Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell 9781684482856

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Boswell and the Press Q

Boswell and the Press Q Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell, Esq.

Edited by Dona ld J. Newm a n

lewisburg, pen nsylvania

 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Newman, Donald J., 1947–­editor. Title: Boswell and the press: essays on the ephemeral writing of James Boswell, Esq. / edited by Donald J. Newman. Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020049082 | ISBN 9781684482818 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684482825 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684482832 (epub) | ISBN 9781684482849 (mobi) | ISBN 9781684482856 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Boswell, James, 1740–1795—­Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR3325.B64 2021 | DDC 828/.609—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.g­ ov​/2­ 020049082 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2021 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2021 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­bucknelluniversitypress​.­org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 To my Sweetie Honey Pie, a gift from Heaven; to my contributors, without whom t­ here would be no book; and to Greg Clingham, a scholar whose extraordinary patience enabled this proj­ect to survive dark times.

Contents

1 Boswell’s Ephemeral Writing: An Overview ​ ​ ​1 Donald J. Newman 2 Anonymity and the Press: The Case of Boswell ​ ​ ​32 Paul Tankard

3 James Boswell’s Design for a Scottish Periodical in the Scots Language: The Importance of His Prospectus for the Sutiman Papers (ca. 1770?) ​ ​ ​49 James J. Caudle

4 Boswell in Broadside ​ ​ ​68 Terry Seymour 5 An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady: Serious Effort or Elaborate Joke? ​ ​ ​80 Donald J. Newman

6 “Making the Press my Amanuensis”: Male Friendship and Publicity in The Cub, at New-­market ​ ​ ​94 Celia Barnes 7 The Hypochondriack and Its Context: James Boswell, 1777–1783 ​ ​ ​108 Allan Ingram

8 The Embodied Mind of Boswell’s The Hypochondriack and the Turn-­of-­t he-­Century Novel ​ ​ ​128 Jennifer Preston Wilson

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viii C o n t e n t s

9 Princi­ple, Polemic, and Ambition: Boswell’s A Letter to the ­People of Scotland and the End of the Fox–­North Co­a li­tion, 1783 ​ ​ ​144 Nigel Aston

Bibliography ​ ​ ​163 Notes on Contributors ​ ​ ​171 Index ​ ​ ​175

Boswell and the Press Q

chapter 1

Q

Boswell’s Ephemeral Writing An Overview Donald J. Newman

James Boswell’s first published work, a poetic meditation on Scottish history, appeared in a magazine. It was 1758, and he was a c­ ouple of months shy of his eigh­teenth birthday at the time. Over the next few months, the same magazine published three more of his pieces: two epigrams and a meditative essay on God’s presence in nature. ­These initial successes launched a decades-­long pursuit of the one possession Boswell came to consider more valuable than any other: literary fame. He diligently pursued that possession for the next thirty-­five years, during which, Paul Tankard writes in the introduction to his valuable collection of Boswell’s journalism, Boswell was a busy writer “with a constant presence in the British press.”1 During t­ hose years, Boswell not only published books, he also published news and news-­related articles (including news hoaxes he called “inventions”), opinion pieces, essays, poems, and reports on his personal and professional activities, all of which appeared in periodicals. He also printed broadsides and issued pamphlets. He wrote in a variety of styles on a wide range of subjects in multiple genres, and he weighed in on a variety of l­egal, po­liti­cal, and social controversies. By the end of his c­ areer as an author, Boswell had published, in addition to the two books about Johnson for which he is famous, a facetious collection of letters that he authored with a friend, two books on Corsica, nearly two dozen pamphlets, an as-­yet unsettled number of broadsides, and more than 600 pieces in periodicals, the bulk of which appeared in newspapers.2 Except for Pottle’s 1929 bibliographical account of Boswell’s literary c­ areer and comments made by his biographers and the editors of his papers, scholars have, for two centuries, considered most of his ephemeral writing unworthy of serious critical attention b ­ ecause it is too topical, too superficial, or too trivial to yield any new insights into Boswell or his work. ­There is some justification for 1

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this view. Our understanding of his writing or his authorial consciousness is not likely to be advanced much by reading his accounts of how he toasted a high sheriff at a dinner or paid a compliment to an enchanting comic actress, though articles like t­ hese may be significant in the aggregate. But, as this collection demonstrates, ­t here is some wheat among this chaff—­and ­t here could well be more. We ­won’t know for certain ­until we have thoroughly sifted this body of work, and the authors collected h ­ ere begin this sifting.

Boswell and the Publishing Industry In February 1768, Boswell capped a frenetic, decade-­long pursuit of literary fame via newspapers and pamphlets with An Account of Corsica, a travel book recounting a five-­week side trip he took in 1765 while visiting Italy on his G ­ rand Tour. At the time he visited the island, a rebel force with nationalistic aspirations was fighting to f­ ree Corsica from the city-­state of Genoa and establish a sovereign nation. The eyes of progressive Eu­rope w ­ ere on the rebellion, and its leader, General Pasquale Paoli, had become an international hero to the progressive-­ minded. Although British newspapers and magazines w ­ ere publishing sporadic reports on the lopsided strug­gle, no one as yet had offered the public a personal account of the island, the rebels, or their illustrious leader. Boswell’s book offered readers a look at all three. The book was widely admired and made him an international literary celebrity virtually overnight. He became the toast of London’s elite, members of Parliament made it a point to introduce themselves to him, his friends praised him effusively, the reviews w ­ ere positive if not raving, and he earned the sobriquet “Corsica Boswell,” which he wore proudly. Within the next year or so, the book would go through three editions and be translated into at least four languages. The success of Corsica realized a teenage fantasy of Boswell’s: to become a celebrated author like Joseph Addison. But in a turn somewhat surprising, he d ­ idn’t capitalize on this achievement and begin work on another book, though he had already proposed several to himself. Instead, he continued to devote his time, energy, and literary talents to publishing in periodicals and printing pamphlets. Given how badly he wanted to be recognized and admired as an author, it seems somewhat incongruous that he d ­ idn’t try to sustain his celebrity with another book. Part of the reason he d ­ idn’t has to do with the dynamics of publishing during his c­ areer. The publishing industry in which Boswell worked was an amalgamation of the new and the old that offered writers like Boswell a myriad of publishing opportunities. The new, newspapers and magazines, w ­ ere in fact new. The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702, and it was soon followed by a number of imitators—­t ypically, sideline businesses for printers who often depended on government subsidies for financial survival—­that emphasized foreign news, po­liti­cal diatribes, and what was generally known as domestic news:

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crimes, suicides, bizarre deaths, weird events, the activities of peers and the royal ­family. Despite t­ hese ­humble origins, the number of newspapers available to the London public increased steadily throughout the ­century. Hannah Barker reports that by mid-­century, which would have been about the time Boswell began contributing to newspapers, London had eigh­teen papers: six weeklies, six tri-­ weeklies, and six dailies. By the 1780s, London readers could get their news from nine dailies, eight tri-­weeklies, and nine weekly papers, and a de­cade or so ­later, in 1790, the metropolis boasted fourteen dailies, seven tri-­weeklies, and two weeklies.3 Many of the more popu­lar papers had daily circulations between 2,000 and 5,000, and the papers prob­ably needed to sell at least 1,500 copies a day just to stay solvent.4 It seems reasonable to attribute the increase in the number of newspapers to the perceived demand for more news and information coming from a reading audience increasing in size and spreading out along the social scale. Barker’s research on newspaper sales indicates “that sales w ­ ere being made to a larger, and more socially mixed, proportion of the London population.” How large this audience was at any given time is difficult to determine. Jeremy Black estimated twenty readers per copy for a total of 500,000 daily readers. One con­temporary observer said t­ here ­were 25,000 papers published daily in London, and he figured each had ten readers, which would have meant 250,000 readers, a figure Barker considers reasonable. The city had a population at the time of about 750,000, thus newspaper readers (which perhaps include t­ hose who had the papers read to them) constituted a l­ittle less than one-­t hird of the population.5 However large it was, the audience was large enough to be con­spic­u­ous, for “con­ temporary observers perceived newspaper readership to be wide spread.”6 Magazines ­were even newer. The first, Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, was launched in 1731, and scores of imitators again soon followed. Although professing to adhere to the dictum that, like newspapers, their primary intent was to inform, the publishers and editors of the magazines emphasized entertainment, for they recognized that the periodical audience was comprised of middle-­and working-­class men, ­women—­and perhaps even servants—­whose interests and reading tastes differed from ­t hose of newspaper readers in the first half of the ­century. In addition to presenting readers with articles that would entertain as well as inform, they also published a ­great deal of fiction, and this emphasis on entertainment proved a formula for success. By the 1750s, Robert Mayo notes, magazines had become the most numerous class of periodicals. Between 1740 and 1815, at least 470 dif­fer­ent magazines appeared, evidence that their readership was expanding as well.7 Some of the popu­lar magazines are reputed to have had monthly circulations in the 12,000 range. The old, pamphlets and broadsides, print venues with long histories, survived into the latter half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury and appeared in booksellers’ shops alongside newspapers and magazines. Broadsides w ­ ere still being hawked in the

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streets. Information on the publishing arrangements for t­ hese venues is difficult to come by, but it appears they ­were accessible to any author who could afford the cost of printing and distribution or who was willing to split the costs and profits with the printer. The only reason Boswell was able to publish The Cub, at New-­market (1762) is that he agreed to assume the expense of it. In February, the London publishing firm of Robert Dodsley and William Strahan published it according to Boswell’s instructions: “Let no expense be spar’d to make it genteel. Let it be done on large quarto and a good Type. Price one shilling.”8 He earned a profit of thirteen shillings. Over the years, Boswell made extensive use of this venue. In a manner of speaking, books straddled the line between the old and the new. They, too, had a lengthy history, but access to the press for middle-­class men like Boswell with in­ter­est­ing subjects and a knack for writing but no special expertise in theological controversy, philosophy, history, or lit­er­a­ture was relatively new. Accessibility to the press eased as the audience of new readers with new literary tastes and interests expanded, a development Pope and Swift both ridiculed early in the ­century. Fifty years ­earlier, Boswell prob­ably would have had a difficult time getting his books into press. The expanded readership and the competition with the magazines it engendered forced newspapers that wanted to stay in business to include content that would entertain as well as inform a wide range of readers. No longer sidelines for printers, newspapers w ­ ere becoming businesses that depended for their financial health on sales and readership: the more readers a paper had, the more it could charge for advertising space. The drive to publish a newspaper that was both informative and entertaining led to the creation of a new kind of paper designed to appeal to all readers, the chronicle, which “combined up-­to-­date news with the type of feature articles that ­were appearing in the magazines.”9 The first of t­ hese was Dodsley’s and Strahan’s London Chronicle, which they launched in 1757. Their paper was the second newspaper to publish Boswell, and he published in it his entire c­ areer.10 ­Because of its disorderly nature, the periodical publishing industry was a perfect place for a writer with Boswell’s interests and proclivities. U ­ ntil near the ­century’s end, publishers and editors assumed no responsibility for the veracity of what they published, and the business lacked industry-­w ide editorial standards defining what the relationship between newspapers and their readers should be, or what content was appropriate for a newspaper and what was not. About the only articles inappropriate for a newspaper during Boswell’s c­ areer ­were ­t hose that could attract a libel suit or the government’s attention. Despite this blurry relation between newspapers and readers, the papers, recognizing an increasing demand for news, developed a voracious appetite for articles on current events and related content. When Boswell was working on Corsica, his publisher, Edward Dilly, reminded him, “Early Intelligence is the very Life of a

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News Paper.”11 But in­ter­est­ing reading was not ­limited to news. In addition to po­liti­cal topics and related discourse, newspapers w ­ ere also interested in articles on historical and literary subjects, social commentary and opinion pieces addressing controversies (frequently presented as letters to the publisher or printer), essays on life and manners, poems, letters—­any pieces that might attract new readers and retain current ones.

Boswell’s Ephemeral Writing Boswell’s psychological needs, the circumstances of his life, and the disorderliness of the periodical publishing industry together made writing for periodicals especially appealing to him. How t­ hese circumstances mutually influenced each other to create this appeal is strongly hinted at in Hypochondriack 1, the first essay in a series of seventy that ran in the London Magazine from 1777 to 1783. It is devoted to a discussion of periodicals, but the essay begins in a rather odd way, by explaining why some authors prefer writing periodical essays to writing books. What is odd about this is that since The Hypochondriack was to be anonymous, ­t here was no one to question his authorial preferences except James Boswell, which suggests that his failure to follow up Corsica with another book might have been an issue for him. At least one friend thought that writing for periodicals was beneath him, and Johnson pointedly told him he found Boswell’s periodical publishing “offensive and disgusting.”12 It is hard to escape the impression that he felt the need to justify to himself the direction his literary c­ areer had taken. His comments are generalized, but the explanation he offers for such a preference seem to mirror his psychological needs and personal circumstances at the time, which imbue his explanations with an autobiographical cast. It appears from what he says that Boswell simply ­didn’t relish the ­labor of writing another book. Perhaps he was looking back on his previous book-­w riting experience when he justifies his preference by explaining that writing “a large book” is “a long and difficult journey, in the course of which, much fatigue and uneasiness must be under­gone, while at the same time one is uncertain of reaching the end of it.”13 This uncertainty hints at a vague fear of failure. It also suggests that Boswell might have had some early doubts about the success of Corsica, for several men he respected advised him against publishing it. None of ­these concerns ­were significant then, however. The research was an exciting adventure, the support he did receive was encouraging, and he was highly motivated by an intense desire to help his new friend, General Pasquale Paoli, the leader of Corsican rebels, and Paoli’s countrymen. Writing short, light essays, on the other hand, was enjoyable, for writing ­these was like taking “a pleasant airing,” especially ­because “the design is gratified in its completion” (Bailey, 21). Writing for periodicals ­doesn’t require prolonged, unpleasant ­labor. No doubt part of what made publishing in them pleasant was

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that they offered writers “a ready opportunity of indulging their genius without exhausting it” (Bailey, 21). Unlike a book that immerses writers in a single subject, prompts continual fretting about the possibility of failure, and leaves them destitute of subjects for conversation when finished, an unhappy prospect for a social man like Boswell, periodicals offer writers variety, “an inexhaustible fund of subjects” to write about, the most in­ter­est­ing of which are life and manners. That periodicals provided ready opportunities for indulging his genius, an endless variety of subjects to write on, and an array of publications in which he could place his work suggests that Boswell felt he could publish an article or essay on any subject anytime and anywhere he wished. This attitude was not so much a self-­assessment of his superior talents as it was a feeling based on the recognition of the expanded opportunities a plethora of periodicals in need of competent freelance writers offered authors like him. Even if they wanted to write books, Boswell explains, many writers simply lack the time to do so. He seems to be including himself among the “ingenious men” who lack the leisure to write more than a short essay (Bailey, 21). This situation certainly fits Boswell’s circumstances. Time ­hadn’t been a prob­lem when he worked on his Corsica book, e­ ither. He was unmarried and his only professional responsibilities ­were completing his law studies and afterward setting up a law practice, a task prob­ably eased by having a ­father sitting on the benches of the nation’s two highest courts. But by 1777, Boswell had a wife, three young ­children, a burgeoning if not lucrative law practice, and a commitment to produce an essay e­ very month for the London Magazine. The implication is that ­t hese responsibilities l­ imited the time he had available for protracted literary work. But b ­ ecause the periodical publishing industry was so malleable, his personal and professional responsibilities did not interfere with publishing in newspapers and magazines. It would have been much easier and less stressful for a busy ­lawyer and ­family man to carve out time in a loaded schedule to write an occasional essay or poem than it would have been to batten down in a study for the close, prolonged work of researching and writing a book. But, Boswell takes pains to point out, the failure to write books does not make writers of short essays lesser authors or any less valuable to society. The literary abilities of ­t hese authors, he says, “are perhaps not extensive and robust,” evidently qualities for book authorship he perhaps feels he lacks, but their work is not deficient in “quickness and grace.” Though t­ hese authors may not always increase society’s fund of knowledge, they do serve a wide range of readers, often ones too busy to read more than a few pages at a time or who “can never fix their attention on any ­thing [sic] more than short essays,” by treating them to a “wonderfully pleasing” variety of reading material (Bailey, 22). It appears also that publishing essays might well have been a psychic defense against feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and worthlessness that could be dredged up by indolence, perhaps a threat posed by the re­sis­tance to writing

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another book. ­These feelings are the bane of the hypochondriack, and the pain they inflicted on Boswell is pathetically detailed in Hypochondriack 39. Unconscious fear of ­t hese feelings seems to have motivated him to think of writing pleasant essays as self-­improvement, a need responding to the long-­term psychological effects of early and sustained criticism from his f­ ather. Thinking of writing essays this way barred t­ hese feelings from consciousness. When writing them, he was not being indolent; he was employing time that would other­ wise be wasted and preparing himself for the execution of more impor­tant works. He was no doubt ­here thinking about his planned works about Johnson. Moreover, writing periodical essays was simply a relief from his l­egal research and writing, which he enjoyed only on rare occasions. Memorials, ­legal case documents that t­oday are called briefs, w ­ ere ­labor intensive and required much research, unlike writing essays for newspapers, which he could do without much reading.14 Most of Boswell’s periodical writing appeared in newspapers. Although from the late 1760s Boswell’s articles also appeared in magazines other than the Scots Magazine, the magazine that first published him, he clearly favored writing for the papers, which he considered “one of the happiest inventions of modern times” (Bailey, 21). Pottle reports that Boswell published in nineteen of them, but the number of papers to which he contributed regularly was a small group. In Scotland, he contributed almost exclusively to the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Advertiser, the latter published by his friend Alexander Donaldson. In London, he published most often in the Public Advertiser, “one of the most sober and respected publications of the era,” which saw its circulation jump from 2,500 copies daily to 5,000 in 1769 when the letters of Junius (1769–1772) began appearing in its pages.15 By 1781, almost all members of Parliament subscribed to it, including the king.16 He also submitted frequently to the London Chronicle, less frequently to the St. James’s Chronicle, and occasionally to the Morning Post. It is unclear why, but Boswell w ­ asn’t interested in submitting to a variety of magazines, despite the opportunities they offered. Perhaps the fact that they emphasized entertainment made them seem unfit venues for an author who considered himself a serious writer on serious topics. He published in only four: the Scots Magazine; the London Magazine, to which he contributed regularly ­after he became a one-­sixth partner in 1769; the staid Gentleman’s Magazine; and the Eu­ro­pean Magazine, another no-­nonsense publication to which he began contributing late in his ­career. His most significant contribution to that magazine was a two-­part memoir he wrote following publication of the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which presented information on Boswell as though written by someone close to him. Given that most periodicals w ­ ere trying to attract readers from the lower rungs of the social ladder and that the reading public was becoming ever hungrier for news, the difference between Boswell’s hard-­news articles and his essays

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would seem to suggest that Boswell might have been writing for two audiences, one comprised of the lower classes that would have had difficulty comprehending articles studded with learned references, historical allusions, and untranslated Latin quotations, and a second comprised of men like himself: classically educated; well-­read; knowledgeable about politics and foreign affairs; and interested in lit­er­a­ture (ancient and modern), science, life and manners, and other subjects not directly relevant to the daily life of the laboring classes. But Boswell wrote for only one audience, men like himself. The prose discrepancy in his work is more likely due to available generic forms than to an interest in reaching two classes of readers. While the essay form was well established, ­t here w ­ ere no generic forms for news and news features, so Boswell had to rely on available forms. Two he used frequently w ­ ere the letter extract and the letter, both of which w ­ ere particularly suited to witness accounts. The letter extract, ostensibly lifted from a longer letter and lacking conventional paratextual ele­ ments, enabled an author to provide an objective, detailed narrative recounting a sharply defined event he witnessed, such as an execution, and being an extract, it could be understood by all readers and listeners, for ­t hese w ­ ere written in an unadorned prose and did not easily accommodate material extraneous to the narrative such as historical allusions and learned references. Letter extract usually signified hard news, but that signification did not vouch for the veracity of the account. The letter was commonly utilized by periodical writers for longer, less sharply focused narratives. The letter, typically addressed “to the printer of . . .” or “Sir” and often signed with a pseudonym, implied that the author was writing from personal knowledge about the subject but was not necessarily a witness, and it enabled the easy incorporation of allusions, learned references, Latin quotations, and ruminations on what was being reported. This was a flexible form that was also employed to pre­sent essays on life and manners as well as arguments and opinions. Then ­t here was the account. Historically, this form was employed when the author was relying on research and/or scholarly expertise, and it was usually titled “an account of . . .” some historical event or personage. Boswell often employed the term account for interview-­based narratives; thus, in a way they relied on research, though t­ hese articles w ­ ere often studded with his learning and reading. Boswell employed the traditional essay form for much of his social commentary and his Hypochondriack essays. And then t­ here was what we could call the squib, a short article of a paragraph or two in straightforward prose merely informing readers what had tran­spired. Many of Boswell’s inventions w ­ ere squibs. Boswell employs all t­ hese forms; hence, the differences in his prose depended on the form he chose. ­There is something a bit incongruous about this body of work coming from the pen of a man whose literary ambitions burned in his veins like a fever: he signed hardly any of his periodical writings and only selected pamphlets. Elsewhere in this volume Paul Tankard notes that he counts signatures on only

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thirty-­four of hundreds of pieces in the newspapers, and pseudonyms on at least 165. Boswell’s authorship of The Hypochondriack was not known u ­ ntil four years ­after his death, and that he was author of The Rampager, Tankard reminds us, was unknown ­until the discovery of his papers early in the twentieth ­century. Logically, it seems that anonymous publication would be contraindicated for a man seeking to become famous as an author, but in the periodical press of the eigh­teenth ­century, anonymous publication and the use of pseudonyms ­were the norm and signed works the exception. The eigh­teenth ­century believed that anonymity encouraged candor and identification of the author restrained it, an opinion Boswell subscribed to. Anonymity, he wrote in Hypochondriack 27, is “a veil sufficient for concealment, the timid apprehension of discovery deters many from throwing out their lubrications” (Bailey, 158). He did sign his books and several of his po­liti­cal pamphlets, however, and it is easy to explain why he did: he expected his po­liti­cal pamphlets to earn him public and po­liti­cal recognition of his civic role as a zealous guardian of citizens’ rights and civil liberties, which played into his po­liti­cal ambitions, and he expected his books to earn a fame that would survive him. But for most of his c­ areer, it w ­ asn’t impor­tant to him that his signature appear on what he published in periodicals. What was impor­tant to Boswell was knowing that he had an audience. His most intimate friend William Johnson ­Temple recognized this need in his friend, though he attributed it to Boswell’s “childish vanity.” In a letter containing a compliment on Boswell’s Rampager papers, ­Temple expressed some exasperation at Boswell’s continuing to publish in periodicals. He reminded Boswell that when he was contemplating buying into the London Magazine in 1769, T ­ emple and Margaret, Boswell’s wife, both of whom both mistakenly believed that only the lower classes read periodicals, tried to dissuade him from the venture by appealing to Boswell’s sense of pride in his writing and pointing out that anything he wrote would be read only by “shop­keep­ers & farmers.” In 1772, ­Temple found it incongruous that the friend of Paoli and author of An Account of Corsica was still flattered “with the admiration of hucksters & peddlars [sic].” But perhaps, T ­ emple suggested, Boswell preferred the praise of periodical readers “who have neither taste nor discernment” to the “applause of the learned & judicious.”17 ­Temple was half right. He was right in recognizing that Boswell needed an audience but wrong in thinking Boswell needed the explicit approval of readers. Boswell ­didn’t need to be complimented to his face, though he was pleased when he was, and his Rampager papers ­were hardly written for shop­keep­ers and farmers. What Boswell did need was public affirmation that the qualities he most valued in himself but which had been denigrated by his f­ ather since his teenage years—­his wit, his sense of humor, his imagination, his affability, his intellect, his literary talents—­were valued by the public. For a man coping with impoverished self-­esteem as Boswell was, it ­didn’t ­matter much where the affirmation

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came from. Just seeing “his anonymous opinions in print,” writes Frank Brady, “aggrandized Boswell’s sense of self.”18 Merely knowing that ­people read and discussed what he wrote provided the affirmation he craved. But I would suggest an additional motive for Boswell’s almost frenetic publishing in periodicals, one more deeply rooted in his psyche. Boswell appears to have been a man who suffered from what m ­ ental health professionals refer to as annihilation anxiety, the unconscious fear that one’s conscious sense of self ­will cease to exist. ­People who experience this anxiety feel a need for the reassurance provided by seeing their consciousness reflected in the environment. It was this vague anxiety that made Boswell uncomfortable when trying to sit silently in com­pany and why he often felt impelled against his ­will to force a com­ pany’s attention upon himself even though he knew his conduct would result in intense feelings of self-­contempt afterward. The urge that kept him publishing in periodicals was in part an effort to relieve this anxiety by forcing the attention of a distant com­pany upon himself and thereby casting a reflection on society. This reflection, the knowledge that his articles and essays ­were being read and discussed, was to him a mirror image of his consciousness, which assured him of its continued existence and relieved this anxiety—­temporarily. Although Boswell preferred writing for periodicals, he took advantage of the other venues that enabled him to put his work and occasionally his name before the public. He particularly liked writing pamphlets, and three are discussed in this volume. A ­ fter finishing A Letter to Robert MacQueen, Lord Braxfield (1780), an unsigned pamphlet in which he offered gentlemanly and judicial advice to a newly appointed jurist to Scotland’s Court of Session, Boswell told a friend that if he “had a pamphlet to write e­ very day, I should be happy.”19 He d ­ idn’t write one e­ very day, but, according to the New Cambridge Bibliography of En­glish Lit­ er­a­ture, he published at least nineteen, excluding a pamphlet of corrections to the first edition of the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). The pamphlets take up a variety of subjects, and many address po­liti­cal or l­egal issues. None of the ones he published before the appearance of An Account of Corsica (1768) are signed, but he did sign selected ones l­ ater, primarily his po­liti­cal pamphlets. What Boswell did with the broadsides he had printed is unclear. Some ­were published, certainly at his expense, for private distribution as souvenirs of occasions he thought special ­because of his participation, and some ­were sold. And they w ­ ere composed in a variety of genres. In September 1769, for instance, Boswell attended the gala Shakespeare Jubilee or­ga­nized by the celebrated actor David Garrick. At the cele­bration’s masquerade ball, Boswell appeared dressed as a Corsican chieftain and recited a poem of his own composition, “Verses in the Character of a Corsican,” that celebrated E ­ ngland and the En­g lish. This broadside was supposed to have been distributed to attendees, but in an essay published h ­ ere, Terry Seymour explains why it prob­ably ­wasn’t. Not all ­were light pieces, however. “The Mournful Case of Poor Unfortunate and Unhappy John

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Reid,” printed in September 1774, has a more somber tone. Reid, Boswell’s first criminal client, was convicted, unjustly in Boswell’s opinion, on new charges of sheep stealing at a second trial and sentenced to death. Boswell wrote this account of Reid’s conviction as if Reid had written it (Tankard, 76), and it was hawked in Edinburgh’s streets on the day of Reid’s execution. Boswell thought the timing would have “a striking effect,” as it would seem to readers as though Reid’s ghost “was . . . ​speaking to them.”20

Boswell’s C ­ areer Trajectory To modern readers accustomed to an orderly and or­ga­nized pre­sen­ta­tion of the written word, the corpus of Boswell’s ephemeral writing might appear to be a ­jumble. From a modern perspective, it is, but the disarray is a reflection of the disorderliness of the industry in which he was publishing. Th ­ ere is, however, a ­career trajectory in this j­umble that is difficult to discern, obscured as it is by a dense literary fog of incessant self-­promotion that lies thick over his work. Corsica made Boswell a public figure, which seems to have encouraged him to think the public was as interested in his life as he was, so for the next thirty-­five years he reported extensively on himself. Readers w ­ ere informed of his travels as well as his personal, professional, and literary activities. He promoted sales of his work by writing news-­related articles that featured work recently published or about to be published; and he favorably reviewed his own publications, anonymously or u ­ nder a pseudonym. His promotion of An Account of Corsica illustrates how thick this layer of fog could be. Peter Martin estimates that between January 1766 and November 1771 Boswell published “at least eighty articles or ‘news paragraphs’ about Corsica for the London Chronicle.” Some ­were signed, “but most of them [­were written] by fictitious ­people who ­were in one way or another connected with Corsica or Paoli.”21 To penetrate this fog of self-­promotion, I divided Boswell’s literary ­career into three general periods based on the kind of material he was publishing and his motivations for writing. This approach has the virtue of enabling us to see more clearly how his authorial identity changed as he matured and how this newly constructed identity with its new interests, preoccupations, and concerns motivated him to reimagine his relationship to his audience and how this re-­envisioned relationship changed what he wrote. The first period encompasses his writing from his initial publication in 1758 to 1767, the year prior to publication of Corsica. We might call t­ hese years Boswell’s literary genius period, for his writing was dominated by an effort to impress readers with his wit, humor, and cleverness. The second period covers the years 1768 to 1784, the year Johnson died. I call ­t hese years Boswell’s journalistic period, for during ­t hese two de­cades, Boswell’s attention shifted from himself to events, the life around him, and the cultures in which he lived. The final period, which I call his pursuit of immortality period,

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spans the years 1784 ­until his own death in 1795. It is dominated by Boswell’s strug­g le to establish his claim as the superior biographer, which was essential to his pursuit of a literary fame that would survive him.

