October 29: On
this day in 1795 James Boswell died, aged fifty-four. Even without his
two-decade relationship to Samuel Johnson, Boswell would have a secure place in
literary history. This is due to the remarkable stash of journals, letters, and
personal papers which he kept, and which his friends and relatives kept from
the world. When Boswell's papers were discovered in the 1920s and '30s the
journals were eventually published in fourteen volumes, with one of these, his London Journal, now a million-seller.
Other volumes of manuscripts, letters, and such documents continue to be
published in scholarly editions issued by the "Boswell Factory" at
Yale University, which purchased most of the known hoard of Boswelliana in 1949
for almost half-a-million dollars.
Johnson died at the end of 1784; Boswell's primary
occupation over the next decade was in turning a mountain of notes, letters,
and memories into his Life of Johnson.
The writing was done in Boswell's Ayrshire mansion, where he had hoped to find
a new "steadiness as laird of Auchinleck," thereby quitting the bad
habits of his London life. The usual view is that his descendants and literary
heirs boxed and conveniently lost his personal papers because they too frankly
documented his failure to reform.
As Johnson put it, he was "without skill in
inebriation" and addicted to "concubinage"; as his own journals
lament, "Signor Gonorrhoea" came to visit a total of eighteen times.
Entries for his first return to London after Johnson's death document a drunken
night in which he strayed into St. Paul's Churchyard singing ballads with two
prostitutes in red cloaks, got his pocket picked, and collapsed in the street.
Other entries describe similar evenings with this or that "Betsy
Smith," one of them after attending the execution of nineteen criminals, a
side-obsession with Boswell. Such passages are balanced by volleys of self-reproach
and pledges to change, and vastly outnumbered by passages of greater interest
and charm, but those who inherited Boswell's mountain of papers bundled fair
and foul together in cabinets, trunks, attics, and barns, dispersing them to
various parts of Ireland and Scotland.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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