Wordsworth's Boswellian Life-Writing

Abstract

Boswell's Life of Johnson, published in in May, 1791, is among signal events of 1790s British literary culture. And, insofar as it relates to other achievements of that remarkable decade and one that followed, it is among least understood. When Johnson died in 1784, his friends and acquaintances competed to publish official or definitive biography. By time Boswell's Lift appeared, his two min competitors, Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale, had already published their accounts of Johnson's life. Hawkins had been designated authentic biographer by an influential group of booksellers, and Thrale, unlike Boswell, had been on intimate terms with Johnson throughout 1770s. The first edition of Thrale's Anecdotes (1786) sold out on day of publication, prompting three more editions that year. When Boswell's Lye finally came out, it was nonetheless greeted by enthusiastically by schoolboys, critics, and kings: George 111, according to Boswell, pronounced it the most entertaining book he had ever read. Joseph Warton, Warren Hastings, Vicesimus Knox, Burney, and Edmund Burke joined in their congratulations. The first edition of Boswell's Life, two quarto volumes costing two guineas, sold out within two years; a second edition followed in July, 1793; a third in May, 1799. Its status as preeminent work of biography in English language, given support throughout 19th century, has grown since initial publication, despite critical hostility to Boswell's plan and mode. Yet, despite impact made at time and hyperbolic, often hotly disputed assessments of later generations, Boswell's Life of Johnson has not, on whole, been recognized as a seminal text in 1790s literary culture and Romantic life-writing. Chronologies of Romantic period in prominent. anthologies make no mention of its publication--alongside Gilpin's Observations on River Wye, Paine's Rights of Man, and Radcliffe's The Romance of Forest--in 1791. However, I propose that Boswell's formal and conceptual developments in biography opened up a space for Wordsworth to imagine his own literary life, namely in 1805 Prelude. Wordsworth had likely encountered Boswell's Lift of Johnson by August, 1800, when Wordsworth records reading it in her Grasmere Journals (GJ 165). In his study of Wordsworth's reading, Duncan Wu proposes a reading of August 30, 1800: Dorothy Wordsworth may have directed Wordsworth's attention to parts of Boswell, as Life seems to have led to a discussion following day concerning 'Miss Thrale's hatred'. ... That Wordsworth had read by spring 1812 is implication of his reference to Johnson's biographers in a letter to Wrangham of that date (147? 27), alluding to a letter in which Wordsworth writes, Dr. Johnson I think observes, or rather is made to observe by some of his biographers that no man delights to give what he is accustomed to sell (MY II 8). Wordsworth refers to Boswell's Life briefly in an 1828 letter to Alexander Dyce, and includes a page from his own copy of work in an 1830 letter to John Wilson Croker, who was preparing his own edition of Life. By 1840, Wordsworth is sensible of Boswell's accomplishment: in a letter to Talfourd, he writes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall and Boswell's Lift of Johnson: these two works were best in their several kinds produced in Europe during last Century (LY VII 72). The obvious contender for title in 18th-century life-writing is Rousseau's Confessions, appeal of which would have waned as Wordsworth began to associate philosophe with paradoxical reveries, as he says in Convention of Cintra (1809). By time of Wordsworth's 1840 letter to Talfourd, reputation of Boswell's Life as best work in genre had been established: Macaulay, for instance, remarks in 1831 that Boswell is first of biographers. He has no second, a sentiment echoed by Carlyle and Lockhart later in same decade (LJ v). …