Boswell’s Literary Genius Period Although Boswell’s first published poem and essay w ­ ere intended to be taken seriously, he soon afterward de­cided to write clever, humorous poetry instead. Of the first four pieces Boswell published, two are witty epigrams, and about all the published poems that followed are exhibitions of Boswell’s wit and humor. The reasons for this abrupt shift must remain speculative, but we can account for it in terms of his personality. Boswell was a clever, witty young man with an extravagant sense of humor, a sharp wit, and an offbeat imagination. He was also a man who needed the applause and approval of ­others to maintain his self-­ esteem. All his life he pursued external approval, and he relied, and continued to rely, on ­t hese traits in a compulsive effort to earn the applause and laughter of companions and com­pany, which, when successful, he usually took as a sign of approval. By his late teens, Boswell had come to admire the writings of Matthew Prior and Laurence Sterne, two authors who earned widespread praise and admiration for their wit and cleverness. When reading t­ hese literary heroes or talking about them, it must have occurred to him that he could better please readers with his wit and humor than he could with declamation, and he was determined to win admiration the same way his literary heroes did, with clever, witty verse. Most of what he published during ­these years was intended to showcase his wit, humor, and unorthodox imagination, qualities he valued highly in himself, and he continued to publish humorous verse his entire life. Many of his early poems are on subjects most readers would prob­ably have thought strange subjects for poetry, and some of the poems, “Ode to a Lamb,” “Ode to Whistling,” “Ode to Gluttony,” for example, do seem at first glance to be silly effusions of nonsense, but when examined closely, they show a clever poet playing with poetic conventions in in­ter­est­ing ways that seem intended to disrupt reader expectations about poetry, and him, while providing readers a laugh.22 Most of ­these early poems ­were published in Alexander Donaldson’s Collection of Original Poems by Scotch Gentlemen, volume 2 (1762), but ­after Corsica, Boswell published his humorous verses in the newspapers and magazines. His desire to impress an audience with his humor and cleverness is also evident in the pamphlets he issued during t­ hese years. Of the first five, four are characterized by witty humor. The title of his second pamphlet, Observations, Good or Bad, Stupid or Clever, Serious or Jocular, on Squire Foote’s Dramatic Entertainment, Intitled, The Minor, by a Genius (1760), provides some insight into how Boswell viewed himself as a writer and what kind of material he was writing during the earliest years of his ­career. The pamphlet is a Shandean display of the

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author’s wit and vivacity masquerading as drama criticism. He apparently never saw the play, and he l­ater described the pamphlet as “an idle per­for­mance, and written inconsiderately.”23 Three years l­ater he authored a satirical pamphlet of drama criticism, Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of “Elvira” Written by Mr. David Malloch (1763), on a new play written by David Mallet. Critics ­didn’t find the pamphlet at all funny and dismissed it outright. It was during this period that Boswell also launched his ­career as a periodical writer. His initial magazine publications ­were more a ­matter of expediency than the expression of a desire to publish in periodicals; it was conventional for aspiring writers to launch their c­ areers with poems and essays, and periodicals provided the most con­ve­nient places to do so. But the Court of Session judge Henry Home (Lord Kames) seems to have convinced Boswell to give writing for periodicals serious thought. During a conversation with Kames one November eve­ning in 1762, just before Boswell moved to London to seek a military commission, the talk turned to authorship, and Boswell lamented that he wanted to be known as an author but ­couldn’t find a serious subject to write on. Kames, who once entertained the idea of starting a periodical himself and had even written some essays for it, suggested that Boswell and his friend Andrew Erskine, a coauthor of two of Boswell’s pamphlets and the facetious collection of correspondence, ­were well suited to writing lively periodical essays and that he should try that. “I wish,” Boswell mused l­ater, that “I may be able to do some good in this way.”24 Apparently, he did give Kames’s suggestion serious thought, perhaps enthused by recollecting the ease with which he had placed his first works, for while in London during the spring and summer of 1763, he published at least three essays, fictional autobiographies composed as letters and signed “B,” in the Public Advertiser. His military scheme having failed, Boswell left London in August 1763 to begin a G ­ rand Tour, which started with a year studying law at the University of Utrecht, and it appears he published nothing in periodicals ­until he arrived in Italy in 1764. From Italy, he sent at least three letters for publication to the Public Advertiser, and he contemplated submitting an essay on his visit to Voltaire in December 1764, but if he did publish something, it has yet to be located. It was while traveling on the Continent that he conceived of his Hypochondriack series, and when in Italy he even wrote an essay for it that he designated number 10, as if it ­were in a periodical series already being published. Allan Ingram discusses the circumstance u ­ nder which this “first” Hypochondriack was composed. On a whim ten years ­later, he inserted a revised version of it in the ­published Hypochondriack as number 10. Before leaving Eu­rope, he also sent the London Chronicle a series of news squibs clearly intended to fan public interest about his experiences on Corsica. They let potential readers know he was touring the island, and although he was truthful about who he was and why he was ­t here, misleading hints cast a spell of mystery over his visit. Th ­ ese squibs ­were printed sequentially almost certainly in accordance with his instructions.

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By the time he returned to Scotland, Boswell had clearly come to enjoy writing for periodicals. Although he had his law studies to complete and a book to write, Boswell c­ ouldn’t resist contributing to newspapers and magazines. He promoted his forthcoming book in the London Chronicle with another series of news squibs, entirely fictional, about a mysterious Corsican emissary who visited vari­ous foreign capitals to confer with high-­level government officials in what was made to seem an effort to solicit aid for the Corsican rebels. The hoax was so successful that t­ hese squibs ­were copied in other periodicals and circulated in Eu­rope.25 He also entertained himself by publishing several other news hoaxes in his favorite London papers as well as in the Edinburgh Advertiser and the Scots Magazine. The remainder of his time was devoted to completing his law studies, consorting with a mistress, and working on Corsica.

Boswell’s Journalistic Period The year before Corsica was published, 1767, divides this period from his literary genius period. The bulk of the material Boswell published over the next twenty-­five years or so, except for the literary fog, is significantly dif­fer­ent from what he had published the previous ten years and is substantially dif­fer­ent from what he would publish his last ten years. During ­these years, he was more interested in informing readers about events, the nation’s politics, the manners in two cultures, and commenting on what he observed (just as he was about to do with his book on Corsica) than he was in dazzling them with his wit and humor. This is not to say that he ceased writing comic pieces; he ­didn’t, but his sense of humor during this period most frequently infused his commentary on politics. The demarcation line between t­ hese two periods would seem to be his involvement in the Douglas Cause. Briefly, ­after the Earl of Douglas died, the Court of Session found itself trying to determine who was the rightful heir to the extensive Douglas estate and the title that went with it: the young nephew, the Duke of Hamilton, who had, as far as every­one knew, legitimately inherited it, or the teenage Archibald Douglas, who suddenly appeared and filed a lawsuit disputing the nephew’s right to the estate and title by claiming to be the son of the deceased earl’s dead ­sister, Lady Jane Douglas, and thus the rightful heir. This case engaged Boswell’s personal, professional, and literary interests, perhaps largely ­because it was of such compelling public interest. “No one who was not alive at the time,” observed a con­temporary, “could imagine the agitation, the anxiety, the polemical spirit, which it excited among the inhabitants of the metropolis, and, indeed, far and wide in the country. It was a constant subject of conversation in companies of ­every description. Families of all ranks ranged themselves on dif­fer­ent sides of the contest.”26 Although not a member of Douglas’s ­legal team, Boswell interrupted his work on Corsica to volunteer his literary talents on Douglas’s behalf, publishing three

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unsigned pamphlets the length of short books intended to sway public opinion in Douglas’s f­ avor: Dorando (1767), a fifty-­page allegory based on the case in which Douglas ultimately wins the lawsuit; The Essence of the Douglas Cause (1767), a seventy-­seven-­page discussion that made the ­legal issues being argued comprehensible to readers; and Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Jane Douglas (1767), 160 pages of judicious se­lections from the correspondence of Lady Jane that cast her in a sympathetic light. Although engaged with serious l­ egal issues, Boswell was unable to resist injecting his wit into the l­ egal wrangling. He wrote a satirical poem on the opposing counsel’s memorial, which he read to his l­egal colleagues. When he showed it to his friend and mentor David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes), Hailes advised caution. “Very witty,” he said, “but put it in the fire. You’ll make yourself enemies.” Instead of burning it, Boswell published it in the Scots Magazine.27 He wrote a more favorable ballad on the Douglas memorial, which he also read to his ­legal colleagues, and then published as a broadside. The case crawled through the courts for several years and was eventually appealed to the House of Lords, which ruled in Douglas’s ­favor. In Hypochondriack 1, Boswell says that the most in­ter­est­ing subjects for periodical writers are life and manners (Bailey, 23), and ­t hese new interests transformed him into what is recognizably a reporter and social commentator who wrote about and reflected on current events, politics, subjects of public interest, and cultural issues. To Boswell’s credit, he usually reported his news stories and features in a surprisingly objective manner. When in London, he published a good number of crime-­related stories: accounts of ­t rials, public executions—­ Tankard has compiled a list of twenty-­one executions Boswell attended—­and articles related to ­these events. His approach to reporting hard news is illustrated by such crime-­related stories as the case of John Reid. Boswell divided his reports on this case between the Edinburgh and London papers. In addition to the broadside, he published at least five news articles about Reid: a notice in the Caledonian Mercury’s edition for 23 January 1774 that Reid had been transferred ­under heavy guard to Edinburgh, where he would stand trial; a short account of Reid’s trial that appeared in the Edinburgh Advertiser’s edition for 29 July to 2 August; a letter to the printer of the London Chronicle urging a p ­ ardon for Reid that appeared in its edition for 17 to 20 September; a four-­paragraph account of Reid’s execution in the London Chronicle’s edition for 24 to 27 September; and a longer version published as an extract of a letter from Edinburgh that appeared in the London Chronicle’s edition for 27 to 29 September.28 Another case typical of Boswell’s better reporting is that of the Rev. James Hackman, and Boswell’s articles again appeared in multiple papers. Hackman, in a frenzy at having his advances rejected, was charged with shooting to death the object of his infatuation, the mistress of John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. He was convicted of murder and executed in late April 1779. Boswell wrote at least four articles that month related to this case: an account of Hackman’s trial

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that appeared in the St. James’s Chronicle; a lengthy letter to the same, reflecting on the trial; a brief account of his having informed Hackman’s brother-­ in-­law that Hackman had been convicted, which ran in the Public Advertiser; and a two-­sentence paragraph, also in the Public Advertiser, in which Boswell denies what had been elsewhere reported—­t hat he had attended Hackman’s execution.29 In many of his reports Boswell seems to have been as much if not more interested in the conduct of the princi­ples than in the event, and they show that in his thirties, he was already the master of the dramatic detail. For instance, he attended the execution of a convicted forger named James Gibson. Boswell’s account, published as a letter extract in the Public Advertiser, describes how the condemned man comported himself on the way to the gallows at Tyburn. “He was drawn backwards, and looked as calm and easy as I ever saw a Man in my Life. He was dressed in a full Suit of Black, wore his own Hair round in a natu­ ral Curl and a Hat.” When he stepped to the gallows, he gave his hat to the executioner, “who immediately took off Mr. Gibson’s Cravat, unloosed his Shirt Neck, and fixed the rope” (Tankard, 81). We see the same attention to comportment in his account of Reid’s execution. Reid persisted in his declaration of innocence, but to all appearances was “most sincere and fervent in his devotions, and in penitence for the sins which he acknowledged. He walked to the place of execution decently dressed in white linen cloaths with black ribbands. . . . ​His calmness and resignation w ­ ere remarkable when upon the scaffold. . . . ​When upon the ladder, with the rope about his neck, just as he was turning over, and dropping into eternity, his last words ­were, ‘Mine is an unjust sentence’ ” (Tankard, 91–92). As a reporter, Boswell is at his best in a two-­installment account of a mutiny that the Public Advertiser published at the end of September 1778. Presented as “au­t hen­tic” letter extracts, perhaps to distinguish them from the fictional ones Boswell wrote, the reports pre­sent detailed narratives of events involving a mutiny by a large contingent of Highlanders in Edinburgh who ­were refusing to follow o ­ rders ­because the men felt that their enlistment promises h ­ adn’t been honored. The incident lasted four days, and it was a dangerous situation: both sides ­were armed, and shots had been fired. For three days the officers tried to negotiate with the Highlanders, who had ensconced themselves in a military posture on Arthur’s Seat. The first installment ends at the close of the third day with a standoff. The second installment, which appeared in the paper’s next edition, reports successful negotiations between the Highlanders and their officers that peaceably ended the conflict. What is particularly in­ter­est­ing about Boswell’s coverage of this event is that he d ­ oesn’t overtly take sides, and he is at pains to describe the admirable deportment in tense circumstances of every­one involved: the mutineers, their officers, and the citizens of Edinburgh, who supported the Highlanders with food and drink.30

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Some of the events he reports on are not as dramatic as executions and mutinies, but ones he apparently thought would be as in­ter­est­ing to readers as they ­were to him. He published a long “account” of Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee, presented as a letter to the publisher of the Public Advertiser. Not coincidentally, the article contains much about Boswell, who signed the report with his initials. The London Magazine carried “An Account of the Armed Corsican Chief at the Masquerade, at Shakespeare’s Jubilee, at Stratford-­upon-­Avon, September 1769,” an article that focuses on Boswell’s appearance as a Corsican chieftain and was written as if by an observer. The article is accompanied by an e­ tching of him dressed as a Corsican chief.31 He took advantage of the public interest in the event with an unsigned poem in the London Chronicle, “Verses on Seeing the Print of James Boswell, Esq; in the Corsican Dress,” and a broadside, “At SHAKESPEARE’s JUBILEE,” that he signed. Some of the articles he published would ­today be classified as news features, stories about events or ­people for which the main source of public interest is curiosity about known events and ­people rather than timeliness. In 1770, the London Magazine published a three-­part series, “On the Profession of a Player,” in which Boswell ruminates on the nature of representing characters on stage, what it takes to be a good actor, and the nature of acting. In the second installment, he muses about how in their social intercourse many p ­ eople are like actors and adopt a character dif­fer­ent from their own, a reflection almost certainly based on personal experience, for in social situations Boswell often felt he was playing a part.32 In the London Magazine’s number for November 1772, he published a report based on interviews with Joseph Banks and Dr. Daniel Solander, two well-­ known naturalists who told him what they had seen on an expedition to the Hebrides and Iceland. Another, an “account” of the travels of Mr. James Bruce in North Africa and the ­Middle East, appeared in the London Magazine’s numbers for August and September 1774 (Tankard, 41, 45). This is another interview-­ based, relatively objective, two-­part series on the adventurer’s encounters with barbaric cultures that would satisfy the public’s “ardent desire” to learn something of his travels before the traveler himself published an account of them. The lead story in the London Magazine’s number for July 1776, “An Account of the Chief of the Mohawk Indians, Who Lately Visited London,” recounts the circumstances of a visit by a Mohawk chieftain who had come to E ­ ngland to discuss how his nation could aid the British in their fight against the colonists. Boswell met him, and as in other articles, he takes note of the man’s deportment: “His manners are gentle and quiet; and to ­t hose who study ­human nature, he affords a very convincing proof of the tameness which education can produce upon the wildest race.” The account is accompanied by “an exact likeness” of the chief in his native dress. The article is unsigned, but Boswell’s authorship is strongly hinted at by the caption ­under the portrait, which was in the possession

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of James Boswell, Esq. (Tankard, 60). All ­these feature-­type articles are straightforward, though seasoned with Boswell’s reading and learning. Sensitive to the unflattering ste­reo­t ypes about Scots and Scotland common in ­England, Boswell also wrote articles that focus on cultural differences between the two countries, perhaps intending to weaken ­t hese ste­reo­t ypes by showing that Scots w ­ ere not as aberrant as the En­g lish i­magined them. He wrote, for instance, a two-­part series on the constitution of the Church of Scotland for the London Magazine in the spring of 1772. The next year, he wrote a series of five installments on debates in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland that ran in the London Magazine from May 1779 u ­ ntil September. In January 1773, he reported on a masked ball in Edinburgh given by Sir Alexander and Lady Macdonald, a second attempt to introduce masquerades into Scotland. This report initially appeared in the Caledonian Mercury but was re-­w ritten a week ­later for readers of the Public Advertiser. Both articles have the flavor of a gossip column. A year ­later, he returned to the subject, but for a dif­fer­ent purpose. In its number for February 1774, the London Magazine published a lengthy article on the history of attitudes ­toward the masquerade in Scotland, whose ­people are “not so extremely remarkable for taciturnity as some foreigners have ­imagined” (Tankard, 323), and he concludes the essay with a brief report on the Macdonald’s masquerade. In an essay presented as a letter signed by “A Southern Soul” that appeared in the London Chronicle at the end of January 1775, Boswell assumes the persona of an En­glishman in Scotland to discuss the difficulty the En­glish have understanding Scottish customs. Although Boswell favored publishing in London papers and magazines, he ­didn’t neglect periodicals in Scotland, though most of what he published t­ here would ­today be called local news. The Caledonian Mercury carried a letter signed “Vetustus” complaining about a proposal to change the name of Parliament Close in Edinburgh to Parliament Square and another signed by “An Old Town Citizen” opposing a proposal in Parliament to replace Edinburgh’s town guard, which acted as a police force, with a corps of watchmen. In April 1784, the Edinburgh Advertiser carried an unsigned report announcing that Edmund Burke had arrived in Scotland to be installed as the Lord Rector at the University of Glasgow and described his activities. The report did not fail to mention that Boswell had traveled from Ayrshire to meet him. ­There is a bit of a mystery about a series of seven articles that appeared in the Caledonian Mercury between 18 August 1773 and 27 November 1773 reporting on Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh and the pair’s tour. It appears they ­weren’t reprinted in London, which is puzzling.33 Boswell was active in Ayrshire politics, so the Scottish papers and the Scots Magazine also carried reports written by Boswell on po­liti­cal activities in Ayrshire in which he participated. Occasionally, t­ hese po­liti­cal reports ­were reprinted in London.

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Among Boswell’s new interests and concerns was national politics and politicians, and he frequently published po­liti­cally oriented essays and articles. ­Until Corsica (1768), Boswell published virtually nothing that could be construed as po­liti­cal commentary, but during ­t hese years, he commented frequently on politics and inserted himself into a variety of po­liti­cal controversies. Between April 1770 and April 1782, the Public Advertiser, the same paper that carried the anonymous Junius Letters, published a series of twenty essays, titled The Rampager, which appeared sporadically. They w ­ ere written as letters, and almost all of them are imaginatively facetious comments on the state of British politics and the conduct of politicians. Boswell was sympathetic to the American cause, so some of the ­later ones are critical of the government’s ­handling of the colonists’ armed strug­gle for in­de­pen­dence. But even t­ hese are facetious. In Rampager 12, for instance, the Rampager recommends replacing ­England’s forces in the colonies with the country’s Jews, who should be armed with large knives, “for the Terror of Circumcision would affect the Colonists still more than that of Scalping” (Tankard, 185; Boswell’s emphasis), a reference to the Mohawks fighting on ­England’s side. B ­ ecause they tend to undercut their arguments this way, none of the Rampager papers are, as Tankard notes, deeply ideological. Boswell’s po­liti­cal commentary is not ­limited to essays and letters. Several of the poems he published in the newspapers are also po­liti­cal. “The Boston Bill: A Ballad,” published in the London Chronicle, and “The Long Island Prisoners: An Irregular Ode,” published two years ­later also in the London Chronicle, express pro-­American sentiments. The po­liti­cal issues Boswell believed most compelling for the En­g lish and Scots ­were addressed in pamphlets. Adopting the role of the civic-­minded man of letters, he issued several depicting himself as a champion of the rights and liberties granted to E ­ ngland generally and Scotland in par­tic­u ­lar, and most of his pamphlets defend the interests of Scotland and the Scots. Their titles announce their po­liti­cal import. The Pre­sent Po­liti­cal State of Scotland (1776), for example, supports a bill by his ­Grand Tour companion Lord Mountstuart, a man with influence that Boswell for years hoped would be exerted on his behalf. Had it passed, Mountstuart’s bill would have created a militia in Scotland. Another, A Letter to the P ­ eople of Scotland on the Pre­sent State of the Nation (1783), which is analyzed in this collection, addresses a national po­liti­cal controversy, and Letter to the P ­ eople of Scotland, On the Attempt to Infringe the Articles of the Union (1785) opposes a bill that would have reduced the number of Lords of Session from fifteen to ten, ostensibly to raise the salaries of the remaining judges. The legislation passed, but without the provision to reduce the number of Lords of Session. As enamored as he was with the Spectator and Johnson’s Rambler, it is no surprise that Boswell would reprise the essay series he ­imagined writing when he

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was in Italy, The Hypochondriack. His intent is, he says, to “divert Hypchondriacks of ­every degree, from dwelling on their uneasiness by presenting to them . . . ​ essays on vari­ous subjects.”34 Only four of the essays are directly related to hypochondria; the remainder take up a variety of traditional subjects—­love, death, marriage, religion, country living, and uses of wealth, to name a few—­and many ­others are on less traditional subjects: cookery, an En­glish cook, authors and revision, quotations, dedications, ridicule, regimental designations by numbers, and a good many more topics off the track beaten by previous essayists. A few—­a two-­part series on parents and c­ hildren and an essay on diaries, for instance—­ would seem to offer significant insights into Boswell’s personality and journal keeping.35 He closed the series on a whim, ending it at seventy ­because, he says, seventy years is the usual duration of a man’s life. From about 1772 on, Boswell worked on his periodical and pamphlet writing while diligently collecting materials for the biography of Johnson he intended to write, so what is particularly con­spic­u­ous about the body of work during this period is the absence of evidence that Boswell had a compelling interest, or even a minor interest, in biography. He wrote no Hypochondriack essay on the subject, and he appears to have written only one biographical essay, “Remarks on the Life and Writings of Gray,” a poet he admired greatly, that appeared in the London Magazine’s number for May 1775. That seems to be his total biographical output in the periodicals. He did conduct biographical research on other men in addition to Johnson—­David Hume, Lord Kames, and his patrician friend Sir Alexander Dick, among them—­but ­t hese may be evidence of a more compelling interest in t­ hese men than in the genre, since none of ­t hese proposed bio­ graphies advanced beyond the research stage. The absence of biographical essays and his stalled biographies suggest that Boswell’s interest in biography was subject-­specific. He theorizes about life-­w riting only in relation to his journals, and in the next period only as a means of explaining why he is the most qualified to be Johnson’s biographer and touting his new mode of biography.

Boswell’s Pursuit of Immortality Period The death of Samuel Johnson on 13 December 1784 marks the point at which Boswell’s journalistic period began fading into his pursuit of immortality period. The death of his friend freed Boswell to work at becoming Johnson’s premier biographer, which he had been envisioning himself becoming since he de­cided to write Johnson’s life in the early 1770s. The release from any constraints real or i­ magined that Johnson might have imposed on him changed how Boswell wished to be perceived by ­others as a writer—­and it was no longer as a periodical writer—­and how he perceived himself as a writer. Consequently, his interest in reporting and commenting on life and manners quickly waned. He seems to have ceased reporting on executions in 1785, and he no longer published lengthy,

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detailed reports for newspapers and magazines like the ones he wrote about the Shakespeare Jubilee, the mutiny of the Highlanders, or the interview with the adventurer James Bruce. He did write a few desultory essays, but he published nothing like his Hypochondriack essays or even his Rampager papers. Now that he had incentives for embarking on that long and difficult journey of writing a book, the “fame and profit” for which he had “high expectations,” and his personal circumstances enabled him to do so, the reasons he listed in Hypochondriack 1 that explained his preference for periodical writing no longer applied.36 From this point on, most of the hard-­news items he published concerned the activities of a consortium of booksellers trying to find funding and a location for a monument to Johnson, subtle reminders that he was writing the man’s bio­ graphy, for every­body who was anybody knew he intended to write one. And, of course, the newspapers carried the usual reports on Boswell’s personal affairs as well as his social and professional activities. Most of what he published in periodicals during this de­cade was related in one way or another to The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). He did, however, continue issuing pamphlets. In 1785 he published the Letter to the ­People of Scotland, which he signed, and two anonymous ones, Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, Upon Their Supposed Approaching Nuptials (1788), which Brady thinks is “by far the best poem” Boswell ever wrote, and No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love; a Poem (1791).37 The third, an anti-­abolition tract published a month ­after the Life appeared, seems a reversion to the early 1760s, when he tried to impress readers with his wit and cleverness. The editors of Boswell: The G ­ reat Biographer describe it as “a bizarre combination of po­liti­cal and amatory themes” (141). He also printed several broadsides, but it appears none ­were sold to the public. Much of what he wrote was part of a massive publicity campaign intended to promote the Life. He actually launched this campaign with The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), which was, in effect, an advertisement for the Life, as he touted it as a preview of the new mode of biography he had conceived for writing Johnson’s life, and a subtle staking of his claim to be a perfect biographer. The Tour is an edited version of the journal Boswell maintained when he and Johnson made their way through northern Scotland in 1773. What was new about Boswell’s method was that it recounted their travels in minutely detailed scenes that dramatized incidents and encounters with the local inhabitants, and the scenes did not always place Johnson in a flattering light. Although his friends applauded his new method, it triggered a firestorm of outrage from critics who objected strenuously to the “minute particulars” that Boswell considered characteristic of Johnson but which they thought wantonly diminished the ­g reat man’s stature. Their anger led to a steady stream of articles in the newspapers accusing Boswell of being an unscrupulous, self-­absorbed, self-­serving parasite

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desperately seeking to regain the fame he once enjoyed by exploiting his well-­ known friendship with the g­ reat man and smearing his reputation in the pro­cess. Boswell’s new mode was incessantly attacked and mocked in the newspapers. Boswell, perhaps recognizing the value of publicity that hinted at what was in the Tour and what readers could expect in his magnum opus, declined to respond to the criticisms in any significant way. Despite the public denunciations, the Tour was extremely popu­lar. The entire first run of 1,500 copies sold out almost immediately, and two more editions w ­ ere printed off in the first year.38 The first edition concluded with a notice that the Life would be forthcoming, and the second two editions contained longer advertisements. He began working seriously on the Life in the early summer of 1786, and though he d ­ idn’t engage with the critics who attacked his new method, he did engage with two rival biographers, Hester Thrale Piozzi and Sir John Hawkins. Piozzi, Mrs. Thrale when Johnson knew her, was an intimate friend who tended him for twenty years at her husband’s Streatham estate in Southwark. Her marriage to her ­daughters’s ­music teacher, Gabriel Piozzi, occasioned an irreparable rift between her and Johnson. Within a year of the Tour’s appearance, Piozzi published her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786), and the year following, Sir John Hawkins, who had been commissioned by a group of booksellers, published his Life of Samuel Johnson (1787). Hawkins not only had known Johnson longer than Boswell but also had been Johnson’s friend during the g­ reat man’s early years in London. And this same year, Piozzi followed up her first book with Letters To and From the Late Samuel Johnson (1787). Boswell thought ­t hese biographical works seriously mischaracterized Johnson, and, in his introductory remarks in the Life, Boswell summarized his general complaint with them. The portrait of Johnson in Hawkins’s book had “a dark, uncharitable cast, by which the most unfavourable construction is put upon almost e­ very circumstance in the character and conduct of my illustrious friend,” and he seems to have thought about Piozzi’s Anecdotes the same way Horace Walpole did: “Her panegyric is loud in praise of her hero—­and almost ­every fact she relates disgraces him.”39 His book, Boswell assures readers, w ­ ill vindicate Johnson “both from the injurious repre­sen­ta­tions of this author [Hawkins], and from the slighter aspersions of a lady who once lived in ­great intimacy with him” (Life, 1:28). What Boswell saw as disparagement of Johnson’s character in Piozzi’s Letters was not all that upset him; he was also angered by being portrayed as the ­humble attendant of a ­great man who thought so ­little of his Scottish friend that he was reluctant to disrupt the comforts Mrs. Thrale provided by saying anything to her in a letter that would indicate Boswell’s friendship was impor­tant to him, a silence in her text that made Boswell feel “degraded.” Piozzi’s book triggered his Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale. The sixteen-­page pamphlet is notable for its lack of taste, but it is at least equally notable for what seems to be

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an expression of repressed rage against Johnson.40 He promoted the pamphlet the next day ­after its appearance with “A Thralian Epigram” that he inserted in the Public Advertiser.41 Boswell believed that his friendship with Johnson and his own more astute perception provided insights into the man’s character that o ­ thers lacked, and this conviction drew him into disputes with t­ hese two rivals that w ­ ere spread across the columns of the newspapers and magazines. Boswell took issue not only with the characterization of Johnson in t­ hese works but also with their accuracy and authenticity. In articles and letters published in the newspapers and magazines, he not only criticized what he thought to be unflattering and ungenerous portraits of Johnson, he also emphasized his special qualifications to be the man’s biographer: his friendship and intimacy with Johnson, and his ability to discern the finer points of the man’s character. In May 1787 he published notices in vari­ ous newspapers saying that his book would correct the false impressions of Johnson’s character, which was being traduced by Piozzi and Hawkins. The following month, the same notice appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine (Tankard, 224). Reviews of Hawkins’s Life of Johnson ­were “hostile,” and the book was roundly condemned “for malevolence and spitefulness, as well as for inaccuracy.” 42 It soon sank from sight. But in the newspapers and magazines Boswell engaged in a prolonged debate, both personal and literary, with Piozzi about whose characterization of Johnson and whose biography would be the truest, most accurate, and most au­t hen­tic, a dispute subtly reinforcing his claim that his biographical method was the superior one. Boswell saw it as his responsibility as a friend and as his friend’s biographer to defend Johnson’s character by placing it in a true light. Although not intended as part of his campaign, he must have been aware that he reaped many publicity benefits from his disputes with the two competing biographers, as well as from the numerous pieces he published defending his new method. Believing that the public was awaiting his book with g­ reat anticipation, he kept readers abreast of its pro­gress. In anticipation of Hawkins’s book, Boswell let the readers of the Public Advertiser and St. James’s Chronicle know that his book was advancing, but he was holding it up ­until ­after Hawkins’s was published, for the last would be the best. The article appeared in February and May in the respective publications. The edition of the London Chronicle for 19 May 1787 carried a notice that his book was forthcoming. In late 1789, the Morning Post carried a notice, obviously inaccurate, that the Life was in press. In the edition of the London Chronicle for 17 March 1791, Boswell announced that the Life would be published the following month. When the book was nearly printed off, Boswell ramped up his publicity campaign, generating “for the newspapers, a succession of anonymous paragraphs about Johnson and by implication his own forthcoming book” (Tankard, 226). His publicity effort, though generally anonymous, was so vigorous that by 1790

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he had acquired a reputation as a man with no compunctions about puffing his own works, and this was clearly seen as a personal fault. To mitigate such charges, Boswell inserted a letter in the St. James’s Chronicle for 19 October 1790 announcing that he would not publish anything more about his forthcoming book ­u nless he signed it, but when unsigned paragraphs favorable to him and his forthcoming biography appeared, he was publicly accused of writing them himself. He was angered by the accusations and announced in the St.  James’s Chronicle for 16 October 1790 that the accusations left him at “full liberty to throw into the prints what­ever fancy may prompt” (Tankard, 258). A week l­ ater, a writer at the World wryly observed that “Mr. JAMES BOSWELL has given public notice, that he means to puff his own works.” 43 Near and on the book’s publication date, 16 May 1791, Boswell published a flurry of articles in the Public Advertiser obviously intended to promote early sales of the Life. Two weeks before the book’s appearance in booksellers’s shops, the paper carried a notice that Johnson’s conversation with the king and his letter to Lord Chesterfield would be published separately in May. They ­were printed but not published in order to protect his copyright on ­t hese items. On 14 May, it carried an unsigned paragraph describing Johnson’s attitude ­toward Burke; on the day the Life appeared, the paper printed an extract from the Life about Johnson’s relationship with Warren Hastings, whose impeachment trial was well underway, and an unsigned article about the quality of Boswell’s book. The next day it published an unsigned paragraph about the engraved portrait of Johnson in the front of the Life and another unsigned paragraph explaining how Boswell protected the copyright on the conversation with the king and the Chesterfield letter. In its edition for 14 to 17 May, the St. James’s Chronicle carried a three-­ sentence paragraph about how Boswell rescued Johnson’s memory from imputations by Hawkins and Piozzi. The publicity campaign in the newspapers continued with equal intensity a­ fter the Life was published. Ten days ­after the book’s appearance, the St. James’s Chronicle carried an extract from the Life on Edmund Burke’s wit and an announcement that the Life sold 600 copies the first week, and if adjusted for price, it outsold Edmund Burke’s popu­lar Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). And the papers continued to publish anonymous letters and articles written by Boswell promoting the book. Many of ­t hese pieces, Tankard notes, ­were often presented as if by “enthusiastic anonymous readers” who found passages relevant to topical issues (Tankard, 227). And Boswell continued to defend Johnson publicly. In 1793 he carried on an extended dispute in the Gentleman’s Magazine with the Swan of Lichfield, the poet Anna Seward, who had published in the magazine opinions of Johnson’s character that Boswell found incorrect and injurious. His responses reinforced his claims about the accuracy and authenticity of his book. It is in­ter­est­ing to note that the promotional articles Boswell wrote for the Life are significantly dif­

