‘Plain, hamely, fife’: James Boswell’s shameful national masculinity

Abstract

ABSTRACTMuch has been made in the scholarship of eighteenth-century autobiography of James Boswell’s journals, particularly the London Journal of 1762-3. While critical attention has tended to focus on his use of journal writing to construct and shift between various idealised masculine identities, few have recognised the central importance of shame to Boswell’s project. This essay argues that by examining shame in dialogue with Boswell’s conflicting ideas of national identity – his desire to embody English politeness whilst caught in a volatile relationship with his Scottishness – we are better placed to understand his idiosyncratic selfhood. My account of the London Journal, in concert with the letters he wrote his close friend John Johnston, situates shame in context as a catalyst of masculine identity formation in a period of political and societal transition.