A Life of James Boswell

We think of Boswell as one of the renowned biographers in the English language, so a biographer OF him faces a high hurdle. Peter Martin does a fine job, primarily because Boswell left such a plethora of rich primary material for a biographer to mine. Beginning as a young man, Boswell kept a detailed journal, most of it surviving, and, like most gentry of his time, he was a prolific letter writer, and much of the correspondence also survives. Martin plumbs those sources, as well as the letters and other writings of Boswell's contemporaries, particularly, of course, Dr. Johnson.

The man who emerges from these writings is a failure in almost everything he attempts, but for his majestic "The Life of Samuel Johnson", its precursor, "The show more Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" and various other journals, published long after his death.

He was of Scottish nobility, but yearned for London life and was bored in Edinburgh and his family estate in southern Scotland. He reluctantly trained as a lawyer (like his father), but he did not like law practice and never earned much of a living from it. When he inherited the family estate late in life, with its many tenants and thousands of acres, he could not earn enough from it to pay the bills, and he was constantly plagued by debt.

He strove for a public position, but his obsequious inquiries of powerful men to that end produced nothing. His attempt at an elected position uttterly failed. He had a wife and five children, whom he loved, but his philandering with "strumpets" never stopped, and his eighteen gonorrheal infections are duly recorded in his journals. His daughters either died early, lived a spinster life or married unwisely. His sons fared somewhat better, but the heir of the family estate died in debt, and a second son, an accomplished Shakespeare scholar, also died in debt.

But we are fascinated by Boswell, and learn to love him, because of the candor and perceptivity of his journals as they chronicle a life desperate to succeed. Along the way Boswell meets almost every person of note in English and Scottish eighteenth century intellectual and political life, as well as other luminaries such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. And, of course, the tale of his friendship with Dr. Johnson thrust biography in a new direction and is still a joy to read. show less