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fer­ent from the ones he wrote to promote Corsica. The ­earlier articles focused on raising reader interest by exciting their curiosity about an exotic place inhabited by an exotic p ­ eople, whereas many of the articles and letters about the Life insist on the efficacy of his biographical method and the quality of the book as well as its authenticity. Reactions to the book w ­ ere mixed. It added fuel to the fires of abuse. In its edition for 1 August 1791, for instance, the Morning Post quoted a Sir James Saunderson on Boswell: “Confound this fellow . . . ​he has murdered the name of Johnson by writing his life; I wish he would now commit suicide by writing his own” (Werkmeister, 37). In its edition for 9 October 1792, an anonymous reviewer for the Morning Chronicle wrote: “DOCTOR JOHNSON said that BOSWELL in his Memoirs of PAOLI, had made a mountain of a wart. [M]ay it not be said that Mr. B. in his Anecdotes of the Doctor, has made a wart of a mountain?” (Werkmeister, 50). But some reviewers thought it an outstanding book and praised Boswell’s effort. In a review that appeared in the Monthly Review’s number for January 1792, for instance, the reviewer is “astonished at Mr. B’s industry and perseverance,” and observes that Boswell would be encouraged by any reader to “Give us all, suppress nothing; lest in rejecting that which in your estimation may seem to be of inferior value, you unwarily throw away gold with the dross.” 44 Despite criticisms that Boswell’s book was an egregious transgression of social and genre norms—it reported private conversations, identified sources of anecdotes, contained too many degrading particulars—­t he book sold well. Of the 1,750 printed in the first run, 800 ­were sold in the first two weeks; 1,200 ­were sold by the end of August; 1,400 by the end of December; and 1,600 by August 1792. At breakfast t­oward the end of November 1792, Charles Dilly settled accounts with Boswell and paid him better than £1,500.45 ­After clearing off some significant debts, Boswell still had £608 left for himself (­Great Biographer, 201). ­W hether he was conscious of it or not, and he prob­ably w ­ asn’t, Boswell was looking for more than mere fame and profit from the Life; he was also seeking the immortality he had been yearning for since he was a young man. His friend ­Temple recognized this yearning early in their relationship. In an exchange of correspondence with T ­ emple just before Corsica was published, Boswell told his friend about an award Corsica had given him, and then added that he had now acquired his full share of fame. ­Don’t talk about already having your full share of fame, ­Temple responded, “while you live, you ­will never cease to aspire to a deathless & immortal renown.” 46 This yearning for immortality was rooted in Boswell’s annihilation anxiety, and its influence on his thinking is everywhere apparent in his journal, though it is most vis­i­ble in his religious fears. He clearly had doubts about the promise of Chris­tian­ity that he would have a life ­after death, and the fear that his doubts might actually be the truth caused Boswell considerable conscious anxiety when his unconscious fears surfaced. His journal is strewn with references to fears

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about ­f uture existence, and his conscious re­sis­tance to the notion that ­t here was no life ­after death reveals his fear that all that one could expect ­after death was oblivion. By his early twenties, Boswell had developed a strategy for keeping this anxiety at bay: he recorded his life on paper, and he prob­ably realized its psychological efficacy when he was in Holland. The effort to bar this anxiety from consciousness was clearly one of the emotional ­drivers of his journalizing. When his wife complained that his journal left him disemboweled for posterity, Boswell, reflecting l­ater on her criticism, disagreed; he rather thought he was leaving himself embalmed. “It is certainly preserving myself,” he observed in his journal. With a hint of frustration a few years l­ ater, he confided to his journal: “It is unpleasant to observe how imperfect a picture of my life this journal pre­sents. Yet I have certainly much more of myself preserved than most p ­ eople” (his emphasis).47 The same embalming meta­phor shows up in the Life with regards to Johnson. In his introductory remarks, Boswell boasts about the massive amounts of conversation and the number of anecdotes he has collected and points out: “Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved” (Life, 1:30). The one ­t hing the Life ­will accomplish is rescuing Samuel Johnson from the oblivion of death. His urge to preserve Johnson from oblivion was at the same time a compelling urge to preserve himself from oblivion. Boswell had to have sensed at some level that preserving Johnson in a biography written by Boswell in which Boswell had a significant presence would preserve James Boswell as well. At least one acquaintance lamented that from this point on, the name of James Boswell would be forever linked with that of Samuel Johnson. Boswell did see publishing a well-­received work as a means of securing immortality, and T ­ emple recognized that as well. When he was looking over proofs of Corsica, T ­ emple said he hoped that Boswell’s ­little monument to liberty would do him credit and “make it remembered a c­ entury hence that ­there was one James Boswell” (his emphasis).48 Deep in his psyche, Boswell hoped the Life would do the same for him. But if the Life ­were to confer immortality on him, it was imperative that ­people recognize the validity of his implicit claim that he, not Johnson, was the superior biographer. He claimed to have conceived the “perfect mode” of writing Johnson’s life, which logically would make him a perfect biographer. He based this claim on what he believed to be the realized objective of his new mode: to make Johnson’s character so “fully understood” that readers would become “better acquainted” with him than “even most of ­t hose who actually knew him” (Life, 1:29–30). No biographer, not even Johnson, had ever accomplished such a feat. From this perspective, Boswell’s assertions in his articles and literary disputes about the accuracy, the authenticity, and the insights into Johnson’s character his biography offered readers ­wasn’t just an effort to increase sales, it was also

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an effort to solicit acknowledgement that he was, in fact, a biographer superior even to Johnson. He earned that acknowledgement from an unlikely source, Thomas Babington Macaulay, a critic who thought Boswell a small man “of the meanest and feeblest intellect.” It was Macaulay who first publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of Boswell’s claim and conferred on him the immortality for which he had yearned all his adult life. The force of Boswell’s new method compelled Macaulay to declare Boswell “the first of biographers,” one who had so outdistanced “his competitors . . . ​that it is not worth while [sic] to place them.” Boswell’s fame is ­great, Macaulay acknowledged, “and it ­will . . . ​be lasting.” 49 Macaulay’s opinion of Boswell’s art, we now know, was deficient, but the intervening centuries have proven Macaulay’s declaration that Boswell’s fame would endure was astute. The variegated nature of Boswell’s literary ­career and its duration make it impossible to discuss in a volume like this one all aspects of his ephemeral writing and the work he produced, but the essays collected ­here constitute a start. The first three take a close look at Boswell’s engagement with the publishing industry that he exploited so adroitly. All told, Boswell signed very few of his periodical writings with his name, but the decision to publish a piece with a signature, no signature, or a pseudonym was not simply a ­matter of deciding ­whether to conform to convention. In “Anonymity and the Press: The Case of Boswell,” Paul Tankard examines a good many instances in which Boswell de­cided how to sign his contributions to show that he made this decision within “complex conventions regarding naming and not naming writers, or anyone e­ lse, in the public media.” Th ­ ese decisions, Tankard demonstrates, w ­ ere strategic deployments of the possibilities of t­ hese conventions. While it is generally known that Boswell published extensively in periodicals, it is not widely known that he entertained the idea of launching one himself, a Scottish periodical in the Scottish tongue. Boswell’s proposal for this periodical, which he intended to title The Chimney-­Sweep (or, The Sooty Man), is being published for the first time in James J. Caudle’s “James Boswell’s Design for a Scottish Periodical in the Scots Language: The Importance of His Prospectus for the Sutiman Papers (ca. 1770?).” The publication of formal periodical essays in native Scots, says Caudle, would, in Boswell’s opinion, serve to preserve the language as well as express the moral and social ideas of the Scots. Boswell loved to entertain formal gatherings with ballads and poems that he composed especially for an occasion, and he was often mocked in the newspapers for his pride in this propensity. In “Boswell in Broadside,” Terry Seymour examines two of Boswell’s broadsides: his verses in the character of a Corsican that he recited at Garrick’s Jubilee, and “William Pitt, the Grocer of London,” a ballad about the new prime minister that he sang a­ fter an anniversary dinner in 1790 that Pitt attended. ­These broadsides, Seymour writes, are “illustrative of

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his motives and methods in the use of the genre.” Seymour also locates all known extant copies of ­t hese broadsides and explains their rarity. The remainder of the essays discuss individual works published during the first and second periods of his c­ areer that have received l­ ittle critical attention. Much of the poetry Boswell produced during the first period of his ­career was intended to display his wit and humor. But two of the humorous pamphlets he produced in the early 1760s also show a subtle intellect at work. In an “An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady: Serious Effort or Elaborate Joke?” Newman argues that when read as a holistic ­whole rather than as a collection of discrete parts, this pamphlet, generally dismissed as a feeble per­for­mance, is actually an elaborate joke that exhibits the wit, the cleverness, and the erudition of the pamphlet’s authors. Celia Barnes’s “ ‘Making the Press my Amanuensis’: Male Friendship and Publicity in The Cub, at New-­market” argues that this poem is more than a comic, fictionalized account of Boswell’s humiliating encounters with a variety of humorous characters during a visit to London’s Jockey Club. What Boswell creates, says Barnes, “is a literary production about literary production . . . ​that poeticizes its own composition and reflects on its own publication, distribution, and reception.” Two essays collected h ­ ere make evident that Boswell’s Hypochondriack has not received adequate critical attention. Brady has said of it that it is “Boswell’s only long work to be a failure; it brought out his weaknesses rather than his strengths,” and Anthony LaVopa has declared it “very thin gruel.”50 Allan Ingram challenges ­t hese assessments in “The Hypochondriack and Its Context: James Boswell, 1777–1783.” Ingram traces how Boswell, whose literary persona was a former sufferer of hypochondria, was eventually broken down by his own strug­gle with the malady, and his description of this breakdown, Ingram argues, changed the essay tradition. He writes, “­After Boswell, it was legitimate for the self to be a core ­factor within the essay.” Jennifer Preston Wilson looks at The Hypochondriack from another perspective. In “The Embodied Mind of Boswell’s The Hypochondriack and the Turn-­ of-­the-­Century Novel,” she explains how Boswell’s essays helped “establish a new psychological perspective that undergirds the turn-­of-­t he-­century novel.” The Hypochondriack, Wilson says, was written at a time when hypochondria was being redefined as “a predominantly psychological condition” rather than a “somatic ner­vous ailment.” Over the course of the series, Boswell formulates a self-­help treatment of the condition, focused solely on the mind. Wilson examines this self-­help program to show how it “foreshadows the embodied portrayal of cognition in the turn-­of-­t he-­century novels.” Boswell often wrote his po­liti­cal pamphlets with an eye t­ oward inducing some ­great man to reward his efforts with a po­liti­cal appointment or, perhaps, even a

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seat in Parliament. At the end of 1783 he saw a ripe opportunity. That December, King George dismissed the Fox–­North ministry ­a fter the defeat of Fox’s East India Bill, a po­liti­cal act that created a national controversy. To cultivate the good ­will of the incoming ministry and perhaps earn a reward for his effort, Boswell issued a pamphlet, A Letter to the P ­ eople of Scotland on the Pre­sent State of the Nation (1783), which was intended to enlist public support for the king’s action. Nigel Aston’s “Princi­ple, Polemic, and Ambition: Boswell’s A Letter to the P ­ eople of Scotland and the End of the Fox–­North Co­a li­t ion, 1783” provides “a fresh assessment of Boswell’s place in the paper wars under­lying the ‘Crisis of the [eighteenth-­century] Constitution’ ” and argues that the second part of the pamphlet highlights Boswell’s capacities for analy­sis and his ability to construct “a formidable interpretative case” based on a “thoughtful assessment of constitutional protocols that he genuinely considered had been ­violated not by George III but by the co­a li­tion government.” Generally speaking, Boswell is still thought of primarily as Johnson’s bio­ grapher, but thinking of him only this way limits our understanding of him as an author, which in turn can skew our understanding of his work. While his ephemeral writing is not essential to an appreciation of the biographical achievement for which he is famous, it is relevant for a full appreciation of his interests, capabilities, and proclivities as an author, and for acquiring a sense of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. Put another way, a study of Boswell’s ephemeral works, as the essays collected h ­ ere demonstrate, can provide a fuller, more nuanced understanding of James Boswell the author and his literary c­ areer. Perhaps, too, this brief examination of Boswell’s ephemeral writing might suggest additional ave­nues of inquiry into his relationship with the mass media of his day and what he wrote for it.

Notes 1. Paul Tankard, Facts and Inventions: Se­lections from the Journalism of James Boswell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), xx. Hereafter referred to as Tankard. 2. Ibid., xxxii. 3. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 23, hereafter referred to as Public Opinion; Hannah Barker, Newspapers and En­glish Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000), 29–­30, hereafter referred to as En­glish Society. 4. Barker, En­glish Society, 32; Barker, Public Opinion, 23. 5. Barker, Public Opinion, 23. 6. Ibid., 23, 27, 31. 7. Robert D. Mayo, The En­glish Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), 12, 2. 8. General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763, ed. David Hankins and James J. Caudle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 124 n. 7. Hereafter referred to as Hankins: Corr.

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9. Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of En­glish Newspapers to 1899 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 79. 10. One of the reasons we are able to identify so many of Boswell’s newspaper articles is that he maintained a file of his contributions to the London Chronicle and clippings from other papers, which are currently at Yale. 11. Dilly to Boswell, London, 13 Oct. 1767, in General Correspondence of James Boswell 1766–1769, vol. 1, 1766–1767, ed. Richard C. Cole et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 236. Hereafter referred to as Cole: Corr. 12. Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1963), 63. 13. Boswell’s Column, Being His Seventy Contributions to the London Magazine ­under the Pseudonym The Hypochondriack, ed. Margery Bailey (London: William Kimber, 1951), 21. Hereafter referred to as Bailey. 14. Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1956), 30. 15. Brian Lake, British Newspapers: A History and a Guide for Collectors (London: Sheppard Press, 1984), 57; Clarke, Grub Street, 88. 16. Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press, 1775–1783 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1967), 14. 17. T ­ emple to Boswell, Mamhead, 5–6 Oct. 1772, in Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson ­Temple, 1756–1777, vol. 1, 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 318. Hereafter referred to as Corr.: ­Temple. 18. Frank Brady, James Boswell: The L ­ ater Years, 1769–1795 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1984), 16. 19. Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick Pottle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 207. 20. Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1959), 306. 21. Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 217. 22. I have discussed t­ hese poems in Donald J. Newman, “Boswell’s Poetry: The Comic Cohesion of a Fragmented Self,” in James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations, ed. Donald J. Newman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 165–187. 23. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1950), 172 n. 3. 24. James Boswell, “Journal of my Jaunt, Harvest 1762,” in Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide ­Castle, in the Collection of Lt.-­Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham, ed. Geoffrey Scott and Frederick A. Pottle (Privately Printed, 1928–1934), 1:101. 25. Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The ­Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-­ Hill, 1966), 305. 26. Thomas Somerville, My Own Life and Times, 1741–1814 (Edinburgh, 1861), 112. 27. Wife, 27; Pottle, ­Earlier Years, 327. 28. Tankard, 84, 85, 88, 91. 29. Ibid., 96, 100, 101. 30. The news accounts appeared in the paper’s editions for 29 Sept. and 1 Oct. 1778. Tankard, 62, 67. 31. Ibid., 19, 30, 33. 32. The series appeared in the Aug., Sept., and Oct. numbers for 1770. 33. The articles reported their departure to Skye, described their route, published a letter from Inverary, and announced their return to Edinburgh. The articles also reported on two visits with Lord Elibank, an avid supporter of lit­er­a­ture and aspiring Scottish writers, Johnson’s engagements in Edinburgh, and his departure. 34. Hypochondriack 1, Bailey, 25.

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35. I have utilized the subjects assigned the essays by Margery Bailey. The essay on regimental designations was originally published in the Public Advertiser on 22 Jan. 1768. 36. Boswell: The G ­ reat Biographer, 1789–­1795, ed. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1989), 40. Hereafter referred to as ­Great Biographer. 37. Brady, ­Later Years, 212. 38. Ibid., 296. 39. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939–1950), 1:28, hereafter referred to as Life; Brady, ­Later Years, 328. Brady is quoting from a letter Walpole wrote to Thomas Mann dated 28 Mar. 1786. 40. Boswell: The En­glish Experiment, 1785–1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1986), 194. I agree with Brady that Boswell’s wit was expressing “an other­w ise inadmissible hostility” t­ oward Johnson, but Brady thinks this hostility arose from a threat posed by Johnson to Boswell’s felt sense of sexual superiority (Brady, ­Later Years, 212–213), while I am more inclined to see the hostility arising from feelings hurt by the image of himself as a less impor­tant friend to Johnson than he ­imagined himself to be, a relationship that was impor­tant to his sense of identity and his self-­esteem. 41. En­glish Experiment, 223 n. 3. 42. Ibid., 132 n. 6. 43. Lucyle Werkmeister, Jemmie Boswell and the London Daily Press, 1785–1795 (New York: New York Public Library, 1963), 20. Hereafter referred to as Werkmeister. 44. Brady, ­Later Years, 447, 569. 45. ­Great Biographer, 142, 201. 46. T ­ emple to Boswell, Mamhead, 8 Jan., 1768, Corr.: ­Temple, 221. 47. Ominous Years, 174–175; Laird, 174. 48. T ­ emple to Boswell, Mamhead, 17 Oct. 1767, Corr.: ­Temple, 208. 49. Thomas B. Macaulay, “Review of Croker’s Edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” in The Works of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans Green, 1898), 8:56–111, reprinted with edits by Jack Lynch at http://­jacklynch​.­net​/­Texts​/­macaulay​.­html. Accessed 1 Dec. 2019. Macaulay could not have been aware of the irony in a comment of Johnson’s he cited in which Boswell’s illustrious friend said that Boswell was “a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written.” Clearly, Johnson, if he ­really said it, was wrong. 50. Brady, ­Later Years, 176; Anthony LaVopa, “The Not-­So-­Prodigal Son: James Boswell and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 100.

chapter 2

Q

Anonymity and the Press The Case of Boswell Paul Tankard

Both magazines and newspapers as we know them ­were virtually in­ven­ted in the eigh­teenth ­century and it is remarkable how recognizable British periodicals of that era are to modern—­though not perhaps to postmodern—­readers. As regards their contents and format, the popu­lar magazines of the eigh­teenth ­century are less unfamiliar to us than the newspapers. But modern readers w ­ ill be disconcerted by the extent to which both species of periodical employ or host the practice of anonymous publication. ­Today we tend to associate anonymity in the media—at least, anonymity that is deliberate rather than merely circumstantial—­with deception and scurrility. However, it is fair to say that in eighteenth-­century periodicals anonymity was the rule and named authorship the exception. Of James Boswell’s total identified periodical output—in excess of 600 items are known—­only thirty-­four items are signed with his own name. The rest are anonymous or pseudonymous.1 (I certainly do not wish to conflate anonymous and pseudonymous publication, but both are strategies by which a text is separated from the true name of its author.) Indeed, the phenomenon is so pervasive that, I would argue, part of the understood function of the periodical press was to be a venue for anonymous discourse. Ele­ments of this convention remained in place in the world of journalism for a very long time. For most of the twentieth c­ entury, a newspaper’s se­nior writers on po­liti­cal or economic subjects might have had a journalistic “byline,” but authority and responsibility w ­ ere understood to reside in each par­tic­u ­lar newspaper as an entity. Some of us w ­ ill remember that, u ­ ntil 1974, all reviews in the Times Literary Supplement w ­ ere anonymous. This convention has, in the print media, been pretty comprehensively abandoned, and nowadays the least items of original reportage—­apart from ­t hose from syndicated sources—­have the name of a reporter attached, and (in further deference to the con­temporary bogey 32

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of “accountability”) often the reporter’s email address as well. Could eighteenth-­ century British readers see this, they would regard it as possibly fetishistic, and certainly as an outrageous limitation on press freedom. Of course, t­ here are many ways in which such a convention could be exploited and manipulated. In the past, the newspaper management could do so by presenting editorial opinions in the form of letters from readers. But the invitation that eighteenth-­century British newspapers (from the mid-1760s) explic­itly extended to readers to contribute to their columns, and to do so anonymously or pseudonymously, allowed both the high and the low to involve themselves in public affairs and contribute their opinions.2 And as for the writers themselves, anonymity and pseudonymity—­whether the exception or the rule, ­whether in the eigh­teenth ­century or ­today—­enable them to achieve something very dif­ fer­ent to what can be achieved by named authorship. If one is writing anonymously, one is not u ­ nder pressure to e­ ither protect or enhance one’s reputation. One is not writing with half an eye to the volume of miscellaneous essays in one’s collected works. This is one of the f­ actors that enables Boswell to contribute to the press not only reputable and literary kinds of items such as essays and poems, but also far more mundane items such as reportage and ephemeral m ­ atter.

Reporting For my edition of Boswell’s selected periodical writings, I particularly wanted to gather as much as pos­si­ble of his straight journalism: news and reportage.3 ­There is no doubt Boswell was a pioneer in the field; he was not just someone who—­like Samuel Johnson, perhaps—­would occasionally condescend to put an elegant essay in the hands of a newspaper editor, but a reporter who would send in hard news and conduct interviews. ­There is not quite as much of this material as (from the point of view of an editor/anthologist) I would have liked, but ­t here are Boswellian interviews with the explorer and naturalist Joseph Banks, and with the Abyssinian explorer James Bruce; ­t here are reports of the first Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford, from Edinburgh of a riot in a theater, and of a mutiny, and of a number of public executions by hanging—­a peculiarly eighteenth-­century mode of spectacle that fascinated Boswell. In writings of this kind (news reports), Boswell writes anonymously in the strict sense: that is, not only not using his name, but also not deploying a pseudonym. Another genre found in late eighteenth-­century newspapers, which appears in Boswell’s bibliography (and perhaps that of no other writer worth a bibliography), is particularly dependent on the convention of anonymity; that is, the short unsourced snippets of news, or “paragraphs.” They are certainly odd ­things, from the point of view of, say, literary referencing: the a­ ctual texts of some of them are in fact no longer than their bibliographical description. How to pre­ sent them in a scholarly edition was for me a vexing question. In the context of

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their original newspaper venues—­for instance, in the thrice-­weekly eve­ning paper, the St. James’s Chronicle, in which the fourth and final page was devoted to strings of paragraphs of unsourced observations and anecdotes—­they are simply listed in series, presumably in the order in which they came to the hand of the printer, with only a paragraph break between them, and, of course, without any familiar paratextual devices such as titles or the name of authors. They are, in fact, the direct ancestors of a form of journalism that persists in newspapers to the pre­sent day, usually in columns conducted by par­tic­u­lar figures, named or frankly pseudonymous (with names like “Veritas,” “Cassandra,” “Chaunticleer,” or—in the New Zealand context—­“Felicity Ferret”), in which the columnist pre­sents unsubstantiated reports and rumors gathered from a network of in­for­mants. Sometimes the conductors pre­sent themselves as embedded in a par­tic­u­lar professional or social milieu, as (for instance) a Hollywood or Washington or Whitehall or Wellington “insider.” Such material is (in a number of senses) a marginal ele­ment in modern newspapers that—on the whole—­strive to be authoritative. Of course, material of this kind has more recently found a new home in the “blogosphere” and other locations on the internet, which is essentially a venue for ­free and un­regu­la­ted self-­publication. In eighteenth-­ century newspapers ­t here was no endorsement from the printer (nor expectation on the part of the readers) of the accuracy of this material. The paragraphs purported to be no more than reports that had come into the printer’s hands of news that was being circulated in the community of the journals’ readers. The heading “Postscript,” which was frequently used for this column, suggests that it is the latest news, that it is unchecked, and that its origins are word-­of-­mouth. The paragraphs ­were not by any means all scuttlebutt or malicious rumor, and the contents are extremely miscellaneous. But it is strongly implied that they are to be read skeptically, or as—at least potentially—­communications from ­people with “an interest.” Lucyle Werkmeister says (in regard to Henry Bate Dudley’s Morning Post) that “by 1780 t­ here was hardly a ‘paragraph’ in the newspaper that was not paid for by someone.” 4 Boswell, however, is unlikely to have had to pay to use the columns of the St. James’s Chronicle, in which he was in effect publicizing books (the Tour to the Hebrides and the Life of Johnson) which w ­ ere to be printed and sold by the printer of the Chronicle. In a letter of 1785 to the St. James’s Chronicle, a contributor (almost certainly George Steevens) articulates what must have been a commonly understood distinction. In offering gratuitous advice to Johnson’s f­ uture biographer, he says: “Let Puffs [for the Life of Johnson] be restrained within their proper Channel, the News. From Paragraphs we may learn, almost ­every Day, who wishes to be thought of as the ‘confidential Friend’ of Johnson; but let not the sober Biographer degrade himself by taking such a Task out of the Hands of the Poor, the Shallow, the Interested, and the Vain, who strive, by Means like ­t hese, to suggest themselves into Notice to which they have no Pretensions, except their Necessities and their Wishes.”5

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Steevens implies that both the news and the advertisements (or “Puffs”) are serious and informative: their sources are obvious and motivations clear; by contrast, the “Paragraphs” are opaque, often mischievous, and simply not reliable.6 Of all the modes of relationship between a text and its author statement that I ­will consider ­here, the most common in Boswell’s periodical work is the s­ imple case where no author name is given. Of his roughly 600 identified periodical items, only 220 ­were published with a name—­either his own or a pseudonym. How then, it might be asked, have t­ hese texts been identified (mostly by Frederick Pottle) as of Boswellian authorship? Boswell kept (for a period at least) a marked file in bound volumes of one newspaper, the London Chronicle; this is in the collection of his papers at Yale, and in it he indicated over 150 contributions to that one paper, during the period 1767 to 1775. He also, somewhat haphazardly, collected cuttings from the papers and labelled his own contributions; ­t hese also are at Yale. And of course, he often mentioned in his journals or correspondence the fact that he had written a piece or sent it to the press. But a notable characteristic of the articles themselves, and which alerts the investigator who approaches the task from the opposite direction—by browsing in the newspapers—is that by far the majority of the items Boswell sent to the press concern (in one way or another) his favorite topic: James Boswell. However, ­t hose in the third person could just as easily have been written by anyone else—­one of Boswell’s friends, or indeed, one of his enemies—so his personal rec­ords are absolutely necessary for firm identification. The reliance of the newspapers on anonymity and unsourced contributions—­ and the need to avoid l­egal or other trou­ble—­meant that newspapers evolved a style represented by formulae such as “a correspondent is of the opinion,” or “we hear that,” or “a correspondent observes.” Such formulae have the effect—­ contrary to what might seem to be the intention—of giving readers a sense that the contributors’ identities are part of the story. The fact that writers or contributors are by t­ hese means mentioned but not named raises the question of their identity in a way that a name (even a false one) would not. This atmosphere of uncertainty in fact pervades the press, b ­ ecause the ­people who are the subjects of the stories are also often referred to in similarly allusive or indirect ways. When the young Boswell anonymously addressed a public letter to the Earl of Eglinton, the heading of the letter called its addressee “the EARL of * * *.”7 If the two ­people involved—­subject and author—­were nobodies, the letter would be of no interest; indeed, it would hardly have been printed. So, part of the interest in such a text is guessing or deducing their identities. We find the king routinely referred to as “a ­Great Personage,” and the House of Commons—­rather pointlessly, one would have thought—as “the H__se of C____ns.” In 1785, in a private letter, the politician Charles James Fox discussed the vari­ous methods of spreading po­liti­ cal opinions in the press: “Subjects of Importance should be first treated gravely in letters or pamphlets. It is not till a subject has been so much discussed as to

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become almost threadbare that Paragraphs which consist principally in allusions can be generally understood.”8 (This seems to me exactly the style employed by Boswell not only in his paragraphs but also in his series of po­liti­cal columns published u ­ nder the name Rampager, discussed below, in which he deals allusively with “Subjects of Importance.”) The allusive style invites readers to become participants in a diverting game, but also and more seriously, to appreciate and interpret current events simply on the basis of their own experience as readers of lit­er­a­ture, pamphlets, and newspapers, and to regard themselves as insiders, members of an elite club. So, the anonymity and pseudonymity of writers in the newspapers needs to be understood in the context of a general allusiveness or lack of directness about ­people’s identities.

