James Boswell (1) (1740–1795)

This journal isn't quite the intimate personal record it pretends to be: Boswell wrote it as a kind of serial letter for one of his friends, and there is a certain amount of artfulness about it, and at times (e.g. in the "Louisa" story) it reads as if Boswell were casting himself as the hero of a novel by Smollett or someone. But that's a minor level of gloss on the surface. Bubbling away under it is all the lively energy of a twenty-two-year-old who's finally got away from his overbearing show more father. (Or rather been let out on a long leash: London is still full of powerful Scotsmen who don't want to offend a Judge of the Court of Session, and most of them evidently have their instructions from Auchinleck Castle...)
Boswell is, as always, gloriously human and delightfully inconsistent. He's one of the few people in English literature who could, without seeming either priggish or hypocritical, recall with one hand up a woman's skirt that it's Sunday afternoon and there's still time to get to church. His descriptions of his various sexual adventures (which ensured this book an unusually large print-run for a scholarly text when it appeared in 1950) have an element of youthful bravado about them: the cool way he dismisses an encounter with a prostitute as we might a dinner in an unmemorable restaurant is almost certainly assumed for the benefit of the friend for whom he's writing this. But the constant assertions that he's never going to do it again are pure Boswell.
Pottle points out in his introduction that it's pure chance that the journal has such a satisfying narrative arc to it: whilst we could expect that our hero arrives in London, has adventures, is frustrated in his ambitions, and eventually has to move on elsewhere, the Big Moment when Boswell meets Johnson might so easily never have happened, or have happened too soon. As it is, they meet at a moment when Boswell's immediate future is already decided, and their friendship is only just beginning when they have to part for a considerable time. Exactly the point where you feel Volume 1 should end... show less

With the London Diary just finished, my enthusiasm for Boswell was high. This tour is great reading. Boswell is admirable for the crafty yet intelligent inveigling he adopts in order to be presented to notables and princes. He does not hesitate to advocate his qualities as an honourable, educated milord.
He succeeds too, obtaining interviews with Rousseau, Voltaire and with the Court at Brunswick and at Potsdam among others on his itinerary. His major failure was not to be invited to an show more audience with Frederick The Great at Berlin, but not through any lack of putting his case to meet him.
He is a most likeable man-about-town; he has a highly attuned wit, but can plunge into depression. He is tortured by the wish to please his father and settle to the life of the laird on one hand, and on the other driven by the great urge to see and meet the world.
He is hardy in his travels, but also has the ability to be charming and to be held in esteem by his hosts and hostesses.
I love the man and his roguish honesty. show less

We left Boswell at the end of 1764 and the previous volume after his triumph in getting to spend quality time with both Rousseau and Voltaire in Switzerland. He was under strict instructions from Auchinleck Castle to return home after that, but he somehow managed to negotiate permission to spend another four months away visiting Italy (not that his father could see how spending time in Italy could conceivably be of any use to a young lawyer...).

Needless to say, April came and went without show more young James showing up in Ayrshire. Braving the inevitable paternal wrath, he succeeded in hanging about in Italy until October, and then, instead of Scotland, he headed for Corsica for a few months. From there, he makes a leisurely tour back through France and England, not getting back home until early March of 1766.

So what was he up to in Italy? Well, basically the usual: "sex, religion and politics", as Brady summarises it in his introduction. And in all of these he manages to be gloriously inconsistent in the way only a Boswell can be.

"Politics" covers Boswell's flirtations with the exiled Jacobites in Rome, Avignon and Paris, as well as his meeting and forming a close friendship on the opposite side of the political spectrum with the radical politician John Wilkes, also in exile at the time. But bizarrely, at the same time as becoming genuinely close to Wilkes, Boswell was also making friends with Lord Mountstuart, a wealthy young man on the Grand Tour, who just happened to be the eldest son of Wilkes's worst enemy, the Prime Minister Lord Bute. He travelled with Mountstuart and his entourage for a couple of months, whilst exchanging gloriously flippant and intimate letters with Wilkes.

