Boswell: Self, Text, Nation

Abstract

It would take a heroic act of will to overlook the implications of James Boswell’s earliest obituary in the St. James’s Chronicle, 21 May 1795. In a narrow column, sandwiched between reports of British shipping movements and the death of the Duke of Newcastle, the correspondent praises Boswell’s best-known writings: the early book which made his name, the Account of Corsica (1768), part travel narrative and part political manifesto, and the late revolutionary Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which portrayed its subject in disconcerting detail. The author of this valediction acknowledges Boswell’s kindness, but also, choosing his words carefully, suggests that his behaviour was often ‘tinctured with eccentricity’, that his ‘social and convivial talents led him, perhaps too frequently into public company; and this circumstance, it is believed hastened his dissolution’.1 The nineteenth-century response to Boswell was shaped by Carlyle and Macaulay’s opinion of Croker’s 1831 edition of the Life. Carlyle considered the biography as an example of the necessary dynamic of the hero and hero worship, with the hero for these purposes as man of letters. For Carlyle, Johnson stands almost alone in the eighteenth century against the swelling tide of mechanisation. He is one of few men who possessed genuine insight, who ‘saw into the Things themselves, and could walk as men having an eternal loadstar, and with their feet on sure paths’.