Commentary and Opinion Not all the material in newspapers or other news media—­t hen or now—is news or purported news. Boswell contributed to the press a g­ reat deal of commentary in the form of essays and letters. When something is being commented on and not simply reported, the identity of the commentator is a legitimate m ­ atter of readerly interest—­indeed, it is an intrinsic part of meaning of the text. Readers ­w ill be expected to ask: Is this the opinion of someone well informed who is qualified to have an opinion? Is this commentator someone impor­tant and influential, whose opinion (in worldly terms) ­matters? Or is this the opinion of someone with an interest, who is not objective, and who perhaps stands to gain from the promotion of this point of view? In texts of t­ hese kinds, Boswell needed to confront the issue of the writer’s identity. We should not gloss over the generic distinction between essays and letters. Unlike essays, letters are not essentially public texts: they are private communications between two individuals, and their generic markers are the address or salutation at the start, and the signed name of the sender at the end. Letters in the press are not labelled “letters to the editor,” but are typically addressed (as Boswell’s are) “To the Printer”; it seems that (as Bob Clarke remarks), “the existence of a separate editorial function had yet to be recognized by the public.”9 At the end of private letters, the writer is conventionally expected to “sincerely” or “faithfully” verify all the foregoing with his name and a mark in his own hand. When letters ­were written not privately but for publication, some accommodation was necessary; this is especially so in a medium in which writers expected to have anonymity. Letter writers to newspapers dealt with ­t hese conflicting requirements by signing with a pseudonym. Gérard Genette, whose work on paratexts taxonomizes and draws attention to the function of t­ hese frequently overlooked devices, says emphatically that “to sign a work with one’s real name is a choice like any other, and nothing authorizes us to regard this choice as insignificant.”10 The thirty or so known periodi-

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cal items that Boswell signed with his own name suggest that he resorts to this extraordinary mea­sure only when the subject is something for which he particularly wishes to vouch by name in public. The signed letters and articles represent not simply what he wanted the public to know or think about him; that description would take in all that he sent to press concerning himself, signed and unsigned, all of which would have a place in the construction of his public persona. His signed articles—in a context in which all names are used far more seldom than in modern journalistic regimes—­represent Boswell taking a quasi-­ legal responsibility for what he says: it is like a vow or a pledge. Or to put it another way, we could say that his unsigned articles—­when they concern himself—­ represent what he is prepared to have said in public about himself, but which it would be socially aberrant to be known to say oneself. In such a guise he can both praise and criticize himself (and he can then respond to such criticism, ­under his own name, another name, or none at all). His signed letters to the press—­w ith a handful of exceptions—­fall into three broad categories: t­ here are half a dozen from the late 1760s concerning Corsica, ten in 1784 to 1785 on po­liti­cal themes, and eight dated 1785 to 1794 concerning the Life of Johnson (1791). In all ­t hese cases, Boswell uses his name in order to draw attention to his involvement with the largest public c­ auses of his life, including two of his major literary proj­ects, the Tour to the Hebrides (1785) and the Life of Johnson (1791). ­These major book publications required a high public profile and serious publicity, and although his signed letters are only a fraction of the material he sent to the press to—as he put it—­“ keep the newspapers . . . ​ warm” on the subjects of Corsica and Johnson, it was appropriate for him to also appear more formally and responsibly as an author.11 On the subject of his Life of Johnson, he writes to the press to refute charges against him by the poetical satirist Peter Pindar, his rival Johnsonian biographer Hester Piozzi, and the Lichfield poet Anna Seward, and to assert the accuracy of his book. The po­liti­ cal letters all date from the period when, a­ fter the death of his f­ ather, he was most assiduously seeking po­liti­cal office or preferment. In the same period, he published his two po­liti­cal pamphlets, A Letter to the ­People of Scotland (1783 and 1785) on subjects that his journalistic letters reinforce. Another strategy that is employed in placing articles in the periodicals is to transmit—as if in the public interest—­documents by other ­people. Boswell does this on a number of occasions, giving his name. In 1774 he sent to the press a song by Oliver Goldsmith, “Ah me! when ­shall I marry me?” originally intended for She Stoops to Conquer, but dropped from the final version and not other­w ise known.12 In 1785 he sent to the London Chronicle a l­egal document by Sir Richard Maitland, Lord Lethington (1496–1586), Scottish statesman, poet, and historian, on an issue connected with Boswell’s own second Letter to the ­People of Scotland.13 He sent to the London Chronicle a long speech by Paoli to the Corsican General Assembly, with a signed cover letter.14 Conveying such “literary

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intelligence” to the newspapers, in the public interest and for the public rec­ord, is regarded as the responsibility of a civic-­minded gentleman with literary interests. Not surprisingly, the plethora of anonymous material in the press, no ­matter how normal a circumstance, occasionally gave rise to explicit published discussion of questions of authorship. In a number of instances, Boswell was drawn into such correspondence, usually to deny responsibility for something of which he was i­magined to have been the writer. Such letters of course required a signature. In January 1785, a series of letters appeared in the St. James’s Chronicle specifying Boswell’s qualifications—as against ­t hose of Sir John Hawkins—to be Johnson’s biographer. No doubt many p ­ eople i­ magined that Boswell himself had sent the articles, and Boswell wrote in to thank the correspondent and to declare his ignorance of his identity.15 A few months ­later he wrote to another paper that it was “proper to declare upon my honour” that he had sent none of the paragraphs about Johnson that had subsequently appeared in the papers, and that furthermore he did not know the authors, and would send none unsigned himself.16 It is rather disappointing to realize that despite his signature, Boswell in fact already knew that George Steevens was the writer of many of t­ hese pieces, and that by the time he sent a signed letter in 1790 to announce that he would no longer refrain from anonymously contributing on the subject, as he had already made a number of such contributions.17 Clearly, an accurately signed letter can be as deceptive as an anonymous one. Also in 1785, he wrote in similar terms to the Scottish papers, concerning the subject of his second Letter to the ­People of Scotland (1785); he begins: “Being informed, that some anonymous writings in the Scots news-­papers, relative to the bill for diminishing the number of the Lords of Session, have been ascribed to me, I think it proper to contradict that report. I stood forth against that dangerous attempt in the most open and determined manner [i.e., in his Letter]; and I give you my word, that I s­ hall publish nothing upon it without my name. I, however, should think it much to my credit, to be the author of t­ hose writings, which contain good information, argument, and irony.” ­Here Boswell uses formulae that suggest the opposite of anonymity: the letter is signed rather elaborately, “I ever am,/Your very faithful,/humble servant,/ JAMES BOSWELL”; and it is addressed not “To the Printer,” but like the pamphlet itself, “TO THE P ­ EOPLE OF SCOTLAND.”18 (It is also notable that whilst in the pro­cess of denying being this par­tic­u­lar anonymous writer, Boswell does not want to be thought to condemn the practice, and adds an implicit endorsement of anonymous publications like ­t hese.) Such correspondence in the papers clearly indicates that readers well understood, or could reasonably be expected to understand, ­t hese conventions. The papers themselves assumed no responsibility for hosting material that was deceptively attributed, or misleadingly un-­attributed.

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­These thirty signed articles, then, are far from being a representative sample of his journalism. They all represent the writer as a public figure involved in public life and suggest that, by contrast with such texts, pseudonymous and unsigned articles partake of a kind of privacy that is preserved by the lack of a true name. Not only, as I have said, did one not need a par­tic­u ­lar reason to publish anonymously, but Johnson once observed that a man who was asked directly “if he was the authour . . . ​as to an anonymous publication, may think he has a right to deny it.”19 Although, commenting on this expression, Robert Walker says that Johnson would have preferred equivocation or silence to a false denial, the point remains that even a careful moralist like Johnson saw that claiming (or not claiming) authorship in the public sphere offered a range of morally plausible choices.20 Far from being regarded with disquiet and suspicion, anonymity and pseudonymity had functions that ­were socially understood and accepted, and it was the person who attempted to undermine t­ hese practices who was being transgressive.

Pseudonyms But ­t hese named items are the exceptions; mostly, when t­ here is a name on one of Boswell’s contributions to the press, it is not his own name but a pseudonym. I have stressed that anonymity and pseudonymity ­ought not to be conflated, but Boswell’s journalistic pseudonymity is in almost all cases like anonymity, in that the author’s true name—if this does not sound too Donald Rumsfeldian—is both not known and known to be not known. That is, he does not (save in a very few instances) give false real names—­t hose of other ­people, or names that might be ­t hose of other ­people—­but he supplies purported names that are palpable fictions. Th ­ ere are 165 periodical items for which Boswell uses pseudonyms. I do not include in this number the liminal case in which he signs seventeen items with the name “J. B.”—­not quite his own name, but identifiable to his friends, or to ­t hose who have been following some subject in the press. John Mullan observes, in his popu­lar survey of anonymity in literary history, that the convention of initials as signatures was “used sometimes [on reviews] in eighteenth-­century periodicals,” though he makes no more in­ter­est­i ng observation on the subject.21 In 1767, whilst preparing the Account of Corsica for publication, Boswell initiated a correspondence in the columns of the London Chronicle, inviting readers to offer translations of Seneca’s epigrams on Corsica. He sent three further letters commenting on the published attempts and intimating in the second that he was intending to insert the epigrams “in a work on which I cannot help setting some value.”22 ­These four letters are all signed “J. B.,” which may be taken as a sign (or a pretense) of tentativeness or modesty. He concludes the correspondence on this subject, thanking the contributors and announcing that his book “is now ready for the press,” with a letter frankly signed

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with his full name.23 This order is reversed in a very dif­fer­ent correspondence. Boswell was mentioned in passing by a correspondent, signing as “Anti-­Gnatho,” who wrote to the Public Advertiser in 1769 to abuse David Garrick’s “Jubilee Ode,” and another correspondent named “D. C.” replied with a minor correction. The original correspondent made in response an elaborate and satirical apology, assuming that “D. C.” was Boswell. Boswell replied simply to say, “I neither directly or indirectly took any notice of that ill-­natured Correspondent,” and signed himself “J. B.”24 The “J. B.” h ­ ere is a sign that he should already be known to t­ hose who have been following, and perhaps also that this m ­ atter does not deserve his full name. Most of Boswell’s pseudonyms are crafted to meet the needs of the par­tic­u­ lar occasion: they are not merely disguises, but part of the composition. As Gérard Genette says, “Using a pseudonym is already a poetic activity, and the pseudonym is already somewhat like a work.”25 ­Because the purposes of the letters differ, he uses something like seventy-­five dif­fer­ent pseudonyms. However, ­there are two special cases: ninety periodical items in his bibliography are accounted for by two pseudonyms. When a writer publishes a sufficient quantity of pseudonymous texts and consistently deploys the same pseudonym, the effect is less like that of anonymity, in that it is pos­si­ble by this strategy to aim at—­and to achieve—­a high level of public visibility. The seventy letters of the famous po­liti­cal commentator Junius ­were published over thirty-­six months in the Public Advertiser, 1769 to 1772, and their notoriety and influence—­editions of the series w ­ ere reprinted well into the twentieth ­century—­were greatly enhanced by the fact that the true identity of Junius was unknown and the subject of im­mense public speculation.26 But this is an extreme case. Hundreds of other writers produced series of essays of greater or lesser length, ­either published as leaflets or for the periodicals. Often enough, and particularly with a well-­k nown writer, the pseudonym was not in fact a disguise, but an open secret, as with Samuel Johnson’s Rambler and Idler essays; in the final essay of The Rambler, Johnson quotes Castiglione: “A mask . . . ​confers a right of acting and speaking with less restraint, even when the wearer happens to be known.”27 Consistent with this, when Johnson sent his novella Rasselas to the printer, he instructed him, “I w ­ ill not print my name, but expect it to be known.”28 This is particularly impor­tant to keep in mind when considering eighteenth-­ century uses of anonymity and pseudonymity—­t hat ­t here is more to the phenomena than what name is (or is not) published on or with the text. As John Mullan observes, “Follow in any detail the use of anonymity by literary writers—­ satirists, poets, dramatists and novelists—­and you w ­ ill find that only rarely is final concealment the aim.”29 In fact, as the Johnsonian instances demonstrate, even immediate concealment is not necessarily the aim. We might use the label “formal anonymity” for the strategy described by Johnson: of a work being pub-

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lished without an author’s name, but the name being publicly known. Mullan’s qualification, “by literary writers,” is particularly relevant in the pre­sent case—­ Boswell’s journalism is not literary writing, but Boswell certainly considered himself a literary writer. The efforts he made to preserve a rec­ord of his periodical publication may not have been in the hope that his authorship would be revealed, but even if the rec­ord was simply for his own plea­sure or some other motive, that motive certainly outweighed any desire for concealment. However, the two substantial journalistic proj­ects for which Boswell used consistent pseudonymous identities ­were not open secrets—in both instances, his identity as the author was not known in his lifetime. He wrote for the London Magazine a long series of traditional literary essays on the Addisonian model, which ­were signed “Hypochondriack” (1777–1783), and a shorter series of less traditional essays (“my lively essays,” as he described them in his journal), which he sent to the newspaper the Public Advertiser ­under the name Rampager (1770– 1782).30 Although the names “Hypochondriack” and “Rampager” are intended as frank announcements of aspects of the author’s character, the first mention in print of Boswell’s authorship of the former series was in a note by Edmund Malone to the third edition of the Life of Johnson (1799), which Malone saw through the press ­after Boswell’s death.31 The latter series was not known to be Boswell’s ­until the recovery in the twentieth ­century of his private papers. One of the defining characteristics of the Rampager essays is the remorseless deployment of playful allusiveness, and in such a context (I would argue) the puzzle of authorship is subordinated to—or at least, is only part of—­a guessing game. In the very first Rampager, readers are invited to think less about the identity of the mysterious writer than about the identities of the twenty or so other ­people—­mainly recent prime ministers and other po­liti­cal figures—to whom he refers in the essay by elaborate nicknames of his own invention.32 Apart from t­ hese very precisely generically constrained proj­ects, Boswell apparently had no desire to establish himself as a figure with a consistent point of view, with a single pseudonym that would eventually gain brand recognition, even if his ­actual identity remained unknown. In the rest of his periodical publications, he barely ever reused a pseudonym, as his aim was not to draw attention to his anonymity, to make it part of the story (and a potential distraction to the readers), but simply to fuel public debate. ­There is no secret key to the names he chooses—­mostly they suit the par­tic­ u­lar topic of the letter: “Medicus Mentis” (Latin: “physician of the mind”) offers a cure for impotence of mind, “Tantalus” (the figure in Greek my­t hol­ogy whose refreshment was out of reach) writes about the inadequate provisions at the Lord Mayoral Ball, “A Hungry Correspondent” complains about rising food prices, “Mortalis” writes about executions, and “Trumpetarius” writes in defense of the Scottish State Trumpeters. We might observe the number of times that the pseudonym implies that the writer is an older person: “Antiquarius,” “Vetustus”

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(Latin: old, ancient, of long standing), “An Old Correspondent,” “An Old Town Citizen,” “Memory,” or “An Old Courtier.” We might include in this group ­those pseudonyms that stress the writer’s long-­established relationship with the journal: six or more pseudonyms he uses are variations on “a constant correspondent” and “a constant reader.”33 Boswell’s response to the fact that the periodicals allow anyone to be an author—­which we can easily imagine him feeling to be an encroachment on his cherished feudal or other privileges and to offend against the princi­ple of subordination—is to pre­sent himself in the press as a figure still recognizable in the letters columns of newspapers: an older man, now perhaps retired to the country or writing from the rooms of his club, who is somewhat removed from active or day-­to-­day involvement in the affairs of the metropolis but who has the indisputable authority that comes of long worldly experience, ­later combined with mature reflection. Using a name other than one’s own is not the same as pretending to be someone other than oneself. That is to say, so far as their original readers w ­ ere concerned, “Vetustus” or “Trumpetarius” might be Boswell, but they might equally well be someone e­ lse. And in many ways, it does not make much difference to the original readers who the writer was: he may as well be anonymous. Boswell does not sign them simply ­because they ­were not the sort of t­ hing one would sign.

The Importance of Not Being James Boswell It is instructive to consider anonymity and pseudonymity not negatively, as mere absences, but positively and as separate strategies with their own subtleties; but we cannot avoid the fact that Boswell’s purpose—­like that of most of ­t hose who deploy t­ hese strategies—is the negative aim of not making use of his own name. Where Boswell does not use his own name, it is most often on articles of which it is part of the point that they are not to be thought of by readers as being by James Boswell. As I have suggested, by sending anonymous ­t hings to the press about himself, he may be construed as providing “literary intelligence,” and thus ­doing what would be alright—­indeed, would be a sort of public service—if someone e­ lse ­were to be ­doing it; by ­doing it namelessly, the result is in fact exactly as it would be if someone e­ lse w ­ ere responsible. Nevertheless, any pseudonymous (or anonymous) item which we know to be of Boswell’s authorship, and in which Boswell is written of in the third person, strikes us as vaguely deceptive. Even allowing for the conventions I have described above, t­ here are cases of Boswell deploying anonymity and pseudonymity in ways that can only be considered as intentionally deceptive—­such as when (throughout his ­career) he reviewed or commented on his own books. He reviewed Letters Between the Honourable Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq. (1763), and—­a number of times—­his allegorical novella, Dorando, A Spanish Tale (1767).34 Signing himself “B. M., Oxford,” he wrote a letter expressing impatience for “Mr. Boswell”

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to publish his Account of Corsica (1768).35 He is the likely reviewer for the Edinburgh Advertiser of his own Reflections on the Late Alarming Bankruptcies in Scotland (1772).36 Using the pseudonym “Lelius,” he sent a letter to an Edinburgh newspaper recommending that all jurymen study Boswell’s Letter to Lord Braxfield (1780).37 He sent a letter to the press speculating as to the authorship of his own anonymous pamphlet poem, No Abolition of Slavery (1791).38 Reporting his own activities—­his comings and g­ oings, his appearances at social functions, his literary pro­gress, his songs and sayings, his po­liti­cal machinations—in the guise of an anonymous or pseudonymous third party may just be a legitimate deployment of the conventions. But anonymously asking himself questions or flattering himself in the press can hardly have been acceptable, even by eighteenth-­century standards. Boswell was particularly prone to sending anonymous and pseudonymous verses to the press, in praise of himself or his works—­k nown or unknown. He wrote a ballad celebrating Dorando, and a set of verses purportedly inspired by reading his own anonymous account of church bells being sent to Corsica.39 In 1769 he attended David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford; his long account of the event in the Public Advertiser was signed “J. B.” When it was reprinted in the London Magazine, it had his full name as author and was accompanied by an unsigned third-­person account (his own) of his appearance at the Jubilee masquerade in Corsican dress (with a print of him in the Corsican dress on the opposite page), together with the verses he wrote and distributed for the occasion.40 A month ­later ­t here appeared in the London Chronicle “Verses on seeing the Print of James Boswell, Esq; in the Corsican Dress.” 41 Around the same time, he sent a paragraph to the London Chronicle about James Boswell, Esq. having been seen at a recent execution, sitting on top of one of the hearses for the sake of a good view. In the next issue, tribute was paid to this news item in “Verses on seeing Mr.  Boswell on the Top of an Hearse at Tyburn,” and ­these ­were described as being “by the Author of the Verses on seeing his Print in the Corsican Dress,” which they certainly w ­ ere.42 In June 1785, Boswell attended a musical party at the Mansion House, the residence of the Lord Mayor of London, and he sent to the St. James’s Chronicle an unsigned third-­person account of the event. This was chiefly concerned with Mr. Boswell having exhibited and demonstrated t­ here his recently acquired “Chinese Gong, or vibrating Bell.” 43 Some months ­later, this piece was celebrated in an “Ode on Mr. Boswell’s Gong,” which Boswell’s file of cuttings reveal—if any proof was needed—to have been of his own composition.44 Among the many items, signed and unsigned, sent to the press in relation to his l­ abors on his Johnsonian works was a set of verses called “Dilly and Dodsley,” which argued the merits of Boswell’s and Burke’s recent books. (To Boswell’s credit, we should observe that the publisher James Dodsley, who published Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], is given the last word.)45 Late in his ­career, Boswell sang a ballad of his own com-

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position in praise of Alderman William Curtis at a dinner celebrating the second anniversary of Curtis’s election as a member of Parliament. Boswell and the song ­were ridiculed in the press, but a set of verses appeared in the Public Advertiser to defend and encourage him, signed “Old Stingo”—­this lone voice in praise was his own.46 Clearly, when verse tributes such as t­ hese celebrated Boswell or his known works, ­there ­were good reasons why they could not be ­under his own name. Even when he was not known to be the writer of the original pieces, or not known to have been involved in the issue on which he was commenting, t­ here was still a propagandistic point to not signing, in that it could appear—at least, to the very naïve, or to ­t hose unacquainted with Boswell and his habits—­t hat ­t here was a level of public interest in him or in ­t hose issues, beyond Boswell’s own. In the publications concerning the Shakespeare Jubilee, described in the previous paragraph, which he distributed over three dif­fer­ent publications, it appeared ­t here ­were possibly four persons engaged in the m ­ atter: Boswell, who wrote u ­ nder his own name describing the Jubilee; the writer who reported on Boswell’s d ­ oings at the Jubilee and transmitted a copy of his verses; the artist who depicted Boswell in his Corsican dress (who Boswell had of course commissioned), and the correspondent who was inspired to celebrate the engraving in verse. But they ­were all Boswell. Another circumstance in which it was impor­tant that certain items not be known to be by James Boswell is when they concerned po­liti­cally sensitive subjects or ­legal ­matters, in par­tic­u ­lar ­t hose in which he was engaged professionally, or which ­were before the court and sub judice. His Corsican newspaper campaigns—­which saw him publish eighty or more mostly anonymous letters, news, and inventions in the London Chronicle, from 1766 to 1769—­were conducted ­under the shadow of a British government proclamation of 29 December 1762, that British subjects w ­ ere not to “give or furnish aid, assistance, countenance, or succour, by any ways or means whatsoever, to any of the inhabitants of the island of Corsica.” 47 Boswell lobbied William Pitt, Lord Chatham, to have the proclamation annulled, but was unsuccessful.48 In such a situation, it was sensible that he avail himself of the conventions and not draw attention to his name—or at least, not in a way that made him responsible for the publications. At the same time as he was conducting his Corsican campaign, he became vitally interested in a celebrated case in Scottish civil law that was then toiling its way through the courts. The Douglas Cause was a complex and long-­running case, of which the details need not concern us h ­ ere, but to one side of which Boswell, although not engaged professionally, became an enthusiastic partisan. The case was to be heard in the supreme civil court of Scotland, the Court of Session, and it was not at the time ­legal to report the speeches of the Lords of Session. Boswell’s amusing series of anonymous paragraphs, which purported to describe “five eminent writers of shorthand” sent to Edinburgh by a London bookseller to obtain a full report of the trial, w ­ ere at least part of the reason that

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the Edinburgh newspaper editors ­were cited for contempt of court, for having published material prejudicial to the case.49 In what Pottle describes as “the most impudent act of a life not unremarkable for impudent acts,” Boswell himself—­ whose identity as author must have been known at least to the publishers and prob­ably to most of the Court—­defended the publishers, and succeeded to the extent that they ­were let off with a rebuke.50 It may be that Boswell’s work as a professional ­lawyer made him all the more conscious of the risks of being identifiably connected with controversial published opinions.

Conclusion I began by observing that anonymity is the normal state of affairs with regard to periodical publication in the eigh­teenth ­century. But by looking closely at the case of James Boswell’s newspaper and magazine articles through the lens of his decisions about signing his work, we observe not simply a writer who usually did not give his name, in accordance with the conventions of his time, but a writer who strategically deployed the many possibilities of this regime. He signed and did not sign, and he used pseudonyms both consistently and randomly. But we should be clear that one ­thing he never did was to write falsely for publication in the true name of someone ­else; this accords with his (diegetically unspoken) reservation in the Life of Johnson about “the casuistry by which the productions of one person are thus passed upon the world for the productions of another.”51 That is, he never wrote as if he ­were some other real person. He made his decisions for many reasons, quite apart from a desire to deceive—­reasons relating to politics and the law, etiquette and modesty, the need to claim authority or to emphasize a lack of it, and to do his best for c­ auses he believed in. His practice responds strategically and creatively to the distinction between the public and the private and to the demands of genre—to the need for objectivity and the acknowledgement of subjectivity—as well as gratifying his own playful impulses. Even the sternest critic of t­ hese conventions must confess that they make newspapers much more complex, nuanced, social, and in­ter­est­ing than they are ­today. In fact, as newspapers face challenges to their cultural importance from the new forms of media—­online journals, blogs, and suchlike, hosted by electronic, internet-­based technologies—it might be that respectable newspapers—­ rather than courting tabloid-­style popularity and relevance by indulging in format changes, shorter texts, celebrity-­focused content, endless lifestyle supplements, and other such features—­could adopt some of ­these conventions and still remain repositories of literate discourse. It is naïve to impose modern assumptions about anonymity and pseudonymity on the construction of authorship in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, and this is particularly the case with regard to the periodicals, with their complex conventions regarding naming and not naming writers, or anyone e­ lse, in the public media—­

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and which conventions are, of course, a subset of a society’s conventions about naming more generally. “Transparency” is all very well, and no doubt the insistence in modern media on the identification of sources suppresses a g­ reat deal of scuttlebutt or mere rubbish, not to mention seriously extreme and transgressive opinions that potential contributors know to be shameful or po­liti­cally dangerous to own (all of which material now makes its way onto the internet, to the dangerous befuddlement of p ­ eople who acquire their news only through that medium). But it would have acted as a restraint on Boswell, who, with his discursive fertility and exuberance, and preoccupations with putting on and putting off dif­fer­ent identities, found the periodical press an ideal medium.

Notes This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented on 15 July 2011 at the ­fourteenth quadrennial David Nichol Smith Conference in Eighteenth-­Century Studies in Melbourne, Australia. 1. Such figures cannot be exact, in large part ­because of the naming practices I w ­ ill discuss, but they are certainly indicative. My source for most Boswellian attributions is Frederick Albert Pottle, The Literary C ­ areer of James Boswell: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929) and the Boswell entry—­a lso by Pottle—in George Watson, ed., The New Cambridge Bibliography of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, vol. 2, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969–1977), 1210–1249. 2. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 38. 3. When referencing such items, I ­shall give the original eighteenth-­century periodical location; some newspapers ­were paginated by volume, some by issue, and some not at all, and in some instances—­where I have not been able to access the original publication—­I have omitted page numbers. Many of the specific items that I discuss in this essay have recently appeared in Paul Tankard, ed., Facts and Inventions: Se­lections from the Journalism of James Boswell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), and I w ­ ill also refer to that edition where pos­si­ble. 4. Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 1772–1792 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 7. 5. St.  James’s Chronicle (8–11 Jan.  1785), 4. Steevens’s identity was—­w ith Steevens’s permission—­divulged to Boswell by the newspaper’s editor, Henry Baldwin. See Tankard, Facts, 228 n. 3. 6. See the OED, s.v. “paragraph”: “Journalism. A short article without a headline in a newspaper or periodical, usually consisting of an item of local news or gossip, or forming one of a regular series of notes on a par­tic­u ­lar subject. Hence: an item of news.” In Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (1777), 4.3, when Joseph Surface tells Sir Peter Teazle, “­People would talk,” Sir Peter replies, “Talk—­They’d paragraph me in the newspapers, and make ballads on me.” 7. “An Original Letter, from a Gentleman of Scotland to the Earl of * * * in London,” Scots Magazine 23 (Sept. 1761): 469–471. See Tankard, Facts, 295–301. 8. Quoted by Barker, Public Opinion, 44; my emphasis. 9. Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of En­glish Newspapers to 1899 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 86. 10. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–40.

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11. Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1960), 67. 12. It was “to be sung by Miss Hardcastle.” London Magazine 43 (June 1774): 295. See Frank Brady, James Boswell: The ­Later Years (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1984), 91. 13. London Chronicle 58 (30 July 1785), 97. See Pottle, Literary ­Career, 249; Letters of James Boswell, ed. Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 2:327. 14. Public Advertiser (30 Nov. 1790), 524. 15. St. James’s Chronicle (25 Jan. 1785), 4. The letters to which he refers w ­ ere virtually all contributed by George Steevens, as Boswell was privately informed by the printer of the St. James’s Chronicle, Henry Baldwin (letter received 29 Jan. 1785). See The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating the Making of the Life of Johnson, 2nd ed., ed. Marshall Waingrow (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 40. See also Paul Tankard, “Boswell, George Steevens and the Johnsonian Biography Wars,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 22 (2012): 73–95. 16. Public Advertiser (17 Mar. 85), 2. 17. St. James’s Chronicle (19 Oct. 1790), 4. 18. Edinburgh Advertiser (27 Dec. 1785), 413. The letter was also published in the Edinburgh Eve­ning Courant (24 Dec. 1785). 19. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 3:377. The entry is dated 29 Mar. 1779. 20. Robert  G. Walker, “Johnson and Moral Argument: ‘We talked of the casuistical question . . . ,’ ” in Swiftly Sterneward: Essays on Laurence Sterne and His Times in Honor of Melvyn New, ed. W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and Robert G. Walker (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 55. 21. John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 200. 22. London Chronicle (27 Jan. 1767), 95. 23. Ibid. (13–15 Aug. 1767), 155. 24. Public Advertiser (13 Oct. 1769), 2. “Anti-­Gnatho” is thought to have been William Kenrick. See The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson ­Temple, 1756–1795, vol. 1, 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 261 nn. 6, 7. The six letters of this correspondence appear in the Public Advertiser in the issues of 16, 19, 22, 26, and 29 Sept., and 13 Oct. 25. Genette, Paratexts, 54. 26. Junius’s identity remains unknown to this day, although ­t here is strong support for the theory that he was the politician Sir Philip Francis. 27. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 3:317. 28. Johnson to William Strahan, 20 Jan. 1759, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1992–1994), 1:178. 29. Mullan, Anonymity, 20. 30. Defence, 292. 31. Life, 4:179 n. 4. 32. Letter signed “Rampager,” Public Advertiser (14 Apr. 1770), 2 (leading article). See Tankard, Facts, 114–128. 33. As a pseudonym or sign-­off line for letters from anonymous contributors to the literary pages of newspapers, “Constant Reader” seems to have originated in the essay series of the early eigh­teenth ­century. It appears at the end of letters in The Tatler nos. 118, 132, 146, and 160, as well as in The Spectator nos. 145, 336, 410, 431, 474, and 613, and in other series thereafter. 34. His review of Letters appeared in London Chronicle (28 Apr. 1763), 404–405. For Dorando, he contributed to the London Chronicle a long review of the first edition

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(2 July 1767), 5, and another of the second (20 Oct. 1767). Both of t­ hese articles had already appeared in Scottish newspapers. 35. London Chronicle (27 Aug. 1767), 195. See James Boswell, An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to That Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, ed. James T. Boulton and T. O. McLoughlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 225. The signature “B. M.” may even be an allusion to “Mr. Boswell.” 36. Edinburgh Advertiser (20 Nov. 1772), 321. Frank Brady comments, “To make sure his pamphlet was not ignored, Boswell reviewed it favourably in the Edinburgh Advertiser” (­Later Years, 43); Brady’s notes remark that it is attributed [by Pottle] on internal evidence. 37. Caledonian Mercury (8 and 26 July 1780). See also the account in Boswell’s journal, Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–­1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1977), 216 and n. 8. 38. Public Advertiser (16 Apr. 1791), [3]. (This paragraph is followed immediately by another of Boswell’s paragraphs, on Johnson’s monument, then another on monuments generally in St. Paul’s. Such collocations are potentially helpful in identifying Boswell’s journalistic activities.) 39. The ballad on Dorando appeared in the Edinburgh Advertiser (19 June 1767), 389. For the notice on the church bells, see Public Advertiser (19 Apr. 1768), [2]; for the verses, Public Advertiser (20 Apr. 1768), [2]. 40. Public Advertiser (16 Sept. 1769), [1–2]; London Magazine (Sept. 1769), 451–456. See Tankard, Facts, 19–28. 41. London Chronicle (5–7 Oct. 1769), 344. See Tankard, Facts, 33–34. 42. London Chronicle (21–24 Oct. 1769), 400 (the paragraph); (24–26 Oct. 1769), 403 (the verses). See Tankard, Facts, 82–83. 43. St. James’s Chronicle (14 June 1785). 44. Ibid. (22 Sept. 1785). 45. “Dilly and Dodsley,” Public Advertiser (27 May 1791), [2]. See Tankard, Facts, 269–270. 46. Public Advertiser (7 July 1792), [1]. See Lucyle Werkmeister, Jemmie Boswell and the London Daily Press, 1785–1795 (New York: New York Public Library, 1963), 40–48. 47. London Chronicle (1–4 Jan. 1763), 9; also London Magazine (Jan. 1763), 35. 48. For the correspondence on this subject, see The General Correspondence of James Boswell 1766–1769, vol. 1, 1766–1767, ed. Richard C. Cole et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 2–3, 63–64, 106–107, 117. 49. London Chronicle (16–19 May 1767), 480. For the subsequent “reports,” see Edinburgh Advertiser (12–16 June 1767), 381; (16–19 June 1767), 390; (23–26 June 1767), 405; (3–7 July 1767), 13. See Tankard, Facts, 11–17. 50. Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The ­Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-­ Hill, 1966), 333. 51. Life, 1:254.