Politics becomes a bit more serious when he goes to Corsica, where Rousseau had encouraged him to go and meet the rebels who were setting up an independent state in opposition to their nominal Genoese overlords (who had been obliged to allow French peacekeepers in, with the inevitable consequences of that...). He meets and makes friends with the Corsican leader Pasquale de Paoli, and learns about his struggle to turn Corsica from a backward feudal society into a modern state worthy of its status as poster-child of the Age of Enlightenment. But more importantly, he seems to go through a sort of revolutionary transition himself, as the serious man-to-man attitude Paoli adopts towards him gives him a new kind of adult self-confidence at last (and makes him a bit less entertaining as a writer...).

"Religion" isn't quite so much at the forefront this time, but we do see Boswell having serious discussions with everyone from radical deists and atheists to Dominican and protestant theologians. And attending services in Rome without the usual obligatory protestant expressions of disgust at the showiness of Catholic worship.

As far as "sex" goes ... well, Italy had a good supply of clever, attractive, aristocratic ladies who were said to be not too literal in the way they interpreted their marriage vows. Boswell was keen to test this hypothesis, and generally had two or three promising experiments on the go at once. Needless to say they didn't all end well: at one point a lady rather humiliatingly tells him that she wouldn't engage a good cook if she knew he was going to leave in ten days. But there's one Sienese lady who is still sending him teasing letters in Italian a couple of years after his return to Scotland. The correspondence seems to have petered out after Boswell made the sort of error that normally only happens in stage-plays: Girolama got a dull note intended for the English Chaplain in The Hague (which she had to have translated), whilst the Chaplain got a love-letter in Italian...

Meanwhile, of course, Boswell had evenings when all his fine ladies were busy, the consequences of which we see in his account books — he carefully recorded what he spent on prostitutes, condoms, and treatment for venereal infections.

And at the same time as all this, he's still thinking about settling down and getting married: there's the mad project of marrying Belle van Zuylen (which we already know about, because the letters concerned, although dating from the end of 1765, were printed in Boswell in Holland), there is mention of a London cousin, then another cousin in Ireland, and then yet another cousin who was on the trip to Ireland with him...

But his most spectacular and unlikely sexual exploit is saved for the end of the book. He finds himself travelling from Paris to London together with Rousseau's partner, Thérèse le Vasseur (45 at the time, and mother of five children), on her way to rejoin Rousseau there after he was forced to flee from Switzerland. One thing leads to another as if we were in a Smollett novel, and they soon find themselves sharing a bed. Thérèse is by no means satisfied with his performance, and insists on giving him a course of lessons. Boswell notes that they have "done it" thirteen times by the time they get to Dover. Not surprisingly, his awe of Rousseau is slightly diminished after this...

So there's a lot going on in this book, but it's also a bit trickier to keep a sense of Boswell's voice here than in some of the earlier parts because there are so many different kinds of texts that the editors have had to put together. The Corsican part of the journal was published in 1768 and made Boswell's name as a writer; the Italian and French journals (not only called that: for the most part they were written in those languages too, as language-practice) keep stopping and starting, so the editors have to pad out the gaps with letters (also in three languages) and excerpts from Boswell's "memoranda" (rough "notes-to-self"). And the "cross-channel" passage was apparently so sexually-explicit that it was destroyed by a Boswell descendant, and the editors have had to reconstruct it from the recollections of another family-member who had read it... show less

Further intriguing diaries from the southern European journey. Bold as brass with his insistence in getting to meet who he wants; intermittently overwhelmed by depression; a pain in the arse to his poor suffering Dad; invariably welcomed by the grand people he encounters; a bit of a slave to sex and remorseful often once the venery is satisfied ( a bit of a dog when it comes to Rousseau's mistress, it must be said).
Another wonderful read as we accompany Boswell to Switzerland, Italy (Rome, show more Siena, Livorno), Corsica, (at a critical stage in its quest for independence from Genoa), France and London. show less