chapter 3

Q

James Boswell’s Design for a Scottish Periodical in the Scots Language The Importance of His Prospectus for the Sutiman Papers (ca. 1770?) James J. Caudle

I propose to explore a mostly unknown incident in Boswell’s life, presumed to have occurred in the early 1770s, in which he described a new periodical paper to be written in Scots, which was to be headed with the Scots title The Sutiman (En­glish translation: The Chimney Sweep). A central goal, though not the sole aim, of this essay is to publish for the first time Boswell’s draft of a prospectus for this periodical, along with my translation of that prospectus into En­glish. Beyond that, I also wish to set this text in the context of the specifically Scottish ele­ments in Boswell’s writing in the genres of periodical prose, poetry, song, and elsewhere. The composition of the sketch was not a salient moment in Boswell’s long and busy life. The most exhaustively extensive and the most academically credible biography of Boswell’s life, a double-­decker with the first volume by Frederick Pottle (1966) and the second by Frank Brady (1984), does not even mention this plan among the myriad “Unpublished, Incomplete, and Projected Writings” by Boswell.1 Neither had it been noted in the “Projected Works” segment of Frederick Pottle’s The Literary ­Career of James Boswell (1929), compiled without full access to what w ­ ere then the Isham papers.2 The scrap u ­ nder examination is not entirely unknown to scholars, but it certainly has remained unpublished, hardly even quoted from, and has only casually

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been referenced in discussions of Boswell and his relationship to the Scots language. It was duly cata­logued by Marion S. Pottle in a paragraph of a guide to the sources at Yale, the Cata­logue, that vade mecum of Boswell researchers.3 Marina Dossena has cursorily referenced the document in her broader work on Scotticisms and “Late Modern En­glish Glossaries” in 2003 and 2015. Susan Rennie made a similar en passant reference to it in a footnote in 2011.4 But none of ­t hese works quoted in any depth from it, much less published it in full. It is, in terms of Boswell studies, a known unknown. The document in question was sketched out by James Boswell on three sides of two discarded letter wrappers, one of which bore a London postmark “22 DE[cember]” and an address proving that it had been used to post a letter “To the Rt. Hon. Ld. Mo[u]ntStuart / to the Care of James Boswell Esqr., at Auchinleck,” but no year.5 The other wrapper is a frank that reads, “[?]to James Boswell Esqr. Advocate [?]­Free Edin[bu]r[gh]. G[eorge]. Dempster.”6 I quote Marion S. Pottle’s comments in her Cata­logue of the Papers of James Boswell at Yale regarding the dating of the document: “A reference to Lord Hailes’s edition of Bannatyne’s Ancient Scottish Poems (1770) may indicate that the paper was written about that time.” 7 However, Pottle’s dating of this document remains highly uncertain and provisional; 1770 is only a terminus post quem. The distant but amiable friendship with Mountstuart is recorded in Boswell’s fragmentary Register of Letters up into the 1780s, rendering a terminus ante quem difficult. Our other bit of evidence, the parliamentary frank giving ­free postage to MPs (a privilege abused by their friends) cannot help, ­because Boswell’s friend George Dempster sat as MP for Perth Burghs for 1769 to 1790. James Boswell having the idea of starting his own periodical paper is, in itself, not particularly extraordinary. Boswell from his teens was fascinated not only by the essay series published in London, particularly Johnson’s Rambler and Addison and Steele’s Spectator, but also the Connoisseur papers of Bonnell Thornton’s circle and the World papers of Lord Chesterfield’s circle.8 His essay series The Rampager (1770–1782), The Hypochondriack (1777–1783), and “On the Profession of a Player” (1770) are only the most striking parts of a broader range of ­little pieces that he wrote for newspapers and magazines. What is extraordinary about this par­tic­u­lar Boswellian document is that this proposal for a periodical paper was written in the Scots language (sometimes referred to as a “dialect”), both in vocabulary and in grammar. The Scots vocabulary in the proposal is not just En­glish words spelled differently or quaintly, but words e­ ither no longer current in mid-­Georgian En­g lish or never having belonged to En­g lish. Enough words are unfamiliar that the essay is partially (about 25 ­percent or more?) unintelligible for most En­glish readers unfamiliar with Scots, and especially for t­ hose who have not been accustomed to the basic vocabulary through reading Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, and Scott.

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“Scarce by North Britons now esteem’d a Scot”: Boswell’s Reputation as “the most unscottified of his countrymen” Whereas scholarship on Robert Burns has tended ­until recently to accentuate his writings in Scots and e­ ither glide past with embarrassment or energetically deprecate his poems in En­glish, the opposite has been true in Boswell studies.9 By contrast, Boswell’s scattered writings in Scots have been passed over from having been buried in a mass of papers rather than from a critical dudgeon. The sheer magnitude of the rich archival sources of the Boswell papers held at Yale, Harvard, and elsewhere—­enough to provide material for a projected forty volumes of the Yale Editions of Boswell’s journals, correspondence, ge­ne­tic editions of the Life of Johnson (1791), and Tour to the Hebrides (1785), and yet still leave much of interest in t­ hose archives unpublished—­makes it easy to miss out on aspects of the archive. This manuscript by Boswell in the Scots language reinforces the argument that although Boswell rarely wrote in Scots, and indeed diligently policed and corrected the Scotticisms in t­ hose of his own writings such as An Account of Corsica (1768) and the Life of Johnson (1791) that he rewrote and revised for an international audience in the Atlantic World, he was nonetheless enthusiastic about Scots language and lit­er­a­ture, particularly in his earliest years, 1758 to 1765, and through much of his ­middle years, 1766 to 1785. In the 1760s and 1770s in par­tic­u­lar, especially before he began his drawn-­out quest to qualify as an En­glish barrister in 1775 to 1785, he composed vari­ous fugitive pieces in Scots to the best of his ability, as l­ imited by his fluency.10 Boswell’s scattered unpublished writings in Scots may be dismissed as amateurish or dilettantish, particularly when compared to the celebrated sustained works in Scots of the older generation represented by Allan Ramsay (1686–1758), who died when Boswell was in his teens. Likewise, he pales before the brilliance of t­ hose writers a de­cade or two younger than Boswell, such as Robert Fergusson (1750–1774) or Robert Burns (1759–1796), both of whom admired Boswell and sent him some of their poems, and both of whom Boswell missed the chance to meet.11 ­Those authors are generally cast as better writers, truer Scots, and more au­then­tic than the group of writers sometimes known as the Anglo-­Scots, many of whom relocated to London to seek a more robust literary marketplace. That constellation of literary cosmopolites described as Anglo-­Scots included Joseph Mitchell (ca. 1684–1738), James Thomson (1700–1748), and David Mallet (1701/2?– 1765) from the de­cades of Boswell’s ­father’s (Lord Auchinleck) youth, and Thomas Blacklock (1721–1791), William Julius Mickle (1734/5–1788), and James Beattie (1735–1803), the last of whom w ­ ere fairly proximate in age to Boswell (born in 1740).12 Yet, presuming that one thinks that Boswell’s literary c­ areer is worth understanding, it follows that looking at the surviving sources regarding his

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thinking and writing in Scots, however fragmentary, ­will shed light both on central issues of his literary ­career, and on his vari­ous forays into publication of occasional verses and journalism discussed elsewhere in this volume of essays.13 A plan for a publication is worthwhile evidence of broader strategies of publication.

Boswell’s Manuscript Writings in Scots Most readers who know about Boswell know the Boswell of the ste­reo­type familiar in the tradition of dismissive or mocking biographies that flourished from Macaulay’s unsavory critique of Boswell in 1831 onward: assimilé, over­eager to please the En­glish, especially Samuel Johnson, and willing to change his accent, word choices, and grammar to be invisible as a Scot in London. ­After all, in 1763, Boswell’s earnest request to Thomas Davies when he first met Johnson was for Davies not to tell Johnson where he came from.14 The passage indicates that he thought his accent training by the stage elocutionists James Love and Thomas Sheridan circa 1761 would be polished enough to deceive the En­g lish bigot—­ known for his “mortal antipathy at the Scotch”—­about Boswell’s national ­origins . . . ​­unless Davies outed Boswell. Yet this same man wrote a proposal to create a periodical paper in “braid scots,” the Broad Scots or “Lallands” heard and spoken in the heart of Midlothian in 1770. Failed it might have been, a damp squib, perhaps, but it did seem to Boswell at some point to be a ­thing worth ­doing. Furthermore, the proposal for a periodical in Scots is not his only work in that language. The presence of words and phrases, and even sentences, of Scots in Boswell’s private journals and Boswelliana, smatterings that occur primarily in t­ hose not filleted for the Life of Johnson proj­ects, is worth noting, and has been used by scholars of historical linguistics.15 But the theme of this volume, which is Boswell drafting plans to publish his works and writing for publication, makes the unpublished journals far less relevant for our purposes. Boswell’s collection of anecdotes that he called Boswelliana contain numerous quotations of Scots speech; they could well have been published, but t­ here is no evidence of the plan to do so, and they have remained scraps, some bound posthumously, some unbound.16 We see no serious evidence in Boswell’s manuscripts that he planned to publish any of his private journals that w ­ ere not related to the g­ rand tour in Eu­rope of 1764 to 1766, the Hebrides tour of 1773, the encounters with Samuel Johnson collected for the Life, and perhaps the London journey of 1762 to 1763.17 One can see gaps between Boswell’s private rec­ords of unpublished dialect and his published version. In one journal from 1774, the flesher and drover John Reid, Boswell’s plebeian l­ egal client who was to be hanged for theft of sheep, uses some basic Scottish words and phrases—­“ ‘I dinna (do not) think,’ said he, ‘they can feel much; or that it can last ony (any) time; but t­ here’s nane (none)’ ”—­and some more complex ones—­“He used to drink hard, till he squeeled like a nowt. He would just play bu.” Wimsatt and Pottle in their annotation to that passage

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wrote that “Boswell’s glosses [in parentheses] upon quite easily interpreted Scots forms, not only ­here but elsewhere in the pre­sent volume, suggest that he has in mind some other audience than himself—an English-­speaking audience.”18 Boswell wrote a putative prison speech that claimed to have been the words of this same John Reid, in the form of a broadsheet, The Mournful Case of . . . ​John Reid, which would be “printed and cried [by street vendors], to conciliate a popu­ lar audience” in Edinburgh. In his journal for 7 September, he wrote that he “would write the case of John Reid as if dictated by himself . . . ​and hit off very well the thoughts and style of what such a case would have been” (emphasis mine). So the text was presented by Boswell in the persona of Reid as speaker, though it was without Boswell’s permission that an overzealous printer added the words “taken from his own mouth” to the title. A reader may be surprised that Boswell presented Reid’s words to be hawked in the streets to a popu­lar audience in a biblically inflected standard En­glish rather than in Scots, with the exception of glitches such as “taen” for “taken.”19 The speech of The Mournful Case was a translated authenticity, not Reid’s thoughts verbatim. His coauthored Justiciary Opera (unfinished, 1770s) was partially (depending on the character singing) in Scots, such as “O send us owr the wide seas / Our ain kind Lordios.”20 So w ­ ere his crambo rhymes such as “Keep ye weel frae Lord Galloway” (1762); win­dow graffiti such as “Howt owt Tobie Smallet maun ye lauch at me” (1762); his hodgepodge entrant, “Wi muckle ambition his mind he’s been creeshing” (1763); and his Douglas Cause ballad, “The B[***]m” (1767).21 But as with the journals and Boswelliana, ­these ­were also ­limited to private circulation. The two Douglas Cause ballads which he did publish, unlike “The B[***]m,” ­were in standard En­glish, not Scots.22 Boswell also compiled a manuscript “List of Scotticisms” at some point, perhaps circa 1783 to 1786, as David Hume had done in 1752 and James Beattie had done in 1779.23 A Scotticism is a flaw in spoken or written En­glish that would be correct in diction and grammar if spoken or written in Scots; none of the word choices or grammatical constructions of a Scotticism would be wrong in Scots. Between 1750 and 1800, at least twelve books ­were published in Scotland with their own methods of freeing Scots from all provincial dialect or Scottish dialect.24 Boswell’s short proscriptive “List of Scotticisms,” like his sketch for a periodical, was never published, but it also contains valuable evidence for Boswell’s conflicted relationship to the Scots language of his youth.25 ­These lists had utility only for p ­ eople who had grown up, as Boswell had, with a daily dose of Scots words and phrases, heard from most of the p ­ eople they knew, and presenting themselves as natural-­sounding word choices and grammatical constructions, thus inclining them to thinking and speaking in Scots ­unless they ­were trained out of it. Books of Scotticisms w ­ ere not compiled for the native Londoner, and they would have been equally useless to improving the En­glish of someone born in Devon or Staffordshire or Cumberland or Yorkshire.

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In the more scholarly category of publication, Boswell would have been the first person to publish a dictionary of the Scots language, w ­ ere it not for his frequent fault of application and follow-­t hrough. His stalled draft of that dictionary, long thought to have been lost forever, was rediscovered in the Bodleian Library by Susan Rennie, and it is hoped that it w ­ ill be published by her in this de­cade or the next. The sample pages of Boswell’s abandoned dictionary, according to Rennie’s observations, follow a “policy of focusing on modern rather than Older Scots terms,” and “now and again . . . ​note snippets of con­temporary Scots usage,” but they also dig back for examples into, for example, works from Queen Anne’s reign a half-­century before, such as the writings of Lockhart of Carnwath.26 Any account of Boswell’s proj­ect for a Scots dictionary ultimately has to note that he sputtered to a halt ­after approximately thirty-­eight drafted sample entries, and even fewer finished 800 skeleton entries covering just forty-­nine sides of paper in Boswell’s fairly large handwriting. He had hoped for the finished dictionary, in folio, to amount to something like 756 pages. To be generous, he was maybe 10 ­percent of the way t­here when he ceased working on it. His stopping point was likely less than 10 ­percent of the way, given how many manuscript pages it would take to fill up a printed page in folio, or even in quarto, and noting the one-­to-­sixteen ratio of his near-­completed sample entries to skeleton entries.27 In studying the fate of t­ hese writings, we see the paradox that while Boswell sometimes thought in Scots in his private manuscripts, when he pushed his writing out into the world for publication, it was almost always in standard En­glish. One can easily imagine Burns publishing poems like The Cub, at New-­market or “Pitt, the Grocer of London” in Scots. Both ­t hese poems are discussed elsewhere in this volume. By contrast, however many verses in Scots he might have jotted, Boswell chose to publish verses in En­glish, even ­t hose of his poems written explic­itly for the national market in Scotland, such as Donaldson’s 1762 Collection of Original Poems by Scotch Gentlemen. (In fairness, the advice many mentors gave some twenty-­five years l­ ater to a younger generation’s leading poet, Robert Burns, was to publish in En­glish rather than Scots.) In Boswell’s prospectus for a Scots periodical, he boasts that he is willing to be “the Snawbreaker,” the pioneer. Yet as we ­shall see, his pioneer spirit flagged when it was time to print such proj­ects, although by the standards of anyone but a Daniel Defoe, Boswell was a promiscuous publisher.

Boswell’s Plan: The Town Guard Soltier, The Cadie, and The Sutiman What did Boswell mean by his allegation in his prospectus, “It’s a very odd ­thing that ­t here’s never yet been a Periodical Paper in Scotland”? He knew well of the vari­ous magazines and reviews mentioned above; he contributed to the Scots Magazine for twenty-­seven years (1758–1785), to the Edinburgh Eve­ning Courant

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for twenty-­two years (1767–1789), and to the Caledonian Mercury for seventeen years (1767–1784), and he may well have begun contributing to the Edinburgh Chronicle as early as 1759. He was a friend of bookseller-­publishers in both Edinburgh and London. What he was claiming, rather, is that Scotland had yet to create a rival to Addison and Steele’s Spectator or Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, essay series that had not just been printed in their individual “papers,” but which ­were so valued by readers that their back files w ­ ere collected and republished in book form. David Hume, as Boswell pointed out, had initially conceived of delivering his delightful and still-­admired “Essays” to the world in a periodical format, but had instead waited u ­ ntil he had a volume’s worth, which could form a proper book. Given that the Mirror would not appear u ­ ntil 1779, and the Lounger ­until 1785, Boswell might well have been the first person to have produced a stand-­a lone Scottish periodical paper. He would almost certainly have been the first to create such a paper written and printed in Scots.28 The proposal Boswell made for a periodical paper to be called e­ ither The Town Guard Soltier, The Cadie, or The Sutiman was, at least in Boswell’s initial plan, all to be written and published not only on Scots themes but also in the Scottish language as he heard it used daily in the streets of Edinburgh and the fields around Auchinleck House, and, as he saw it, written in some of the correspondence to him. The urbane essays of the Mirror and the Lounger w ­ ere written in a clear and vibrant En­g lish that inadvertently might be flecked with Scotticisms ­here or ­t here, but which had minimal Scottish content. They ­were analogues of their En­glish counter­parts such as the Rambler (1750–1752), the World (1753–1756), the Connoisseur (1754–1756), and the Bee (1759). The authors w ­ ere t­ hose “newfangled englified fowk,” the ­people of fashion who drew their literary modes from the London bon ton, against whom Boswell’s proposal placed itself in counterpoint. Boswell’s proposed paper would be in “our ain tongue [sic] as it is,” since “braid scots has a pith and a fushion in’t, and a bony s­ imple natu­ral way o’ turning t­hings.” By contrast, Boswell’s Hypochondriack and Rampager papers of 1770 to 1783 w ­ ere examples of the metropolitan English-­language essay tradition, more like the Connoisseur, the World, and Johnson’s Rambler, all papers esteemed by young Boswell in the early 1760s. It is fair enough to ask if a reader who was not informed of Boswell being the Mr. Rampager or Mr. Hypochondriack who wrote the aforementioned papers would even know that they ­were by a Scot. They are in a generic British En­glish of the sort the Anglo-­Scots amphibians a­ dopted for purpose of international success and transcended the bound­aries of the provincial market for belles lettres, and ­were not, for the most part, Scottish in diction or in thematic content. (The indexes to Tankard’s work on the Rampager in his Facts and Inventions and Bailey’s edition of The Hypochondriack have proven helpful in establishing the sparseness of reference to Scottish personages and texts.)

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The writing of formal periodical essays in the native Scots, as well as instructing and delighting its readers, might additionally serve to preserve and conserve the language as well as express the moral and social ideas of the essays themselves. In one section of the proposal, we can see the traces of Boswell’s unsuccessful attempt to create the first-­ever “Dictionary of Scots”: “I’m for preserving aw dialects that have been formed. How muckle mair then maun I be keen to preserve my ain cuintry tongue in which we hae sae mony gude pieces.” Yet, the precise relationship between the dictionary scheme and the Sutiman plan is unclear. The evidence for the dictionary centers on two years in the ­middle 1760s (20 January 1764–11 December 1765), although ­t here are l­ater mentions of encouragements given Boswell to continue or “complete” the work in 19 October 1769, or “to carry on” in mid-­April 1777.29 The Sutiman plan is less firmly anchored in time. As Marion Pottle noted, Boswell mentioned Lord Hailes’s edition of Bannatyne’s Ancient Scottish Poems (1770): “Lord Hailes His notes on auld Bannatynes Collection of Poems . . . ​­will stand as an honour till himsell and a support to the Scots.” Hailes’s work was reviewed in the “Cata­logue of New Books” in the Scots Magazine for May 1770, and Boswell’s earliest booklist for his personal library includes Hailes’s edition. The phrasing that “His notes. . . . ​­will stand” might be read as indicating some discussion of the Ancient Scottish Poems between Boswell and Hailes prior to publication. I have not found reference to it in Mark McLean’s transcriptions of the Boswell-­Hailes correspondence. Was the Sutiman an idea Boswell had b ­ ecause his dictionary proj­ect had slowed to a crawl ­after 1765, and he was considering new ways to achieve the old goal without enduring the drudgery of lexicography? Some of the agenda of the Sutiman did seem to align with the defensive posture of the Dictionary prospectus of 24 February 1764, in which Boswell had written autumnally, “The Scottish language is being lost e­ very day, and in a short time w ­ ill become quite unintelligible. Some words perhaps w ­ ill be retained in our statutes and in our popu­lar songs.” In his 1764 Dictionary prospectus, Boswell is not so much the Thomas Ruddiman of the glossary to Gavin Douglas’s Eneados as he is the Ruddiman of the ancient Roman Latin primers, striving “to make a dictionary of our tongue, through which one ­w ill always have the means of learning it like any other dead language.” (Boswell, a competent Latinist with smatterings of ancient Greek, also must have known that in the absence of Latin grammars explaining how nouns w ­ ere to be inflected and how verbs w ­ ere to be conjugated, just owning and consulting a dictionary, however superb, could never be the sole means of learning a dead language.) Granted, his reverie in 1764 of students using “the work of Old Boswell” to interpret Scots writings is set in an era “some centuries from now” in which “Scots of that day” (e.g., 1964, 2064?) would be “applying themselves to the study of their ancient tongue as to Greek or Latin,” rather than in 1770, when any report of the death of Scots was an exaggeration.30 Still,

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in his Dictionary musings, Boswell appears to be planning for the embalming of the corpse, and not aiming for prolongation of the patient’s life. In the Sutiman prospectus, Boswell echoes the autumnal phrasing of the Dictionary plan, as he offers the familiar lament that “as the [?]use of [En­glish] in converse is wearing [Scots] awa[,] the meaning o’ mony words may be lost gin bein taen in to something whar ither words round them gars them be weel understood.” That is, given the slow triumph of metropolitan En­glish over Scots, the meaning of many Scots words would at some ­f uture point be lost u ­ nless they ­were preserved in sentences which could provide their meaning by context. One can see the Dictionary plan’s conservationist’s and classicist’s idiom in the Sutiman proposal’s goals to “preserve my ain cuintry tongue” to allow “sae mony gude pieces” from the past to be read. The Sutiman would provide examples of vernacular 1770s Scots in action in quotidian dialogues or monologues, which he argued w ­ ere difficult to find, since “­we’re rather scant o writings in our ain tongue.” Had the Sutiman succeeded, it would have generated new moral essays or dialogues that would have sounded like the daily con­temporary Scots in the Edinburgh in the reign of George III. The diction in the Sutiman, ­whether written by Boswell or authored by the “help” in the form of guest essays that he planned to solicit “frae Correspondents o’ baith sexes,” would be modern. That would set it apart from the “mony gude pieces” from the eras of Douglas and Bannatyne, and it might even have been noticeably dif­fer­ent from the “gude pieces” of Ramsay’s most active era in the 1720s, now about a half-­century in the past. The Sutiman would not have striven to sound like the early sixteenth-­century Scots of Gavin Douglas or George Bannatyne’s ages; not even Walter Scott’s l­ ater historical novels set in the Re­nais­sance would dare to do that to the full extent pos­si­ble. Beyond that, all of Boswell’s proposed series titles, alluding to town guardsmen, cadies, and chimney sweeps, hint that the plebeian voice and not the patrician one is to be captured. One recalls Samuel Johnson’s view in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) that “the g­ reat, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the En­glish phrase, and the En­glish pronunciation, and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old Lady.”31 (Boswell knew, even if the truth was concealed by polite society from Johnson, that Lord Auchinleck and Lord Kames and other gentlemen of ­middle and old age still deployed Scots with regularity; perhaps to him they ­were the equivalent of that “old Lady.”) Yet if one walked out from the drawing rooms of “the ­great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain,” and eschewed the “splendid companies,” it was easy enough to hear street “Scotch.” It’s a strange claim for Boswell to have made, that “a cutty paper”—­a periodical one-­essay paper amounting only to “a bit paper o’ a page or twa”—­discussing

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current events or providing opinionated editorial prose in chatty con­temporary Scots, would serve to “preserve my ain cuintry tongue.” Individually issued periodical papers, like pamphlets, chapbooks, newspapers, and broadsides, had a very low survival rate. As Roger Stoddard memorably stated, “Bigger books linger longer; ­little books last least.”32 Single-­essay ephemera tended to end up as parcel wrapping for shops, kindling for fires, lighters for pipes, protective liners for trunks, or toilet paper for bog­houses; the near-­daily sight of handwritten documents and printed papers being downgraded to ­these profane uses was a depressing thought for any authors dreaming of literary immortality. By contrast, the “muckle Buik,” as Boswell put it in his prospectus, the big codex, would endure for the ages. In some verses from 23 January 1764 speculating on his dictionary of Scots, Boswell boasted: “Boswell in folio I allready [sic] see.”33 Ephemera would perish u ­ nless, as the Mirror or the Lounger did, it won a lasting fame and earned the privilege of being collected into duodecimo, octavo, or even quarto revised standard versions such as the l­ ater collections of British Essayists that flourished in a long series of pocket-­sized duodecimos from the late 1810s.34 Stranger, still, for Boswell to compare the erudite glossaries of Ruddiman and Hailes to his proj­ect of publishing chatty quotidian observations of the sort his prospective guards, cadies, and sweeps might share with a friend. A town guard, a cadie, and a chimney sweep, the personas in whose honor or in whose personae he would conduct the papers, ­were rather dif­fer­ent from a bibliophilic Latinist or an antiquarian high court judge. They w ­ ere also worlds apart from Boswell’s gentleman personae of the whimsical Rampager and the moody and meditative Hypochondriack he created in the 1770s. Furthermore, Ruddiman had compiled his glossary in 1710 to help readers navigate a work completed by Douglas nearly two centuries e­ arlier in 1513 and published in 1553. Lord Hailes had compiled his glossary in 1770 to aid readers in comprehension of the manuscripts that Bannatyne had assembled just over two centuries previously, circa 1568. And Ramsay’s glossary for his The Ever Green (1724) is the result of editing similarly remote texts, t­ hose of Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600, from more than 125 years ­earlier. (Jeff Strabone has suggested that Ramsay’s use of glossaries for his works, including The Ever Green, differed from Ruddiman’s ­because Ramsay sought to create a vibrant connection between older and newer works in Scots.)35 The language to be preserved in the Sutiman would be the sound of the Edinburgh streets in the 1770s, the words Boswell might hear on walks from his ­house in James’s Court near the West Bow to the Parliament Close. Ironically, ­t hese ­were the very Scots accents that he frequently complained of in his journals and letters as sounding uncouth, coarse, noisy, and vulgar to his ears. However, t­ here is no evidence that the Sutiman ever saw the light of day. Unlike many of Boswell’s other stalled or abandoned proj­ects, t­ here is apparently nothing left of the Sutiman except for the high concept. Why did his plan fail? In the 1770s, many ­things ­were competing for Boswell’s attention. He worked

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on his law cases at the Scots bar and relished his usual spring jaunts to London to rec­ord the conversations of the wits (not just Johnson). He commenced his periodical essays for London newspapers and magazines as The Rampager (printed in the Public Advertiser, sporadically in 1770–1782) and The Hypochondriack (printed in the London Magazine, 1777–1783). He began afresh in September 1771 at writing his private journal, a custom that he had seemingly dropped in October 1769. He also began f­ amily life with his wife (whom he had married in 1769), had a rapidly increasing set of ­children (born in 1773, 1774, 1775, 1778, and 1780), and tried to keep on adequate terms with his f­ather ­until he could inherit Auchinleck (not ­until 1782). ­There w ­ ere also several other items from the group of his tens of unfinished literary proj­ects competing for space in his brain. The Sutiman papers beyond the pi­lot may well have proven too difficult to compose, given that Boswell was trying for most of this de­cade, and indeed had been trying for most of 1761 to 1795, to diminish most of his Scottish accent, diction, and idiom in order to function more effectively in London. By his own admission in the prospectus, he was not deeply versed in it: “I dinna pretend to be a Deacon at it.” The Sutiman would have required him to think and write fluently in Scots at a time when he was assiduously discouraging himself from ­doing that very ­thing. Yet the collaborative Justiciary Opera, with its many Scottish ele­ments provided by Boswell’s l­awyer friends as well as himself, dates from the ­middle 1770s. And he did imagine a collaborative method similar to Justiciary Opera for the Sutiman when he said, “I doubt na but I’ll get help frae Correspondents o’ baith sexes,” even though he pledged to “hae aye something o’ my ain ready in case I canna do better.” He had similarly suggested using crowdsourcing to aid him in his Scots dictionary: “I am thinking of publishing in a Scottish newspaper similar lists of words, begging all ­those who can give derivations to send them to my publisher.”36 Boswell, Jing-­fen Su informs us, conceived of at least ninety-­two separate projected publications that he mentioned in his private papers as potential works, but never completed.37 For some of t­ hese, such as the Life of Lord Kames, he assembled substantial notes, eighty-­two pages in Kames’s case. For ­others, such as the Sutiman, he only managed a preliminary prospectus or concept sketch before some pressing business in the law courts, or passing whim, caused him to forget his cunning plan. Of his propensity to be facile in dreaming of successes but then to flag before his proj­ects ­were completed, his mentor Lord Eglinton had exclaimed in exasperation, “Jamie . . . ​You have a light head—­but a damn’d heavy A[rse,] and to be sure such a Man w ­ ill run easily down hill; but it would be severe work to get him up.” Boswell admitted the truth of that contention: “This illustration is very fine: For I do take lively proj­ects into my head; but as to the execution, t­here I am tardy.”38 He also said this about his lack of follow-­ through in his collection of epigrams known as the Boswelliana: “Boswell who had a good deal of whim, used not only to form wild proj­ects in his imagination,

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but would sometimes reduce them to practice. In his calm hours he said with ­great good humour, ‘­There have been many ­people who built ­castles in the air, but I believe I am the first that ever attempted to live in them.’ ”39 Given that Boswell started at least ninety hares that he failed to catch, why should we trou­ble ourselves over this par­tic­u ­lar one? The Sutiman prospectus is worth thinking about (and publishing) ­because it tells us something about a well-­ known paradox within the late eighteenth-­century Scottish Lowlands gentry and clerisy, especially ­t hose with literary inclinations. Boswell, and ­others like him, sought to alter their authorial voices enough to enable them to succeed in the post-­Union culture represented by the literary capital of London. At the same time, they often remained connected to a Scots vernacular national literary past and the national language (as exemplified by the diligent scholarship of Ruddiman and Hailes, and the combined textual curations and textual inventions of Ramsay). Most of the other Scots whom I have mentioned in this essay do not seem to have agonized as much as Boswell did about getting on with making their choices in this cultural balancing act, although we lack a comparable depth of surviving private papers for them. Many Scots of his era felt impelled to shed their ­fathers’ and ­mothers’ Scots accents, word choices, idioms, and grammar, modulating their interests in peculiarly Scottish lit­er­a­ture and history in order to succeed in ­England. At the same time, many of them, often the same individuals, did what they could to maintain the unique cultural heritage of the Scots language and lit­er­a­ture, even at the risk of having their interests mocked as provincial or antiquarian.40

The Text James Boswell’s Proposal for a Periodical Paper written in Scots (1770s?) Source: Yale Beinecke GEN MSS 89, box 58, fol. 1219, also known as Yale MS M 214. Readers should note that the Scots words in the text are chiefly glossed by means of the translation rather than as footnotes. The footnotes to the original text rec­ord insertions and deletions. The footnotes to the En­glish texts discuss the more obscure references in the essay.

The Original Text in Scots Nae sort of writing has been mair lucky nor what is ca’d a Periodical Paper. It’s ane o’ thae ­t hings that tawks the fancy ­o’ilka reader. A muckle Buik’s no’ for e­ very ane’s ­handling. But a ­thing that [undeciphered] ‘cause ye maun sit down till’t for sic a lang time that maist except it be some o your douce41 dure chaps thats ­really greedy of’t lair fowk think it’s horrid dreeck. But t­ here’s naebody amaist but likes very well to gie a glisk till a bit paper o’ a page or twa. A StomackCheild kind

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that woud be frightenedto yoke full at a Shilling laif wud very pleasantly tawk a sheave off’t a bawbee row, a bap a Lady Cullen’s Coukie or a sheave off the leaf itsell. They Cadie[s]tell ane ­there’s a they ca Ashley in London that sells your wee drapies of punch,wha macks mair siller nor them thatwinna sells but in muckle bowls. It’s a very oddunco ­thing that ­there’s never yet been a Periodical Paper in Scotland.I mind David Hume tells us that he was gawin till hae pittin out his Essays in that way like the Spectator. However he e’en tewk to the Volume way of it frae the very first & I hinna heard that ony other body has ettled at it. Th ­ ereIt surely can bedo nae skaith into mak tha experiment how sic a t­ hing wud anserin Scotland. So I havee’en taent it upon me to be the Snawbreaker. I own I’m ane o’ your awld fashioned Carles, & have a heart liking for the land o’ cakes & our ain tongue sic as it is and however some o your newfangled englified fowk may lauch I maintain that braid scots has a pith and a fushion in’t [two words deleted]and a bony ­simple natu­ral way o’ turning ­t hings. It’s hasbeen aye been my opinionbeen thought that a langage is ane o the maist wonderfu’ effects ofthe Man’s Mindspirit o’ Man, and therefore I’m for preserving aw dialects that have been formed. How muckle mairkeener then maun I be keen to preserve my ain cuintry tongue in which we hae sae mony gude pieces­things. Mass Thomas Ruddiman who did sae muckle in the Roman langage was a ­great help to the Scots by his edition o’ Gawin Douglas’s Virgil wi a learned Glossary. Allan Ramsay helpi0t it wi’ his ain admirable warkis and now [heavi­ly deleted word] its [?]is taen ­u nder the protection o’ Lord Hailes His notes on auld Bannatynes Collection of Poems ^[?]setting them aff wi sa[e] mony tales & lively?remark ­w ill stand as an honour till himsell and a supportstoup to the Scots. I dinna thank than that any body w ­ ill thinksay it’s wrang that the first Periodical Paper in Scotland su’d be in the Scots langage. ­We’re rather scant o writings in our ain tongue, &as the [?]use of [En­glish] in converse is wearing awa the meaning o’ mony words may betint lost gin they bein taen in to something whar ither words round them gars them be weel understood. I dinna pretend to be a Deacon at it but I’m very weel willied and Ise do my best. I doubt na but I’ll get help frae Correspondents o’ baith sexes. I maun’na however lippen owr muckle to that, so I’se hae aye something o’ my ain ready in case I canna do better. It may be askitspeire’d whatfor I’ve taen the titil o’ The Sutiman? My anser is that I wanted to hae a titil parfectly Scots[.] Severals occurred to me. First The Town Guard Soltier,42 but Im a man o’ a quiet disposition and a Lochaber Axe gars me aw grue, and my plan o’ reformation is mair gentle than herreying bawdy ­houses, or tawking up fu’ fowk aff the street i’ the night time. Secondly The Cadie And indeed they are a wheen as sharp cliver fallows as youll find any where, & a cutty paper A Cadie would write. But ­after aw the thought I could tawk I determined43 that the Sutiman was the best titil, for a periodical Paper to be published in Auld Reekie.

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Translation No sort of writing has been more successful than that which men call a “Periodical Paper.” It is one of the t­ hings that takes the fancy of ­every reader. A lengthy book is not to every­one’s taste, as one may sit down to it for such a long time that, u ­ nless one is among t­ hose sedate and dour men who are truly greedy of it [for knowledge], or men of learning, they think it is horribly tedious and wearying. But t­ here is almost nobody who does not like to give a glance to a small paper of a page or two. A child who would be extremely frightened to come to grips with the challenge of eating an entire shilling-­loaf of bread44 would very pleasantly take a slice off of a half-­penny bread-­roll, or a bap,45 or a “Lady Cullen’s cookie,” 46 or even a slice off the shilling loaf itself. The caddies of Edinburgh47 say that t­ here is a man named Ashley in London who sells small glasses of punch, a strategy which makes him more money than ­t hose do who w ­ ill only sell their 48 punch in g­ reat punch-­bowls. It is a strange t­ hing that ­t here has never yet been a periodical paper in Scotland.49 I remember that David Hume tells us that he was ­going to have put his Essays in an essay form like The Spectator.50 However, even he took to publishing in a book of essays from the very first,51 and I have not heard of anyone e­ lse who has proposed such a ­t hing. It surely can do no harm to make the experiment of how such a ­t hing would answer in Scotland. So I have even taken it upon me to be the snow-­breaker, that is, the first sheep in the herd to clear the path.52 I admit I am one of t­ hose plain old-­fashioned men, and I have a hearty liking for the Land of Cakes53 and our own tongue, such as it is, and however some of your new-­fangled anglophile folks may laugh,54 I maintain that our broad Scots has a pith and a vigor in it, and a beautiful, s­ imple, natu­ral way of expressing t­ hings. It has always been my opinion that a language is one of the most wonderful effects of man’s mind, and therefore I am for preserving all dialects that have ever been formed. How much more then must I be keen to preserve my own country’s tongue, in which we have so many good pieces. Master Thomas Ruddiman, who wrote so much in the Latin language,55 was a ­great help to the Scots by his edition of Gavin Douglas’s56 Virgil, a work which he supplemented with a learned Glossary.57 Allan Ramsay helped the Scots language with his own admirable works,58 and now it is taken ­under the protection of Lord Hailes.59 His notes on old Bannatyne’s Collection of Poems, setting them off with so many tales & lively remarks, ­will ever stand as an honor to himself and a support to the Scots.60 I do not think that that anybody w ­ ill say it is wrong that the first periodical paper to appear in Scotland should be in the Scots language. We are rather short in supply of writings in our own tongue, as the use of [En­glish] in daily conversation is wasting it away, and the meaning of many words in Scots may be completely lost, ­unless they be put down in something written, so the other words around them can make them be well-­understood, through context.

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I do not pretend to be an expert at it [unclear if he means expert in writing the periodical essay or writing in Scots], but I am very good-­willed, and I ­shall do my best. I have no doubt but that I w ­ ill receive help from correspondents of both sexes. I might not, however, trust overly much to that, so I ­shall always have something of my own in case I can do better. It may be asked, for what reason I have taken the title of The Chimney-­Sweep (or, The Sooty Man)? My answer is that I wanted to have a title which was perfectly Scots. Several such occurred to me. First was The Town Guard Soldier, but I am a man of a quiet disposition, and their Lochaber Axes make me shiver all over with fear, and my plan of moral reformation is more gentle than their police-­work of harrying bawdy ­houses, or arresting drunken ­people off the street in the night time.61 Secondly was The Cadie. And indeed they are a group of as sharp and clever fellows as you ­will find anywhere, and a short paper is the only sort that a cadie would write. But ­after all the thought I could take, I determined that The Chimney-­ Sweep was the best title, for a periodical paper to be published in Old Reekie.62

Notes 1. Frederick A. Pottle, “Writings . . . ​Not Published by JB,” in James Boswell: The E ­ arlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1966; repr., 1984), 581–­582; Frank Brady, “Unpublished, Incomplete, and Projected Writings,” in James Boswell: The L ­ ater Years, 1769–1795 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1984), 588. 2. Frederick Albert Pottle, “Part VI Projected Works,” in The Literary C ­ areer of James Boswell, Esq.: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 301–­309. 3. Yale MS M 214, “Proposals for a Periodical Paper in the Scots Dialect,” in Cata­logue of the Papers of James Boswell at Yale University, ed. Marion S. Pottle, Claude Colleer Abbott, and Frederick A. Pottle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 1:106. Hereafter referred to as Cata­logue. 4. Marina Dossena, Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary: “Like Runes Upon a Standin’ Stane”? (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell, 2003; repr., Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005), 72; Marina Dossena, “Late Modern En­glish Glossaries as Tools of Definition and Codification,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 71 (Dec. 2015): 29–40, at 31; Susan Rennie, “Boswell’s Scottish Dictionary Rediscovered,” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North Amer­i­ca 32 (2011): 94–110, ref. 97 n. 7. Hereafter referred to as “Dictionary Rediscovered.” 5. John Stuart (1744–1814), styled Lord Mountstuart ­until 1792; Earl of Bute (1792–1794), marquess of same thereafter. He was Boswell’s G ­ rand Tour friend in the mid-1760s and, perhaps, the best hope among Boswell’s po­liti­cal patrons in the 1770s. 6. Lady Edith Haden-­Guest, “Dempster, George (1732–1818), of Dunnichen, Forfar,” in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–­1790, ed. L. Namier and J. Brooke (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1964; repr., London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 1:313–316. 7. Cata­logue, 1:1, 106. 8. Eleanor Terry Lincoln, “James Boswell: Reader and Critic” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1938), Appendix I. 9. “He did write some ‘En­glish poems,’ the theory goes, but they ­were always bad and unimportant. . . . ​The bad Burns is primarily En­glish in diction and sentimental in tone.” Raymond Bentman, “Robert Burns’s Declining Fame,” Studies in Romanticism 11, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 209–210. Burns’s works in metropolitan En­glish w ­ ere first abridged from his complete poems in Eileen Doris Bremner, The *En­glish* Poetry of Robert Burns (Author, 2005).

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10. I am grateful to Daniel Gustafson for allowing me to consult his authoritative timeline “James Boswell in London, 1760–1795” (unpublished manuscript compiled for the Yale Boswell Editions offices, 2010). 11. Terry Seymour, Boswell’s Books: Four Generations of Collecting and Collectors (New ­Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2016), cat. no. 1256. Hereafter referred to as Boswell’s Books. David W. Purdie, “ ‘Never Met—­and Never Parted’: The Curious Case of Burns and Boswell,” Studies in Scottish Lit­er­a­ture 33, no. 1 (2004): 169–176, esp. 174. 12. For the Anglo-­Scottish authors sometimes still classified as outside the bound­aries of Scottish literary studies, see Corey E. Andrews, ‘ “Almost the Same, but Not Quite’: En­glish Poetry by Eighteenth-­Century Scots,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 47, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 59–79; James Sambrook, James Thomson, 1700–­1748: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); J. J. Caudle, “Mickle, William Julius [formerly William Meikle] (1734/5–1788),” Oxford DNB, [2004]; Sandro Jung, “Joseph Mitchell (ca. 1684–1738): Anglo-­Scottish Poet,” Scottish Studies Review 9, no. 2 (Sept. 2008): 43–69; Sandro Jung, David Mallet, Anglo-­Scot: Poetry, Patronage, and Politics in the Age of Union (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2008); Sebastian Mitchell, “Boswell: Self, Text, Nation,” in Visions of Britain, 1730–1830: Anglo-­Scottish Writing and Repre­sen­ta­tion (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2013), 156–192; Mary Jane  W. Scott, “Scottish Language in the Poetry of James Thomson,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 82, no. 4 (1981): 370–385. A recent survey of the successes of Scots in London, generally from a meliorist perspective, may be found in Scots in London in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury, ed. Stana Nenadic (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2010). Of specific relevance to the themes and personages in Nenadic’s volume are James J. Caudle, “James Boswell (H. Scoticus Londoniensis),” 109–138; Nigel Aston, “James Beattie in London in 1773: Anglicization and Anglicanization,” 139–161; Sandro Jung, ‘ “Staging’ an Anglo-­Scottish Identity: The Early C ­ areer of David Mallet, Poet and Playwright in London,” 73–90. 13. Boswellians still start from the handicap of refuting the premise that even Boswell’s best work is fairly worthless: e.g., Donald Greene, “The World’s Worst Biography,” American Scholar 62, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 365–382; Donald Greene, “The Boswell of the Vanities,” Washington Post Book World, 27 Aug. 1989, X1. 14. “As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies ‘­Don’t tell where I come from.’ ” Journ., 16 May 1763, in James Boswell, London Journal 1762–1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull (London: Penguin, 2010), 220. Hereafter, this edition is referred to as LJ. 15. Richard  W. Bailey, “Variation and Change in Eighteenth-­C entury En­g lish,” in Eighteenth-­Century En­glish: Ideology and Change, ed. Raymond Hickey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 188. 16. James J. Caudle, ed., The Johnsoniana in Boswelliana (Cambridge, MA: The Johnsonians in association with Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2009). 17. For the G ­ rand Tour book proj­ect, see Frank Brady, James Boswell: The ­Later Years, 1769–1795 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1984), 91, 476, 516. 18. Journ., 31 Aug. 1774, in Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1959), 288 n. 1; Shirley F. Tung, “Dead Man Talking: James Boswell, Ghostwriting, and the ­Dying Speech of John Reid,” Huntington Library Quarterly 77, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 59–78. 19. “The Mournful Case of Poor Misfortunate and Unhappy John Reid,” text of broadsheet 10 Sept. 1774, in Paul Tankard, ed., Facts and Inventions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 85–88, and nn. 31, 33. Reid’s failure as a sometime thief of sheep, and Boswell’s valiant attempt to gain his freedom, led to him being allotted space in the Oxford DNB. 20. Synopsis or notes for the Justiciary Opera, ca. 1776, Yale MS M 134 in JB’s hand; Alexander Boswell, ed., Songs in the Justiciary Opera, Composed Fifty Years Ago (Auchinleck, UK: James Sutherland, 1816).

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21. “Keep ye weel frae Lord Galloway” (crambo rhymes to the tune of Gillicranky, Journ., 21 Sept. 1762); “Howt owt Tobie Smallet maun ye lauch at me” (graffiti ­etched into a win­ dow of an Inn at Cambo, Journ., 15 Oct. 1762); “Wi muckle ambition his mind he’s been creeshing” in “A Ludicrous Hodge-­Podge,”?1763 (“A Ludicrous Hodge-­Podge,” ?between 20 Jan. and 5 May 1763, Yale MS M273); “The B[***]m” (“Gif ye a dainty Mailing want”) Douglas Cause ballad of 1767, printed in The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange, ed. Ralph S. Walker (London: Heinemann, 1966), 228–230. Hereafter referred to as Corr.: Grange. 22. Frederick A. Pottle, “Three New ­Legal Ballads by Boswell,” Juridical Review 37 (Sept. 1925): 201–211, esp. 207–211. 23. “List of Scotticisms,” Yale MS M260. 24. Sylvester Douglas, A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, ed. Charles Jones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). 25. “List of Scotticisms,” Yale MS M260. 26. “Dictionary Rediscovered,” figs. 1–2 at 101, 103, and 108–109. 27. James J. Caudle, “Dictionary Boswell: James Boswell (1740–1795) and His Design for a Dictionary of the Scot[t]ish Language, 1764–1825,” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North Amer­i­ca 32 (Jan. 2011): 1–32, esp. 2–4, hereafter referred to as “Dictionary Boswell”; “Dictionary Rediscovered,” 102; Susan Rennie, “Boswell’s Scottish Dictionary Update,” Dictionaries 33 (2012): 205–207. 28. Rhona Brown, Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012). 29. “Dictionary Boswell,” 5–6, 23–26. 30. Ibid., 15. 31. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 162. 32. Michael Suarez, “­Towards a Bibliometric Analy­sis of the Surviving Rec­ord, 1701–1800,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1695–­1830, ed. Michael F. Suarez, S. J. Turner, and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37–65. 33. “Dictionary Boswell,” 3, and n. 8. 34. Denise Gigante, ed., The ­Great Age of the En­glish Essay: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 231; James Ferguson, ed., The British Essayists (London, 1819). 35. Jeff Strabone, “Allan Ramsay and Thomas Ruddiman: Two Ways of Reviving Scotland’s Dead Poets,” in Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eigh­teenth ­Century: ­Imagined Antiquities, ed. Jeff Strabone (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 77–121. 36. “Dictionary Boswell,” 18. 37. Jing-­fen Su, “A Cata­logue of James Boswell’s Projected Writings,” unpublished manuscript compiled for the Yale Boswell Editions offices, 2008. 38. Journ., 9 May 1763, LJ, 214. 39. Boswelliana: The Commonplace Book of James Boswell . . . ​, ed. Charles Rogers (London: [privately printed] The Grampian Club, 1874), 225. 40. Alexander Manson Kinghorn, “Scots Lit­er­a­t ure and Scottish Antiquarians, 1750– 1800,” University of Texas Studies in En­glish 33 (1954): 46–59. 41. “d” of “douce” written over another original initial letter. 42. “t” of “Soltier” written over “d” of original “Soldier.” 43. “de” of “determined” written over undeciphered. 44. A magazine article from 1830 mentioned “a shilling loaf . . . ​t he colossal dimensions of which ­will be easily ­imagined by the reader.” (Def. and citations in Dictionary of the Scottish Language (DSL), s.v. “Scale” [for scale-­loaf.], n. 2.) 45. “A small thick roll of bread of varying size and shape (often diamond-­shaped). baked in the oven; a morning roll.” (Def. and citations in DSL.)

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46. “Cookie, Cooky, Cu(c)kie, n. A plain round bun, without fruit or spice. . . . ​Never used in Sc[otland]. for the small ‘flat sweet cake’ of American usage.” Edmund Burt wrote that “In the Low Country the Cakes are called Cookies, and the several Species of them . . . ​are distinguished by the names of the reigning Toasts, or the good House­w ife, who was the Inventor; as for Example; Lady Cullen’s Cookies.” Edmund Burt, Letters from the North of Scotland (London, 1754), 2:279. Burt’s letters are believed to have been written ca. 1730. (Def. and citations in DSL.) 47. Boswell mentioned passing by “Porters chairmen and Cadies” near “the crowded [market] cross.” Boswell to Johnston, London, 15 Feb. 1763, Corr.: Grange, 46. Cadie or Caddie was an ill-­defined vocation-­cum-­avocation. The DSL defines caddie as “One who earned a living by r­ unning errands, lighting the way in the dark with lanterns, e­ tc. Orig. applied to a number of such persons who formed an organised corps in Edinburgh and other large towns in the early 18th cent.” (Def. and citations in DSL.) 48. “And then came to Ashley’s Punch-­house & drank three three penny Bowls.” Journ., 4 June 1763, LJ, 237. Ashley’s “Punch House” was also known as the London Coffee House or London Punch House, nos. 24–25 (or 26), Ludgate Hill. It opened in 1731 next to St. Martin’s Church. Its opening advertisements promised low prices for ample servings. “A quart of Arrack made into Punch for six shillings; and so in proportion to the smallest quantity, which is half-­a-­quartern for fourpence half-­penny; and the gentlemen may have it as soon made as a gill of Wine can be drawn.” J. Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London, 1872), 346. 49. Boswell h ­ ere means series such as Addison and Steele’s Spectator and Guardian, Steele’s The En­glishman, or Samuel Johnson’s Rambler. Seymour, Boswell’s Books, cat. nos. 44, 45, 1794, 3125, 3126, 3127, 3156. The date of writing of the prospectus may be solidified by the years in which t­ hese sorts of papers first appeared in the Mirror (1779) and the Lounger (1785). He does not count in this category the a­ ctual newspapers to which he contributed for years, such as the Caledonian Mercury, the Edinburgh Eve­ning Courant, and the Edinburgh Chronicle, or miscellaneous magazines such as the Scots Magazine. 50. Meaning, issued one by one, rather than in a volume of collected papers. Hume’s anonymous collection of Essays, Moral and Po­liti­cal appeared in 1741, he added a second volume in 1742, and a thin volume, the first to bear his name as author, in 1748, culminating in the 1748 edition. Further essays on politics appeared in 1752. A posthumous edition in 1777 (as Essays, Moral, Po­liti­cal, and Literary) was to contain thirty-­n ine essays. “David Hume modeled his own ­career as an essayist on Addison, explic­itly citing Addison as the ­great authority and presenting his own proj­ect in language similar to Addison’s Spectator 10 statement.” Introduction to Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004). Boswell first met Hume in 1758. Boswell to ­Temple, Edinburgh, 29 July 1758. See The General Correspondence of James Boswell and William T ­ emple, 1756–1795, vol. 1, 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 6. 51. Boswell’s undated personal library list, ca. 1770, contained a 1754 edition of Hume’s “Po­liti­cal Discourses,” identified by Seymour, Boswell’s Books, cat. no. 1712, as Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects . . . ​Vol. IV Containing Po­liti­cal Discourses (London, 1754). 52. A “snaw-­breaker was a sheep that breaks a way for ­others through snow for food, ­etc.” Arthur Young in 1791 wrote, “When the ground is covered with snow, the sheep are often obliged to procure their food by scraping the snow off the ground with their feet, even when the top is hardened by frost; hence they have obtained the name of Snow-­breakers.” (Def. and citations in DSL, s.v. “Snaw,” nn. 1, 3.) 53. “Land o(f) cakes, a popu­lar designation for Scotland, arising from the fact that oatcakes are (or w ­ ere) an impor­tant item in the fare of the rural population.” (Def. and citations in DSL, s.v. “Cakes.”) 54. In his “London” journal, Boswell wrote of “Mr. Trotter who is originally from Scotland, but has been ­here so long, that he is become quite an En­glishman,” and described a

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party including “Mr. Stewart formerly the noted Provost of Edinburgh and some more of ­t hese kind of old half-­english gentry” (Journ., 19 May 1763, LJ, 224, 472 nn. 5–7). 55. One of Boswell’s tens of other unfinished proj­ects was a biography of Ruddiman, a plan he mentioned to Johnson. Thomas Ruddiman (1674–1757) was a printer, classical scholar, and librarian. His Rudiments of the Latin Tongue (1714 et seq.) captured the market in Latin primers and was used by young Alexander Boswell in 1783, and his Grammaticae Latinae Institutiones (2 vols., 1725, 1731) appealed to advanced scholars. A. P. Woolrich, “Ruddiman, Thomas (1674–1757),” Oxford DNB. Despite the severe differences in their religions and politics, Lord Auchinleck valued Ruddiman’s Latinity, was given inscribed copies by Ruddiman, and bought energetically at the auction of Ruddiman’s books in 1758. See Seymour, Boswell’s Books, cat. nos. 2894–2897. 56. “Douglas’s greatest claim to fame rests upon the Eneados, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. In the early 1500s, no major classical work had been translated into En­glish, and Douglas’s Eneados was a pioneering work . . . ​a careful translation of the ­whole of Virgil’s ­great poem. . . . ​ He wished to communicate to his countrymen a knowledge of the Aeneid, and also to enrich his native ‘Scottis’ tongue with something of the ‘fouth,’ or copiousness, of Latin.” Priscilla J. Bawcutt, “Douglas, Gavin (c. 1476–1522), poet and bishop of Dunkeld,” Oxford DNB. 57. Virgil’s Aeneis, translated into Scottish verse, by the famous Gawin Douglas, A new edition to which is added a large Glossary by Thomas Ruddiman, &c. (Edinburgh, 1710). The copy in the 1893 Auchinleck sale has a dated signature of owner­ship (1807) by James Boswell the Younger, rather than his ­father the author. The copy sold in 1825 among the younger Boswell’s books might have been one of the Auchinleck copies, since some books the elder Boswell brought down to London remained ­there a­ fter his death. Seymour, Boswell’s Books, cat. no. 3482. 58. Ramsay was celebrated for his Scots Songs (1718) and Tea-­Table Miscellany: a Collection of Scots Songs (4 vols. seriatim 1723, 1726, 1727, 1737). He chose “Gavin Douglas” as his club nickname in 1713. He consulted the Bannatyne manuscripts for The Ever Green: being a Collection of Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600 (1724), though he was a far more free-­wheeling editor of the Bannatyne materials than Lord Hailes would be. His Scots Proverbs (1737) offered examples of traditional Scots prose. He wrote in a letter in 1722 claiming that “by writing Scots verse he [was] performing a national ser­v ice.” Murray G. H. Pittock, “Ramsay, Allan (1684–1758),” Oxford DNB. 59. Patrick Cadell, “Dalrymple, Sir David, third baronet, Lord Hailes, (1726–1792),” Oxford DNB. 60. Ancient Scottish Poems, published from the MS of George Bannatyne, MDLXVIII, ed. David Dalrymple [Lord Hailes], (Edinburgh, 1770), esp. “Preface,” i–ix, and “Glossary,” 317– 328. This book is known to have been owned by Boswell and kept in his Edinburgh town ­house library in 1770. Seymour, Boswell’s Books, cat. nos. 245–246. 61. An anonymous writer assumed to be Boswell published a tribute in Feb. 1781 to the Town Guard (est. 1682). The seventy-­five or so guardsmen ­were mostly superannuated veterans of Highland regiments whom Boswell compared to the veterans’ home residents known as the Chelsea Pensioners. As Tankard observes, “They ­were armed with a lethal but antique weapon called a Lochaber axe. . . . ​They w ­ ere regarded as being rough and ill-­disciplined, and the age and rustic ways of the veterans” made them faintly ridicu­lous. In that piece, the author bragged that “Edinburgh is the only city in ­Great Britain that has the honourable privilege of maintaining a constant body of soldiers, with proper officers, neither appointed nor paid by the Crown, but entirely u ­ nder the command of our City itself.” “An Old Town Citizen,” “Town Guard,” Caledonian Mercury (26 Feb. 1781). Tankard, Facts, 356–359. 62. “Auld Reekie” or “Old Smokey” was a mocking but affectionate name given Edinburgh, which during the age of coal-­burning home hearths was often covered in a thick, sooty smog. (Def. and citations in DSL, s.v. “Auld Reekie,—­Reeky,—­Reikie, a nickname of Edinburgh.”)

chapter 4

Q

Boswell in Broadside Terry Seymour

James Boswell’s contributions to En­glish letters reside chiefly in biography and journalism, both public and private. During a life notable for social and jocular activity, however, he made occasional forays into poetry and ballads. Some of his e­ arlier poetic efforts ­were part of his daily journalizing. While in Utrecht in 1764 he began a practice he termed “Ten lines a day.” Boswell’s aim was to write quickly on the first topic that came into his head.1 Such a technique would greatly reduce the odds of artistic accomplishment, but as with any other type of writing, discipline and practice w ­ ill produce improvement. Although most of his poetry has minimal literary merit, he could be clever at times, and the words on the page ­were only a part of the total experience. He is reputed to have had a fine singing voice and loved to deliver after-­dinner per­ for­mances.2 Frank Brady goes so far as to say that “[Boswell’s] knack for effective topical verse and readiness to perform made him much in demand as an after-­dinner singer.”3 To review the entire body of Boswell’s ballads and songs would require a lengthy treatment. This essay w ­ ill examine two of his ballads, each of which was printed as a broadside ­a fter celebratory occasions. Both are illustrative of his motives and methods in the use of the genre, and both survive in very small numbers. A par­tic­u­lar focus of this essay is to discuss the circumstances of their rarity and survival. Boswell’s works are frequently identified by their Pottle numbers, numbers assigned in 1929 by Frederick A. Pottle in The Literary C ­ areer of James Boswell, Esq. ­A fter ninety years, no other bibliography has emerged to challenge its authority. The two broadsides ­under discussion are Pottle 46, “Verses in the Character of a Corsican,” 1769, and Pottle 77, “William Pitt, the grocer of London; an excellent new ballad, written by James Boswell, Esq. and sung by him at Guildhall on Lord-­Mayor’s Day, 1790.” The first was composed in the wake of his literary triumph, An Account of Corsica (1768). The latter ballad just preceded the publica-

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tion of his magnum opus, The Life of Johnson (1791). In his discussion of Boswell’s after-­d inner entertainments, Frank Brady tells us that the “Grocer” was “the most memorable . . . ​of this kind.” 4 Both broadsides treated ­here exemplify Boswell’s penchant for social per­for­ mance, and both ­were triggered by a celebrity event attended by Boswell. The first was David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee Ball, a masquerade held on 6 September 1769 as the high point of a three-­day festival to honor the bard. Boswell de­cided to attend the ball dressed as a Corsican chief.5 The latter event was the Lord Mayor’s dinner held on 9 November 1790. As described in the Diary conducted by William Woodfall: “­There was never a more splendid and elegant assemblage.”6 Boswell would have preferred to pass out the broadsides during the eve­ning of each per­for­mance. In practice, however, he could not get them printed in time for distribution to attendees. It is likely that this “morning ­a fter” effect is the cause of their scarcity. If ­t hose in attendance had received a copy, many more copies would be found ­today. It was typical of Boswell to have ­great enthusiasm for such per­for­mances, but a­ fter the event was over and in the sober light of the following day, it must have been harder to maintain the energy he felt during attendance at the event. Tracking down participants during the days following ­t hese cele­brations could not have held much appeal, hence it is likely that very few copies w ­ ere given out from already small print runs. From his journal we have an exact account of how the Jubilee broadside came to be printed. This was the night of the Ball in Mask, when I was to appear as a Corsican Chief. I had begun some verses for the Jubilee in that character. But could not finish them. I was quite impatient. I went home and forced myself to exertion and at last finished what I intended. I then ran to Garrick, Read them to him, and found him much pleased. I . . . ​went to the Bookseller and Printer of the Place, Mr. Kaiting. He had a lad from Baskerville’s at Birmingham, of Scots extraction, his name Shank. I found him a clever active fellow; and set him to work directly. He brought me a proof to the Masquerade Ball about two in the morning. But could not get the verses thrown off in time for me to give them about in my Corsican dress.7

This broadside, printed by Alexander Wilson, is of poor quality. It is dated 6 September. The Baskerville printing is dated 7 September.8 In his Baskerville bibliography, Gaskell speculates that Shank took the poor copy back to Birmingham where Baskerville printed it properly, perhaps at Boswell’s instruction.9 Boswell did deliver a “packet” of the 6 September broadsides to Garrick on 8 September. Although Boswell claimed that Garrick was pleased with the poem, we ­don’t r­ eally know how Garrick regarded it. It is unlikely that Garrick made an

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effort to distribute the packet of copies. Although Garrick and Boswell ­were friends, he always regarded Boswell as slightly subordinate, and he would have resented the assignment of an errand. Garrick was also jealous of any rivals, so he prob­ably would not have appreciated being upstaged at his own cele­bration.10 In an entire book about the Jubilee, Martha Winburn ­England provides additional perspective as to how other­wise busy and engaged Garrick must have been with his ­grand cele­bration. It is pretty certain that he d ­ idn’t have much time to ponder the poem, much less admire or distribute Boswell’s poetic efforts.11 The text of the poem is well known from numerous periodical accounts of the day. But Pottle had never seen a copy of the broadside ­until Col­o­nel Ralph Isham discovered one in Germany. Isham had found no copy among the Boswell papers at Malahide.12 Following is a list of the known, extant copies: 1. The Baskerville version is far superior in printing quality, but only one copy of it is known to have survived—at Yale, Beinecke Folio Baskerville 1769bo. 2. Harvard holds two copies of the 6 September version, both in the Hyde collection at Houghton; the first, 2003J JB 39F, is the one Col­o­nel Isham found in Germany. 3. The other, 2003J JB40F, was apparently acquired by the Hydes at a Parke-­ Bernet auction of the estate of J. P. Morgan Jr. (1867–1943). 4. The National Library of Scotland copy is the 6 September version RB.m.312(1). It was acquired from C. R. Johnson, along with, quite appropriately, an engraving of Boswell in his Corsican Chief costume—­R B.m.312(2)—on 23 January 1989. 5. Staatsbiblioteck zu Berlin holds a 6 September version Zb 3960. 6. Just recently, another 6 September copy has emerged, part of a collection of David Garrick’s papers acquired by Prince­ton. Generally, Boswell kept published examples of his work e­ ither at Auchinleck or at his town h ­ ouse in Edinburgh. That Isham did not discover a copy among the Boswell papers13 is a slight suggestion that the parcel Boswell gave to Garrick may have been all that remained of the print run. Boswell may have intended to keep the Baskerville copy for his archives, but if he did, it has not survived. Text of the broadside: AT SHAKESPEARE’s JUBILEE At STRATFORD upon AVON, Sept. 7, 1769. By JAMES BOSWELL, Esq. From the rude banks of Golo’s rapid flood, Alas! too deeply ting’d with patriot blood; O’er which, dejected, injured freedom bends, And sighs indignant ­o’er all Eu­rope sends:

Bosw e l l i n Broa dsi de Behold a CORSICAN!–in better days, ­Eager I sought my country’s fame to raise; When ­o’er our camp PAOLI’s banner wav’d, And all the threats of hostile France we brav’d, ’Till unassisted, a small nation fail’d, And our invaders’ tenfold force prevail’d. Now when I’m exil’d from my native land, I come to join this classic festal band, To soothe my soul on Avon’s sacred stream, And from your joy, to catch a cheering gleam, To celebrate ­great Shakespeare’s wondr’ous fame, And add new trophies to the honor’d name Of Nature’s bard, whom tho’ your country bore, His influence spreads to ev’ry distant shore: Whenever genuine feeling souls are found, His “Wood-­notes wild” with ecstasy resound. Had Shakespeare liv’d our story to relate, And hold his torch o ­ ’er our unhappy fate, Liv’d with majestic energy to tell How long we fought, what heroes nobly fell! Had Garrick, who Dame Nature’s pencil stole, Just where Old Shakespeare dropped it, when his soul Broke from its earthy cage aloft to fly, To the eternal world of harmony— Had Garrick shewn us on the tragic scene, With Fame embalm’d our deeds of death had been; If from his eyes had flash’d the Corsic fire, Men less had gaz’d to pity–­t han admire. O happy Britons! on whose ­favor’d isle, Propitious Freedom ever deigns to smile, Whose fame is wafted on triumphant gales, Where thunders war, or commerce spreads her sails, I come not hither sadly to complain, Or damp your mirth with melancholy strain; In man’s firm breast conceal’d the grief should lye, Which melts with grace in ­woman’s gentle eye; But let me plead for Liberty distrest, And warm for her each sympathetick breast: Amidst the splendid honours which you bear, To save a ­sister island! be your care: With generous ardour make us also ­free, And give to CORSICA a noble JUBILEE!

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­These verses w ­ ere composed at what was prob­ably the happiest period of Boswell’s life. He had returned in triumph from a dangerous journey to Corsica. His major work on Corsica was in its third edition and had established a reputation for him throughout Eu­rope. His marriage to his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, was drawing near, and he was excited about the prospect. On the eve of the Jubilee Ball, he wrote to her: “You are my constant object. What we read in the old romances is realized in me. Upon honour, my dearest life, I just adore you.”14 ­Later in the letter he boasted to her about the figure he would strike in his Corsican dress. The “Grocer” verses, in severe contrast, w ­ ere composed at what was perhaps the very lowest point of Boswell’s life. In 1789 his wife had died a­ fter a long strug­ gle with consumption. Boswell was not even at her side. On receiving news of her rapid decline, he made a mad rush from London, but arrived at Auchinleck too late. His po­liti­cal aspirations played out over a number of years in a series of rejections that had caused him nothing but humiliation and failure. His Life of Johnson (1791), although now nearing the finish line, was a source of im­mense worry b ­ ecause of the risk he would incur as self-­publisher.15 He was u ­ nder intense financial stress already, and his failure to win a po­liti­cal appointment added further to his anxiety. Boswell had sought po­liti­cal preferment for several years, exploring vari­ous ave­nues. A part of his campaign was to meet with William Pitt, the prime minister, during which he hoped to lay out his qualifications for appointive office. Boswell was a staunch supporter of Pitt’s policies and had written, notably in his Letter to the ­People of Scotland in 1783, a thinly veiled announcement of his po­liti­cal intentions to align himself solidly with Pitt’s positions. Pitt had, as early as 1784, completely ignored Boswell’s letters seeking an audience. At one point, Boswell was so desperate that he even asked his rival biographer, Sir John Hawkins, for assistance with Pitt. Hawkins, essentially a Boswell ­enemy, refused him in no uncertain terms. Boswell admits that “it was a m ­ istake to suppose that Hawkins would write to Mr. Pitt: he never said he would, and he assures me he would not ­were his own ­brother in the case.”16 Boswell summarizes his attempts to reach Pitt in a 31 March 1789 letter to William ­Temple, his lifelong confidante: “He [Pitt] did not answer several letters, which I wrote at intervals, requesting to wait upon him; I lately wrote to him that such be­hav­ior to me was certainly not generous. ‘I think it is not just, and (forgive the freedom) I doubt if it be wise. If I do not hear from you in ten days, I ­shall conclude that you are resolved to have no farther communication with me; for I assure you, Sir, I am extremely unwilling to give you, or indeed myself, unnecessary trou­ble.’ About two months have elapsed, and he has made no sign” (his emphasis).17 ­After issuing such a bald ultimatum to Pitt, Boswell could hardly have proceeded with any more correspondence. He e­ ither had to abandon this path or,

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more prudently, give up the entire business. Boswell tended to assume he could charm almost anyone, and he frequently succeeded. His list of triumphs is long and illustrious. We can name Rousseau, Voltaire, Paoli, Wilkes, and Johnson among them. Neither should we forget the notorious, mostly consisting of his sexual conquests: Mrs.  Rudd, the forger/courtesan; Louisa, an actress and his first London paramour; and Thérèse Le Vasseur, Rousseau’s mistress. Only occasionally was his rec­ord marred by a failure to impress. Horace Walpole, for one, had a low opinion of him and disparaged all of Boswell’s attempts and blandishments. But Pitt was a dif­fer­ent and difficult case. As prime minister he was an impor­tant, busy man, and he acted even more impor­tant than he was. An early assessment of Pitt appears in a con­temporary account: “[He had] an absurd stateliness of manners which w ­ ill command re­spect, but [which] w ­ ill never gain love; t­ hose symptoms of an immoderate self-­opinion vis­i­ble in his exterior . . . ​his fondness for courtly honors are properties incompatible with a truly ­great and amiable mind.”18 Pitt was a tough nut for Boswell to crack, and his motivation for writing and then performing “The Grocer of London” when Pitt was likely to be pre­sent is unclear. William Pitt, The Grocer of London, An Excellent New Ballad, Written by JAMES BOSWELL, Esq. And sung by him at GUILDHALL on Lord-­Mayor’s Day, 1790; When, ­a fter the Alarms of War interrupting Our Commerce, an honourable Peace was announced. Tune, DIBDIN’S POOR JACK Fell Faction be ­silent, and clamour no more, Against government, laws, and the times: Our glory triumphant from shore sounds to shore: ­There’s both reason and truth in my rhimes. Let no dark suspicion our bosoms invade, And make gloomy November more dull, ­There’s a GROCER of LONDON who watches our trade, And takes care of th’ Estate of John Bull. CHORUS ­There’s a Grocer of London, A Grocer of London, A Grocer of London who watches our trade, And takes care of th’ Estate of John Bull.

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Boswell and the Press Though fleets in vain-­boasting hostility ­ride, Still BRITAIN is Queen of the main; The secret well kept now comes forth with due pride; And lo! A Convention with Spain. Too noble to brag, as w ­ e’re never afraid, ’Tis enough that ­we’ve had a good pull,— ­There’s a Grocer of London who watches our trade, And takes care of th’ Estate of John Bull. CHORUS ­There’s a Grocer of London, A Grocer of London, A Grocer of London who watches our trade, And takes care of th’ Estate of John Bull.

In its edition for 11 November 1790, the Public Advertiser published the song and mentions several encores: “The author’s health was twice drunk with three cheers standing.”19 A more detailed account, written in the best society-­page style, appeared in the Diary’s edition also for 11 November. ­ ere never was a more splendid and elegant assemblage than attended GuildTh hall on Tuesday last, to celebrate Mr. Alderman Boydell’s elevation. . . . ​The higher Officers of the State w ­ ere pre­sent. . . . ​Mr. Pitt, and most of the Sages of the Law, gave testimony on this occasion to the merits of a virtuous citizen, raised by his own industry and talents to the enviable distinction of Chief Magistrate of the first city in the world. Many of the Literati and artists of high repute, with a large train of elegant females, also graced this meritorious event. . . . ​Mr. Boswell and a few literary friends remained in the Hall till long ­a fter midnight. Mr. Boswell sung the following song, which he wrote for the day, and on the day, and was obliged to sing from his first rough manuscript. The song is an easy parody on the favourite air of Poor Jack, and is so good an En­glish ballad, that it is evident the lively author is well acquainted with our national character. It was so well received, that Mr. Boswell was obliged, by the unan­i­mous applause of the com­pany, to repeat it full half a dozen times.

Was Pitt pre­sent for the per­for­mance? All of Boswell’s biographers seem to agree that Pitt had already left the hall before the per­for­mance. This belief is based on reports in con­temporary newspapers. Pottle thought he detected Boswell’s hand in the account given in the Edinburgh Advertiser for 12 to 16 November 1790. The article confirms five encores but “says that Boswell sang the song ­after Pitt had left the room.”20 The rebuttal to this opinion is the very detailed account given by a third party, John Taylor, who also attended the dinner. This account has so much specificity that it is difficult to think it a fabrication.

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I . . . ​remember dining with him [Boswell] at Guildhall, when the Alderman Boydell gave his ­grand civic festival on being raised to the mayoralty. Mr. Pitt honoured the ­table on that occasion with his presence. . . . ​In a short time Mr. Boswell contrived to be asked to favour the com­pany with a song. He declared his readiness to comply, but first delivered a short preface, in which he observed that it had been his good fortune to be introduced to several of the potentates, and most of the ­g reat characters of Eu­rope, but with all his endeavours he had never been successful in obtaining an introduction to a gentleman who was an honour to his country and whose talents he held in the highest esteem and admiration. It was evident to all the com­pany that Mr. Boswell alluded to Mr. Pitt, who sat with all the dignified silence of a marble statue, though indeed in such a situation he could not but take the reference to himself. Mr. Boswell then sang a song of his own composition, which was a parody on Dibdin’s “Sweet l­ ittle cherub,” u ­ nder the title of “A grocer of London,” which rendered the reference to Mr. Pitt too evident to be mistaken, as the g­ reat minister was then a member of the Grocers’ Com­pany. This song Mr. Boswell, partly volunteering and partly pressed by the com­pany, sang at least six times, insomuch that Mr. Pitt was obliged to relax from his gravity, and join in the general laugh at the oddity of Mr. Boswell’s character.21

Did Boswell aim to please Pitt, or alternatively, to annoy him? E ­ ither way, it would surely have been best to perform the song in his presence. Con­temporary as well as ­later commentators have just about unanimously concluded that Boswell was foolish to perform this song as a way to win Pitt over. I would like to suggest that Boswell was not so naïve as to think this public per­for­mance accompanied with his explanatory remarks would succeed where all of his past efforts had failed. Instead, I feel that Boswell had already concluded that Pitt would not come around to him. The “Grocer” per­for­mance was, in fact, a clever way for Boswell to assert some mea­sure of retribution. If Pitt chose to ignore his advances, Boswell at least made the public aware that this avoidance was done in the face of Boswell’s loyalty and re­spect for Pitt’s accomplishments. In a way, the per­for­mance was a brilliant move. Perhaps Boswell ­really did believe it would sway Pitt’s attitude ­toward him, although it is hard to understand how that could be. Instead, the song and its delivery to that audience was a sort of declaration of in­de­pen­dence: “Ignore me at your peril.” The “Grocer” broadside was printed in very small numbers. We know from his journal that Boswell read from his manuscript at the dinner. In fact, he had completed the song e­ arlier in the eve­ning in the Guildhall and subsequently arranged to have the broadside of the song printed. ­After noting the reception in the press—­and having had time to contemplate its effect on Pitt and his own reputation—he prob­ably thought better of circulating many copies. In fact, ­there is no surviving evidence that he ever distributed any of them. All but one of the

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known copies came from a small stack that was part of an early Isham purchase from Malahide. Boswell must have returned the stack to the Auchinleck library in Scotland. Pottle had seen just two copies, both in Col­o­nel Isham’s hands before 1929. Both copies ­were exhibited as item 580 in the 1930 to 1931 exhibition at the Grolier Club. A list of the known copies: 1. Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (Rothschild 462), acquired directly from Col­o­nel Isham in 1937. The Rothschild cata­logue states that ­t here is also a copy in the Hyde collection. 2. That copy is now in Houghton, 2003J-­JB206, and was likely acquired by the Hydes in the late 1940s, directly from Col­o­nel Isham. 3. A third copy is in the Beinecke, P 170, and doubtless left by Col­o­nel Isham with the main collection, sold to Yale in 1949. 4. A fourth copy was sold at auction 19 November 1974 in the Stockhausen Sale by Parke-­Bernet in New York City, lot 39. Stockhausen had acquired it as part of an en bloc acquisition of the Charles P. Greenough Collection of Boswell. It was purchased t­ here by Arthur Gordon Rippey, who ultimately sold it to McMaster University. Greenough was an active collector in the 1940s and 1950s and likely bought his copy from Col­o­nel Isham. 5. A fifth copy, sold by Christie’s, 18 November 1981, lot 196, is now in the National Library of Scotland. 6. A sixth copy was sold by Christie’s NYC, 17 May 1989, lot 25, and again by Christie’s NYC, 10 December 1999, lot 112. That copy was sold again by Sotheby’s London, 10 December 2013, and is now in the collection of Terry Seymour. David Buchanan writes that Jonathan Isham (Col­o­nel Isham’s son) still had a copy in his possession in 1974 (Trea­sure 343); likely this is the sixth copy.22 The copy is ­housed in a custom box with Col­o­nel Isham’s bookplate. 7. The other known copy of the “Grocer” broadside is one reported by Percy Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald apparently saw this copy at an auction preview and rec­ords that “this song, with other papers of Boswell, was, I recollect, sold at an auction some years ago, when I had an opportunity of reading it. It was bought, I believe, by the late Lord Houghton.”23 This last auction copy must be from the very same lot that contained the Boswelliana manuscript, afterward published in the nineteenth ­century by Richard Monckton Milnes, l­ater Lord Houghton.24 About that lot t­ here exists some confusion and misinformation that has gone largely uncorrected and deserves more detailed treatment. The lot had originated in the 1825 sale of James Boswell the Younger, lot 3173, acquired by the bookseller Thomas Thorpe, arguably the most impor­tant book dealer of the first half of the nineteenth ­century,25 who sold it to the bibliomaniacal John Hugh Smyth Pigott. Pigott’s financial position eventually crumbled, brought down by his extravagant spending on h ­ ouses and rare

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books. He was forced to sell his books at auction in 1849.26 Lord Houghton acquired lot 1589 then, which contained the manuscript now known as Boswelliana, on the eigh­teenth day of this sale. Based on Fitzgerald’s observation, it would seem the lot with the manuscript and at least the “Grocer” broadside had remained together from the 1825 sale. Pigott had arranged for the manuscript portion of the lot to be bound in a volume. The lot is noteworthy ­because it revealed the first piece of Boswell’s journal-­related material to escape the f­ amily. Lord Houghton published excerpts from the manuscript of Boswelliana as early as 1853 to 1854. Rogers published the bulk of the manuscript in an expurgated form in 1876.27 Although Rogers is generally a meticulous scholar, he botched the provenance of the Boswelliana lot very badly. In the preface he relates that it was “sold along with the books contained in his [Boswell’s] h ­ ouse in London.”28 ­There was no such sale at Boswell’s death in 1795. His London effects ­were embroiled in estate administration for many years. It is apparent that his son, another James Boswell, retained the manuscript as well as the broadside from his f­ ather. The biographer had numerous books and papers with him when he died in London. James the Younger was living with his f­ather at the time and kept many of t­ hese books and papers permanently. Rogers goes on to err by telling us that the portfolio was sold on Pigott’s death in 1861.29 By that date, Lord Houghton had owned the manuscript for some dozen years, and Pigott had been in his grave for eight years. Both Rogers and Lord Houghton should have known the 1861 date given in the preface to be wrong. Lord Houghton had privately published some of the more salacious pieces of the Boswelliana in 1854 to 1855.30 As a postscript to the Pitt affair, it is ironic how very dif­fer­ent an experience Boswell and Pitt’s f­ather, William Pitt the Elder, enjoyed. The elder Pitt was a power­f ul po­liti­cal figure and led the government during the Seven Years War with France. He was widely respected. ­After Boswell returned from Corsica in early 1766, he successfully petitioned Pitt for an audience, and only needed a single letter to do so. Ostensibly he wished to deliver some observations and views of the Corsican leader, Pascal Paoli.31 (From the Buchan papers, now in the Bodleian, and on the word of o ­ thers who w ­ ere pre­sent for part of the meeting with Pitt the Elder, comes an account that Boswell showed up at his meeting dressed in his Corsican costume. Pottle, Brady, and the current general editor of the Boswell Papers, Gordon Turnbull, all agree that the Buchan account is patently ridicu­lous).32 The meeting, based on Boswell’s journal description, went off as intended and was relatively substantive. It is seductive to root for Boswell. He was not afraid to try for the difficult celebrity introduction or the improbable female conquest, to request a pointless audience with the king, or argue in court for the freedom of a hopelessly guilty client. But once in a while, certainly in the Pitt case, we cringe a bit and wish he would cease and desist. In the e­ arlier Corsican ballad given to Garrick, we likewise would wish he had not inserted himself so vigorously and perhaps would

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have toned down the strutting and self-­promotion. But on reflection, we realize that had Boswell lived on for a few more years, ­there would have been more cele­ brations soaked in claret, more ballads sung in questionable taste, and more broadsides printed—­but never distributed.

Notes 1. Boswell on the ­Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1953), 118. ­These poetic exercises w ­ ere numbered 1 to 51 by Boswell. All of them survive, and several are printed within this trade edition. 2. For additional commentary on Boswell’s singing voice and eagerness to perform, see Morris R. Brownell and Melita Ann Brownell, “Boswell’s Ballads: A Life in Song,” in Boswell in Scotland Beyond, ed. Thomas Crawford (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1997), 119–145. 3. Frank Brady, James Boswell: The L ­ ater Years, 1769–­1795 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), 416. 4. Ibid. 5. General Paoli presented a costume to Boswell during his visit to Corsica. Boswell had stored the costume, however, in Edinburgh. Thus, before departing for Stratford, he had to scour the shops in London, have some items made up specially, and borrow some o ­ thers in order to create his outfit for the ball. Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1956), 291. 6. The Diary (11 Nov. 1790). Lucyle Werkmeister, Jemmie Boswell and the London Daily Press, 1785–­1795 (New York: New York Public Library, 1963), 23. 7. Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide ­Castle, in the Collection of Lt.-­Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham, ed. Geoffrey Scott and Frederick A. Pottle (Privately Printed, 1928– 1934), 8:99, 100. This comment can also be found in Wife, 282. 8. Philip Gaskell, A New Enlarged Edition of John Baskerville, A Bibliography, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959; repr., Chicheley, UK: Paul P. B. Minet, 1973), plate 9. 9. Ibid., 12–13. 10. For the best insight into the relationship between Boswell and Garrick, see Brady’s introduction to the Garrick-­Boswell correspondence in The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, ed. Peter S. Baker et al. (London: Heinemann, 1986). 11. Martha Winburn ­England, Garrick’s Jubilee (Ohio State University Press, 1964), 49–62. This section deals with events of 6 Sept. 12. Col­o­nel Ralph Isham acquired the bulk of all surviving Boswell papers over a period of many years (1926–1948). The papers that had descended through Boswell’s f­ amily w ­ ere discovered at Malahide ­C astle in Ireland, where Boswell’s last direct male heir, James Boswell Talbot, resided. 13. At the time of the Jubilee, and in fact ­until his ­father’s death in 1782, when he inherited Auchinleck, Boswell kept many of his books and papers in Edinburgh, where he resided. The ­family papers migrated from Auchinleck to Malahide shortly ­a fter 1915. 14. Wife, 295. 15. The gist of the story of Boswell’s deliberation over the financial arrangements for the Life of Johnson is told in Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1982), 123–126. Boswell was worried by the criticism of George Steevens, who commented that Boswell was greatly overprinting and that the only p ­ eople still curious about Johnson w ­ ere members of their own circle. Boswell’s own bookseller Dilly advised him to sell the copyright to George Robinson, a prominent publisher, who had offered £1,000 to Boswell. At the time. Boswell had huge loans for a real

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estate purchase in Scotland as well as a sizable debt to Dilly. He received encouragement, however, from his printer, Henry Baldwin, and his de facto editor, Edmond Malone. ­A fter much deliberation he de­cided to take on the financial risk himself. It proved to be an excellent decision, as the complete printing sold out in a ­matter of months. He had to pay Dilly for ­every copy that was printed, but he was still able to satisfy all his debts and have money left over. 16. Boswell to ­Temple, London, 7 Feb. 1791, Letters of James Boswell to the Rev. W. J. ­Temple, ed. Thomas Seccombe (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1908), 274–275. 17. Ibid., 237. 18. Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt (London, 1806), 21. 19. Boswell: The ­Great Biographer, 1789–­1795, ed. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1989), 113. 20. Frederick Albert Pottle, The Literary ­Career of James Boswell, Esq.: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 143. 21. John Taylor, Rec­ords of my Life (London, 1832), 89–90. 22. David Buchanan, The Trea­sure of Auchinleck (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1974), 343. This work is the best source for understanding the history of the Boswell papers and their acquisition. Pottle authored a parallel and equally valuable book on the same subject: Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981). 23. Percy Fitzgerald, Life of James Boswell (of Auchinleck), (New York, 1891), 2:66. 24. For a recent account, see James J. Caudle, The Johnsoniana in Boswelliana (Cambridge, MA: The Johnsonians in association with Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2009). I am also indebted to Dr.  Caudle for generously sharing his working notes on both broadsides. 25. He was the dominant purchaser at almost ­every auction from about 1818 u ­ ntil 1850. 26. Costly and highly in­ter­est­ing contents of Brockley Hall, Somerset. John Hugh Smyth Pigott, having removed to his Seat at Weston-­Super-­Mare, he has desired the effects to be sold, preparatory to letting the Mansion unfurnished . . . ​Select & valuable library of several thousand volumes . . . ​on October 8 [1849] & weeks following. The only known copy of this sale cata­logue was formerly owned by A. N. L. Munby and is now in the Cambridge University Library. 27. Boswelliana: The Commonplace Book of James Boswell with a Memoir and Notations, ed. Charles Rogers (London, 1876). 28. Ibid., xii. 29. Ibid. 30. Boswelliana: Folium reservatum (London, 1855?). 31. Boswell on the ­Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1955), 289–295. 32. Brady and Pottle dismiss Buchan (Ibid., 293 n. 4). Turnbull concurs (email message to author, 1 Apr. 2018).

chapter 5

Q

An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady Serious Effort or Elaborate Joke? Donald J. Newman

An elegy on the death of an amiable young lady/with an epistle from Menalcas to Lycidas, to which are prefixed three critical recommendatory letters (1761)1 is a humorous, twenty-­four-­page pamphlet published by Boswell and two companions that pre­sents readers with two poems that are at best mediocre, preceded by “critical recommendatory letters” written by “three gentlemen of taste” who lavishly praise the extraordinary literary merit of the poems. The gentlemen who wrote the letters signed them with their initials: [G]eorge [D]empster, [A]ndrew [E]rskine, and [J]ames [B]oswell.2 This is, incidentally, the first time Boswell, who had several anonymous publications already, made it pos­si­ble to identify him as an author. The pamphlet has received ­little critical attention other than the impressively detailed annotations of it in Boswell’s general correspondence3 and Frederick A. Pottle’s unflattering assessment of it as a dismal per­for­mance. Pottle pronounces the first poem, the Elegy, “a feeble piece on a trite subject”; he ignores the second, the Epistle; and he finds neither poem funny, though t­ here is nothing in them to indicate the authors intended them to be. He dismisses the letters as mere burlesque “of the broadest sort, ridiculing by extravagant and ironic praise the style, diction, and even the spelling of the hapless poems.” 4 Such a judgment is tempting ­after a cursory reading, but a more extensive consideration of the pamphlet suggests that the poems are merely two components of an elaborate joke, which becomes evident when the pamphlet is examined as a holistic w ­ hole rather than a collection of discrete parts. Except for the text itself, t­ here is nothing unambiguous about this pamphlet, so any discussion of it must necessarily be speculation, but I suggest that e­ very 80

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part of this pamphlet contributes to the creation of an elaborate joke cleverly executed. Even its pre­sen­ta­tion contributes to its humorous effect. At first glance, readers would have had no reason to think the pamphlet was anything other than what it purports to be: a sincere effort to bring two poems of extraordinary literary merit to the public’s attention by presenting them in a pamphlet. The cover is presented in typical pamphlet style, and it carries the imprint of a respected Edinburgh bookseller, Alexander Donaldson, who had recently published a well-­ received collection of poems by Scottish gentlemen. The pamphlet included an unsigned advertisement that offers a plausible account of how the pamphlet came into being and a copy of the author’s submission letter to Donaldson. Th ­ ere was nothing out of the ordinary about the pamphlet’s appearance or its contents, except perhaps inclusion of the submission letter. It would not have been ­until readers w ­ ere well into the first letter, written by GD to AE, who had sent GD the poems to review, that readers would have begun to suspect that the pamphlet was not quite what it appeared to be and that its authors ­were toying with reader expectations. Perhaps that realization would have provided a chuckle. The first hint was prob­ably GD’s declaration that he is “astonished” at how, while writing his long preamble, he is “able to suppress ­those exclamations of applause, which I utter insensibly e­ very time I read or think of ­t hese poems” (p. 6). That statement almost certainly was a puzzling and unexpected critical pronouncement. If ­t here ­were any doubts about the seriousness of the pamphlet, they would have been dispelled soon a­ fter by the over-­t he-­top praise the three gentlemen of taste lavish on each other’s critical acumen. AE, for instance, tells GD that the first time they met, he saw in GD’s face “a true feeling and just relish of the fine arts, particularly poetry. . . . ​I saw numbers (both blank verses and rhymes) imprinted upon your countenance; and if you presented me with an epic poem superior to Homer’s, I should not have been surprised” (pp. 9–10). AE wishes unabashedly that they all could live to the last generation on earth so that they could witness the applause their criticism would earn from ages to come, and neither of the o ­ thers think this mutual praise is any exaggeration of their critical abilities. The real interest of the pamphlet is not the poems, however, but the recommendatory letters, which no doubt is why readers encounter them first. They could have been enjoyed by any eighteenth-­century reader with a basic knowledge of poetry, ancient and modern, without ever reading the poems. It seems unlikely that readers w ­ ere expected to read the poems in­de­pen­dent of the letters. But to facilitate a discussion of the pamphlet and to illuminate the humor of the letters more effectively, the organ­ization of the pamphlet is ­here reversed so the verses can be discussed first, which is the order in which the authors would have worked with them before presenting them to the public. Both poems are addressed to absent friends. In the Elegy, an admirer of a recently deceased “sweet maid” celebrates her virtuous life and her friendship.

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He addresses her directly and praises her for the peaceful life she led, a life ­free from “stormy passion” and “strife.” He attributes her serenity to an unwavering piety that calmed her youthful passions: Amid the joyful gaiety of youth, The Christian’s dignity thou still preserv’d, Trod all the paths of piety and truth, Nor in thy actions nor thy precepts swerv’d. (p. 20)

In what is certainly an allusion to Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-­ yard (1751), a poem Boswell admired greatly, the speaker laments that no memorials exist to transmit the w ­ oman’s name to the living or commemorate her death despite the fact that he, like Gray, is writing a memorial of sorts, in this case a panegyric, that does preserve her ­humble fame: No costly monument adorns thy tomb, No panegyric spreads thy h ­ umble fame; Nor verses carved upon a sculptured dome, Transmit to ­a fter times thy virtuous name. (p. 21)

But he w ­ ill return to her grave e­ very year to decorate her final resting place with colorful flowers and wreaths, and while ­there ­he’ll shed a tear and breathe a sigh, “To sacred friendship, sure so much is due.” The poem ends with an expression of the admirer’s sense of loss: Farewell, my charmer, peace attend thy rest, Thou, who in virtue did so much excel; For this I hail thee blest,—­supremely blest, Adieu,—­adieu,—­a long—­a last farewell. (p. 22)

Although longer, the second poem, “Lycidas to Menalcas,” is no better. It is at once a tribute to a friend and a cele­bration of nature’s beauties, which the pair often admired together during leisurely summer days in the country. Menalcas is off somewhere exploring “the won­ders of almighty pow’r” in “nature’s works,” an activity that includes surveying “Flora’s works.” On the basis of this description, it is hard to speculate about where he is. Perhaps he is at a university preparing to enter the clergy. Writing from Fortha’s Banks, where summer has arrived and rendered the rural scenes sweet, Lycidas sends “the warmest wishes of a friend” (p. 22).5 The natu­ral beauty around him prompts two rhetorical questions: can the weak attempts of art, Like nature, charm the glowing heart? Can the coquet in dress how fair With yonder lily’s breast compare? (p. 23)

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The questions trigger recollections of the pleasant days he and Menalcas enjoyed together talking about such ­t hings as they wandered along “Glotta’s lovely streams” and prolonged their plea­sure with “decent mirth and social talk.”6 As they ambled along the banks of the Clyde, “where Nature’s native charms reside,” Lycidas recalls that the beauty of nature was often a subject of their conversations. On some of ­t hese leisurely days they lounged in a meadow or shade and read poetry that warmed their imaginations. Lycidas specifically remembers he and Menalcas reading William Wilkie’s nine-­book Homer imitation The Epigoniad (1757), which he considers lamentably neglected, and he recalls how they lamented the death of the poem’s hapless Cassandra, who was betrayed by “fond love.” Her fate prompted conversations on love, “the pure source of social joy” (p. 23). The memories warm his imagination and suddenly he sees the image of Hera before him, which brings him up short. He excuses The sallies of a wanton muse, That flies on fancy’s wing away.

and he ends his “empty lay” with a command that the zephyrs carry his good wishes to Menalcas (p. 24). The letters contain what prob­ably was to classically educated readers a funny if not hilarious critical discussion of the poems that belies the pamphlet’s serious appearance and the sincere tone of the poems. The humor in the discussion arises from the ironic discrepancy between the three gentlemen of taste’s high assessment of their critical acumen and their absurdly inept criticism. Unrestrained by any doubts about their ability to recognize poetic merit, they lavish high praise on the verses, in which they find an abundance of ravishing beauties. GD is undecided about which of the poems is the better, but he is inclined to think that “the author’s genius appears most conspicuously” in the Elegy (p. 6). He advises AE to consult Mr. B, “who has a very sound judgment in m ­ atters of this kind” (p. 9), but Mr. B’s critical judgment is just as inept as that of the other two. He considers the Elegy perhaps “the completest ­t hing of the kind” he has ever seen and declares that the “exquisite entertainment” he received “is rather to be conceived than expressed” (p. 14), a rather silly comment. AE likes the Epistle b ­ ecause “­t here is nothing like it in our language. Easy and pathetic, sublime and natu­ral, it pre­sents us with a picture of love and friendship not to be paralleled; it is ­really a capital piece” (p. 13). The gentlemen of taste think that the poems are of such extraordinary literary merit that the world would be the loser if they ­were buried in a collection, presumably a reference to Donaldson’s forthcoming second collection of poetry by Scottish authors. JB agrees and suggests that the poems be published separately ­because “they ­will, by this means, be better known, and consequently more universally applied to use by ­every reader of any discernment” (p. 17).

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In commentary reminiscent of the blockhead Martinus Scriblerus, the three gentlemen of taste support their assessments of the poems’ superior literary quality by applying ridiculously idiosyncratic critical princi­ples to produce absurd analyses, and in the pro­cess reveal that they not only are utterly devoid of literary taste, they also lack the intellectual wherewithal to render even reasonable critical judgments. To establish the admirable qualities of the unknown poet’s work, for instance, they favorably compare his poems to the works of widely admired classical authors, but they attribute to ­these ancient writers qualities the opposite of t­ hose they ­were generally considered to possess, the result being that the critics expose their ignorance of classical lit­er­a­ture and con­temporary commentary on it. If he’s not mistaken, GD says, the unknown author’s “turn rather leads him to the plaintiff strains of Terence, than to the gay and animated compositions of Tibullus. The subject too is happily chosen” (p. 6). Terence wrote comedies and was known for his broad humor. Tibullus wrote elegiac poems.7 It is unlikely that a poem about the untimely death of a wonderful young ­woman would have been considered by con­temporary readers a happy subject. AE says of the unknown poet’s work that he is “not so merry as Lucretius, nor so sad as Horace; neither is he altogether so soft and tender as Juvenal in his satires; he is not quite so simplex [­simple] in his munditius [cleanliness] as Lucan, neither has his work the modern air of the old poet Ennius” (p. 12). Lucretius, a Roman philosopher-­poet, wrote a philosophical treatise in a “dignified and aesthetic manner.” Horace wrote good-­humored, gentle satires. Juvenal wrote “scourging satire of outrage and indignation.” Ennius was considered the f­ather of Latin poetry, thus he would have been the oldest of the group and hardly modern. Lucan composed an epic on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey that was written in a “­grand and lavish manner.”8 But, AE concludes, “­t hese are slight faults” (p. 12). In another reference to the classics, AE says that “the epistle a­ fter the elegy seems to be much in the style of Pliny,” but Pliny never wrote verses.9 To further justify their critical judgments, they dismiss some of the specific deficiencies of the poems as inconsequential. GD, for instance, agrees with AE that the poems are marred by what GD calls “small inaccuracies”: the verses lack ornamentation and figurative language, and they contain an occasional “hard word, ill-­spelled, and worse chosen.” But he considers t­ hese inaccuracies trivial. “Does not the native simplicity of the poet, in a thousand instances, atone for ­these defects?” GD asks (p. 7). He recognizes the deficiencies but dismisses criticism of them as unwarranted ­because of the poet’s “native simplicity,” a euphemism for his lack of formal education; the unknown poet cannot even write correct verse. AE believes it pos­si­ble to judge a poet’s ability without even reading his poems. He assures GD that “the only way of judging the merit of a poet is by his eye,”

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and he cites blind Homer as an example (p. 10). AE subjects his lack of taste to ridicule when he pronounces Alexander Pope “a very bad poet” and, perhaps cued by GD’s comments, praises the unknown poet by calling attention to another quality that most readers would have considered a significant defect, his “noble negligence” of spelling and grammar. AE finds ­t hese defects a beauty of the poems, as they have the authority of Pope; poor spelling and incorrect grammar are what he thinks Pope is referring to when he talks about snatching a grace beyond the reach of art. Sheridan, according to AE, says that l­ ittle is known about t­ hese two arts, and then adds: “I dare say he [Sheridan] goes upon sure ground, and has good reasons for what he does; not that I have any par­tic­u ­lar reason for saying so” (p. 13).10 He fails to recognize the ineptitude of GD’s criticism and considers it the most candid he ever saw, and he is inordinately pleased that GD’s thoughts about the poems coincide so precisely with his own. JB not only fails to recognize the absurdity of his colleagues’ criticism, he is so ignorant of En­glish lit­er­a­ture and poetically deaf that he cannot distinguish between a poem written by John Dryden and one written by an incompetent versifier. He tells AE that he at first thought that the author of the Epistle lifted ­whole stanzas from Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” and that he had to study Dryden’s poem with all the “attention and accuracy” he could muster to determine that he was mistaken in his initial thought. ­After this intense study, he concludes that between the two poems, t­ here ­wasn’t “the least atom of similarity ­either in thought or language” (p. 16). Their criticism becomes idiotic when the gentlemen of taste single out lines as examples of the poems’s beauties. They have a vague idea what qualities generally make good poetry, but they find t­ hese qualities in lines utterly devoid of them, and in some cases, they make up their own critical standard of quality. GD, for example, focuses on the ravishing beauty of this line in the Elegy, “Thou number’d lies among the numerous dead” (p. 21), and praises it for the varied occurrence of the word number. But he ­doesn’t explain what he considers the significance of her being “number’d,” which renders the judgment meaningless to a reader and perhaps calls to mind Buckingham’s satire on modern writing.11 What makes this line praiseworthy, he does explain, is that if ­t hese variations are pronounced frequently, they “trippingly . . . ​go off the tongue,” which seems a critical princi­ple idiosyncratic to GD. He also calls attention to the “propriety of the epithet numerous, when applied to the dead” (p. 7); (his emphasis). That this epithet has some special significance when talking about the dead must have struck con­temporary readers as humorously puzzling. He turns his attention to the last line of the poem: “Adieu,—­adieu,—­a long—­a last—­farewell.” It is a tender and affecting line ­because it “contains that abruptness, and ­t hose repetitions which constitute the language of grief” (p. 8). Readers must have thought his assertion that abruptness and repetition is a tender

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expression of grief odd if not silly, another of GD’s idiosyncratic critical princi­ples. JB’s analy­sis is just as inept as GD’s if not more so. As a “striking example” of the poet’s ­grand and lofty language, he cites this “memorable” line from the Elegy: “To such majestic, such exalting strains,” (p.  16). Not only is the line divorced from any context that might give it meaning, it is not even a sentence, so it expresses no thought, no sentiment, no emotion; t­ here could be nothing g­ rand or lofty about it. This line is in the second stanza of the poem’s introduction, which refers to monuments devoted to General James Wolfe, a military hero, and it has nothing to do with the amiable young lady, though the two-­stanza introduction does compare the difference in monuments devoted to the high and the low. JB singles out a line in the Epistle for its beauty, this one from the concluding stanza: “I cease, I cease the empty lay,” (p. 18). He considers this line so just and proper that he is persuaded “no ­human mortal can possibly read this without a conscious home-­felt satisfaction” (p. 18).12 To declare the line just and proper would suggest that it expresses an emotion or thought befitting and appropriate in a context established by the poem’s argument, which it ­doesn’t. As with the line he cited previously for the loftiness of its language, this one is yet another innocuous line that could not possibly be just and appropriate, as it merely describes a mundane act; proper and just are standards that do not apply. The more astute readers might well have recognized ­there is more to the pamphlet than just the over-­t he-­top irony in the praise of mediocre poems by utterly inept critics. It also incorporates in humorous ways established genres and traditions: a collection of correspondence, the recommendatory letters; the critical essay, the critical discussion in the letters; the elegy, with the way it plays with the tradition; and perhaps the updating of a classical friendship poem, for almost certainly someone in the triumvirate had a model. The critical response to this pamphlet depends on how the poems are read, and I suggest they should not be read as sincere tributes but as fiction and part of the joke. It appears that the authors embedded several hints in the pamphlet signaling to readers that nothing in the pamphlet is what it seems to be, and thus nothing in it should be taken seriously. It is unlikely that astute con­temporary readers would have read the poems as genuine poetic tributes, especially a­ fter reading the letters. Neither poem mentions the friend by name, and both are virtually devoid of individualizing detail and specific incidents locating where the life of the unknown poet intersected with t­ hose of the recipients of the tributes. The absence of t­ hese features makes it easy to question w ­ hether the unknown poet and the individuals for whom the tributes w ­ ere written r­ eally had personal relationships. At first glance, the Elegy might seem a real elegy, but con­temporary Scottish readers would have soon recognized that it is not even an imitation. It is prob-

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able that the word elegy in the title was intended to evoke Gray and prompt readers to compare this elegy with Gray’s, which prob­ably raised at least a chuckle if they did. But b ­ ecause it was published in Scotland and is titled an “elegy,” it more than likely also conveyed the impression to con­temporary readers that it was a sincere lament. It does lament a death, is something of a memorial, and ends on a melancholy note, but that is where the resemblance to the tradition ends, for it lacks the salient features of the traditional Scottish elegy. If this poem had been genuine, it would not have been written for a general readership, as this poem obviously was. Scottish elegies w ­ ere obituaries in verse, “keepsakes inscribed with the memory” of an individual and written for a small audience, t­ hose for whom an individual’s passing had personal significance.13 But the Elegy does not even mention the deceased w ­ oman’s name or the date she died or contain any individualizing details, what Sandro Jung describes as “referential specificity,” so memorializing hardly seems to have been the point. Had it been a sincere commemoration, the poem would have enumerated the virtues of the deceased, which are typically ­t hose “associated with the Scottish national character.” Piety could certainly be one, but the religious values exhibited by this ­woman are not specifically traditional Presbyterian virtues, so the poem fails to exhibit the expected commitment to a Scottish religious vision,14 and ­t here is nothing distinctly Scottish about her. Generally, according to Jung, elegiac poems served an emblematic function, and this one does, but not to Scottish values or identity; rather, the dead w ­ oman is generalized as any amiable young ­woman who is worthy of praise for her adherence to feminine standards of conduct valued by con­temporary men in polite society, whose modern and secular values and standards of conduct w ­ ere often in conflict with traditional Presbyterianism. Unlike many modern, con­ temporary w ­ omen whose cravings for fash­ion­able dress and En­glish manners ­were the subject of much satirical verse in Scotland, the amiable young lady knows her place and ­doesn’t disrupt social life by transgressing modern men’s expectations. The poet’s comment that ­t here are no concrete memorials commemorating this young w ­ oman suggests it is likely that this poem is intended to update Gray and apply his lament in a slightly dif­fer­ent context. The Epistle exhibits a similar pattern. It, too, eschews the name of the person to whom it is addressed, and individualizing details are minimal, though it does show the intersection in the lives of Lycidas and Menalcas. While ­t here are perhaps details in this poem that illustrate something about Menalcas’s character, he likes Homeric imitations and admires Scots authors, for instance, they are too general to enable identification. Except for his interest in botany, he could have been any young man who preferred the banks of Fortha to a tavern. Moreover, the poem refers to only one shared event, if it is an a­ ctual event: the two friends reading Wilkie’s Epigoniad (1757) together. This detail could have been included to give an air of authenticity to the poem.

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Instead of real names, both men in the poem are given Latin names associated with classical pastorals, and in the case of Lycidas, perhaps also with Milton. ­These are merely the names of generic, pastoral swains. They almost certainly would have evoked Virgil generally and perhaps his ninth eclogue in par­tic­u­lar, for both Lycidas and Menalcas are mentioned in this poem, but Lycidas is only mentioned in the dialog between two shepherds. Lycidas and Menalcas have no interaction and are not both pre­sent in any of the scenes. Moreover, Boswell’s poem does not comment on subjects common to Latin pastoral poetry: rural life and work. It is conceivable that in Boswell’s mind the cele­bration of nature’s beauty was an updated parallel. Perhaps the Epistle was modeled a­ fter expressions of friendship in an as yet unidentified classical Latin poem. The lack of names, individualizing details, and specific events in ­these poems, all told, make both seem more poetic exercises than heartfelt tributes. ­After reading the poems, it would have been difficult for con­temporary readers to take anything the authors say about the poems or the pamphlet seriously. This insight might well have encouraged readers to recognize that the advertisement, the submission letter, the recommendary letters, and the poems w ­ ere all parts contributing to an elaborate joke, for the parts, other than the pamphlet cover, would be extremely problematic if genuine. The advertisement and the submission letter included in the pamphlet provide a plausible account of the pamphlet’s origin. The advertisement is unsigned, and b ­ ecause it is in a pamphlet with Donaldson’s imprint, it conveys the impression that the advertisement was prob­ably written by Donaldson himself or an associate. The advertisement seems straightforward enough. An unnamed, unknown poet—­presumably unknown ­because the public had yet to take notice of his work—­submitted two poems for Donaldson’s forthcoming collection. The poems ­were reviewed by “some gentlemen of taste,” and this mention of gentlemen of taste would not have raised questions among readers who believed Donaldson was responsible for the advertisement. Readers would likely have assumed that he had asked competent judges of poetry to review the poems for him. The reviewers found the poems to “have so much merit, that they are ­here offered to the public by themselves.” Thus, the separate publication rather than their inclusion in Donaldson’s forthcoming collection is explained. The recommendatory letters are included as an encouragement of genius. The advertisement ends with the hope that readers w ­ ill excuse any “inaccuracies” in the letters as signifying “nothing more than the warm overflowings of souls susceptible of the ravishing beauties of genuine poetry” (p. 4). Readers might well have chuckled at the irony of the inaccuracies in the letters being the result of an extreme sensitivity to the beauty of the poems. The advertisement is largely a fiction. It begins by announcing, “The world is obliged to an unknown author for the following excellent poems.” Of course, in

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the fictional history of the pamphlet set forth in the advertisement, the poet is unknown to the three gentlemen of taste, but whoever wrote the advertisement, prob­ably Boswell, knows full well who the poet is. That the poems ­were studied by parties unknown to the author of the poems or the advertisement is an outright fiction. We have no idea what the pamphlet’s three authors actually thought of the poems, but they ­were critically astute enough to recognize that ­these poems ­were mediocre at best. The submission letter asking that the two poems be inserted in Donaldson’s volume is also likely a fiction. It is signed by JB, initials that can refer ­either to Boswell, the persona JB in the pamphlet, or both. Why this letter was included in the pamphlet remains a mystery, but it affirms the account in the advertisement that the poems ­were originally submitted for Donaldson’s volume. It is questionable ­whether Boswell would have ­really needed a submission letter. He was well enough acquainted with Erskine to collaborate with him on a literary proj­ect, so he could have just handed the poems to his friend, who, if he thought it necessary, could have shown them to Donaldson. Pottle’s theory of the pamphlet’s origin illustrates the critical prob­lems that arise when the poems are read as genuine tributes. Pottle’s comments on the pamphlet and his discussion of it make clear that he is viewing the advertisement, the submission letter, the poems, and the recommendatory letters as discrete parts. Pottle assumes that the unknown poet is Boswell, and ­t here seems to be no reason to quarrel with this assumption. He speculates plausibly, but without evidence from Donaldson, the editors of Boswell’s general correspondence point out, that Boswell did in fact submit the poems to Donaldson, who gave them to Erskine to evaluate. Erskine, who had poems published in the first volume and was helping Donaldson edit the second, did not think the poems worthy of inclusion in the new volume, but, unwilling to hurt the feelings of a man he had recently met, hit upon the idea of the pamphlet and suggested that the poems be printed separately as burlesque.15 Pottle bases his theory of the pamphlet and its origin on the advertisement and submission letter, for his theory closely parallels the history of the pamphlet offered by the documentary evidence it includes. AE sends the poems to GD and JB. GD thinks that AE wants a second opinion of their quality ­because, he says, “You are anxious that Mr. Donaldson’s collection should be uniform, and that the second volume should contain nothing unworthy of the first” (p. 5). Pottle’s theory receives additional support from the editors of Boswell’s general correspondence, who have found no evidence suggesting the three originally planned to publish the poems separately.16 The poems never did appear in Donaldson’s second volume, and we have no explanation as to why they d ­ idn’t, perhaps ­because the reason is obvious. The pamphlet does appear, however, with Donaldson’s imprint.

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But Pottle’s theory is based on some questionable assumptions that show he took the pamphlet’s documentation seriously. (I’m not arguing Pottle is wrong, but I am suggesting it is not certain he is right.) The advertisement in the pamphlet says that the poems w ­ ere submitted to Donaldson for his second volume of poetry by Scottish gentlemen, and a letter to the volume’s editor, which at this point could have been e­ ither Donaldson himself or Erskine, also says the poems ­were submitted for Donaldson’s collection. Pottle assumes, again without any evidence, that ­t hese documents are au­t hen­tic. Since the original of the submission letter has not survived, Pottle is in the position of basing his theory on evidence contained in a fictionalized account in a pamphlet that seems an elaborate joke. But ­t here are two other issues with this letter that show Pottle considers it au­t hen­tic, one of which Pottle acknowledges is a prob­lem. The letter was supposedly written at Strathaven and is dated 28 July 1761. Strathaven, Pottle reports, was a stage stop between Edinburgh and Auchinleck, but he believes it unlikely that Boswell would have been at Strathaven at the time the letter is dated, though, as Hankins and Caudle note, we have ­little information about Boswell’s whereabouts at any par­tic­u­lar time in 1761.17 But this prob­lem vanishes if the letter had been written specifically for the pamphlet wherever Boswell was, and he datelined it Strathaven b ­ ecause a young w ­ oman who lived near t­ here and whom he might have known had died in early July and her death was announced in the newspaper. News of her death could have been the inspiration for the Elegy, and Boswell datelined it Strathaven to give it an air of authenticity to local readers. The submission letter is signed JB. Pottle seems to assume that the JB at the bottom of the letter refers to James Boswell, when in fact it just as easily could refer to the persona JB that wrote one of the recommendatory letters. If it ­doesn’t refer to Boswell, and, since the original is unavailable, t­ here is no way to prove that it does, then this submission letter could well be part of the joke too. Pottle read the poems as autobiographical, that is, sincere tributes to real ­people; thus, the lack of names and individualizing detail became mysteries to be solved.18 He speculates that the amiable young lady of the Elegy might have been Ms. Katherine Young, d ­ aughter of James Young of Netherfield, whose estate was near Strathaven. She died on 1 July 1761. The Caledonian Mercury of 8 August carried an advertisement saying the pamphlet would be published on 10 August 1761,19 so the Elegy conceivably could have been written soon ­after Boswell learned of her death. ­Later, he would contribute frequently to the Caledonian Mercury, so he might well have been reading it at this time. Boswell might have known her, but if he did, it is likely this was a casual acquaintance at best, for no evidence exists to show that they had any relationship, even a casual one. Pottle’s assumption that the poems are autobiographical influenced the way he read them. No evidence exists that Boswell is the speaker in ­either poem,

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which he prob­ably would be had the poems been sincere. We d ­ on’t even know when ­these poems ­were written. Pottle’s assumptions indicate that he thinks the Elegy was written ­after Ms. Young’s death, but he has no evidence that it was, and ­there is no speculation about when the Epistle was written. We should remember that in late 1760 and throughout 1761 Boswell was writing verses with abandon, and by 1762 he had written enough for a volume of about 150 pages. It is entirely pos­si­ble that both poems ­were written during this period for his projected volume. It is pos­si­ble that, despite the ambiguity of the evidence Pottle offers, he is right in his theorizing about how this pamphlet came into being, but the lack of definitive evidence also enables the construction of alternative theories. Perhaps the most ­viable is that Boswell had written ­these two poems for his projected volume of verses and was thinking about submitting them to Donaldson, but, as he was often indecisive when he had to make impor­tant decisions, he sought an opinion on them from Erskine, who was involved with the forthcoming collection. But he was discouraged when Erskine made fun of them (he was not above such conduct), and Erskine did in fact show them to Dempster, who agreed that the poems ­were poor t­ hings. The ensuing banter over the poems could easily have resulted in a group decision to burlesque them. This is how the satirical Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of “Elvira” written by Mr.  David Malloch (1763) came about.20 Another possibility is that the entire enterprise, from writing the poems to the fake submission letter, was conceived as a joke from the beginning, and every­ thing was written in its ser­vice. No evidence exists to exclude such a theory. However the pamphlet came into being, it is unlikely that Donaldson, a friend of Erskine’s and a man who liked Boswell well enough to offer him the proofing job when Erskine had to leave for military duty, would have contradicted the narrative the letters create. The advertisement and the submission letter w ­ ere subtle plugs for his forthcoming collection, and Boswell learned early how to use newspapers for promotional purposes. ­Until—­and u ­ nless—­Donaldson’s rec­ords come to light, w ­ e’ll never know for certain just exactly how this pamphlet came into being. It is also impossible to know how con­temporary readers read the pamphlet or to know for certain ­whether they recognized it as a joke. It was never reviewed in the newspapers or magazines, and none of the authors talk about it or its reception in extant letters or journals. It is hard to believe, however, that by the time they finished reading the letters and the poems, readers would not have realized that the ­whole ­thing was an elaborate joke perpetrated by a trio of clever authors who found a way to display their wit, verve, and erudition. This recognition would have invited them to enjoy the irony of JB’s effusion that readers w ­ ere beholding “with eyes full of intrepid won­der and premature astonishment, such a poet! and such critics!” (p. 14).

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Notes 1. The pamphlet itself titles the epistle “Menalcas to Lycidas.” Pottle says that the epistle should be Lycidas to Menalcas, but offers no additional comment. Frederick A. Pottle, The Literary ­Career of James Boswell, Esq.: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 5. This discussion observes Pottle’s note. 2. James Boswell, Andrew Erskine, and George Dempster, An elegy on the death of an amiable young lady / with an epistle from Menalcas to Lycidas, to which are prefixed three critical recommendatory letters (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1761). Eigh­teenth ­Century Collections Online, accessed 26 July 2016. All citations are to this version and identified by page numbers. 3. The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763, ed. David Hankins and James J. Caudle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Hereafter referred to as Hankins: Corr. 4. Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The ­Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-­ Hill, 1966), 65. 5. Fortha is a poetic rendering of the River Forth. “Fortha’s Banks” is the title of a ballad by the Scottish composer Michael Arne (1740–1786), contained in the second book of a collection of ballads titled The Violet: A Collection of XII En­glish Ballads, book 2 (London, 1756). This ballad describes the short history of a romance that has left a heartsick shepherd lamenting the loss of his Peggy. 6. Glotta is another name for the River Clyde, celebrated in a 1721 poem, “Glotta, or, The Clyde, a poem” by James Arbuckle (1700–1742?). 7. Hankins: Corr., 66 nn. 4 and 5. 8. Ibid., 72 nn. 17, 18, 19, 21, 20. 9. Ibid., 73 n. 34. 10. Thomas Sheridan (1719–1788) was an Irish actor who retired from the stage and began a ­career lecturing on elocution. In 1760 he was invited to Edinburgh, where he delivered a series of popu­lar lectures. A con­temporary recalled that a­ fter Sheridan’s lectures, “a rage for the study of elocution became universal, as if it w ­ ere the master-­excellence in e­ very profession.” Thomas Somerville, My Own Life and Times, 1741–1814 (Edinburgh, 1861), 56. The remark AE attributes to him prob­ably refers to something Sheridan said during a lecture. 11. The Rehearsal is a satirical play burlesquing the bombast of Restoration tragedy, especially the tragedies of John Dryden. It was first staged in 1671 and published, anonymously, the following year. George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham is the acknowledged author, and he is believed to have had coauthors, but none have been specifically identified as yet. In the play, a gentleman from the country comes to London and is invited by two city friends and the playwright Bayes to watch a rehearsal of several scenes in Bayes’s new play. The absurdity the three gentlemen witness is still hilarious. 12. Johnson’s dictionary defines home-­felt as “inward, private.” 13. Sandro Jung, “Early Eighteenth-­Century Scottish Funeral Elegies, Memorialization, and the Ephemeral,” Publishing History 70 (2011): 36, 36–37. https:// ­biblio​.­ugent​.­be​ /­publication​/3­ 121292​/­fi le​/­6784771​.­pdf. My discussion of the traditional Scottish elegy relies heavi­ly on Jung’s discussion of the tradition. 14. Ibid., 40, 38, 49. 15. Hankins: Corr., 65 n. 3. 16. Ibid., 64 n. 6. 17. Ibid., 65 n. 3. 18. Thomas Crawford apparently also read the poems as autobiographical, though he had to s­ ettle for an even more remote possibility of identification. He speculates that Menalcas might have been John Hamilton (1739–1821) of Sundrum, an Ayrshire neighbor about the same age as Boswell, and a long-­time friend. They attended classes at the University of Edin-

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burgh, and Hamilton enrolled at the University of Glasgow at the same time Boswell did. ­W hether he had any botanical interests is unknown. See The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson T ­ emple, 1756–1795, vol. 1, 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 3 n. 2. 19. Pottle, ­Earlier Years, 473–474. 20. ­A fter watching the per­for­mance and joking about it over dinner, the three satirized Mallet’s play, which they had intended to damn before seeing it. They ­were so dazzled by their own razor wit that they de­cided to share it with the public in a pamphlet. Critics ­didn’t find it at all funny and dismissed it outright.

chapter 6

Q

“Making the Press my Amanuensis” Male Friendship and Publicity in The Cub, at New-­market Celia Barnes

On 27 November 1762, Boswell and his rakish mentor Alexander Mongtomerie, tenth Earl of Eglinton, sat together in the Bedford coffee­house in Covent Garden, where they “talked a ­little privately” about the younger man’s deportment: “He i­ magined me,” Boswell rec­ords in his London Journal, “much in the style I was three years ago: raw, curious, volatile, credulous.” Boswell assures Eglinton he has changed from the young man he was—­“I am now a ­little wiser,” he protests—­but Eglinton remains unconvinced. He accuses the younger man of imagining that his moral transformation is more significant than it ­really is, and Boswell confesses in the pages of his journal that ­t here may be “some justice in what he said.”1 But as Boswell’s account of this conversation unfolds, we discover that the two men ­aren’t simply talking in generalities; Boswell has behaved irresponsibly: “I told him I was sorry that my dedication without leave to the Duke of York had been ill-­taken, and I insisted that he should make it up and bring us together, which he half-­a ssented to.”2 The previous March, Boswell had financed the publication of his semiautobiographical poem The Cub, at New-­ market (1762) and dedicated it to Edward Augustus, Duke of York, younger ­brother of George III and, at the time, heir apparent to the throne. Boswell had read aloud to the duke an e­ arlier draft of the poem, likely around the time it was composed in 1760, and the duke had voiced his approval.3 However, he certainly never had consented to have it dedicated to him in any kind of formal manner, especially by someone whom he barely knew, so when the poem 94

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was released in 1762, he voiced his dis­plea­sure. “I can assure you,” Eglinton would complain to Boswell in January of 1763, “he was very angry.” What the duke had ­imagined to be a private ­matter—­a (likely cursory) reading of a new acquaintance’s silly poem, the exchange of a ­couple of laughs—­Boswell transformed into a public one. And Boswell then had the nerve to be unapologetic; as he put it in his response to Eglinton’s January complaint, the duke “was wrong” to be angry, “for in my opinion I pay’d him a compliment.” 4 A poetic dedication was a compliment to a new friend in Boswell’s world, where public actions mimic private affections, or they should anyway, and he simply could not understand why Augustus would be offended at such a good-­natured show of friendship. I dwell on ­t hese miscommunications regarding Boswell’s unfortunate dedication b ­ ecause I want to suggest that they offer us a way of reading The Cub itself, for the dedication and the backstory that accompanies it echo the poem’s unique vision of the literary marketplace. In the world of the poem, the formal apparatuses of publicity, patronage, and print culture are re­imagined as l­ ittle more than a series of private interactions between like-­minded, fun-­loving gentlemen, gentlemen like the Duke of York as he appears in Boswell’s dedication. Indeed, the poem and its front m ­ atter describe a benevolent system of literary and creative production, whereby private approval necessarily leads to public revelation—­ Boswell cannot, he writes, conceal The Cub from the world—­and public revelation in turn reinvigorates and restores the bonds between male friends. In this way, “My dear Boy CUB,” and therefore Boswell himself, goes out into the world, secure in the friendship and patronage of the duke, Eglinton, and the other Jockey Club members, ever confident that the literary marketplace is, for the most part anyway, a group of “comical fellow[s]” enjoying “a hearty laugh” together.5 If, as Dustin Griffin has argued, we must resist the temptation “to consider literary texts and writers apart from the complex system of sponsorship, financing, production, and distribution” and therefore resist the temptation “to abstract lit­er­a­ture from its living cultural context,”6 then I would suggest The Cub is a poem that insists we pay attention to the complex literary system in which it operates. Not only does it seek to remind us of its mode of production, but it also attempts to revise and rethink that mode of production in order to create a more gentleman-­like literary marketplace. Perhaps, then, The Cub ­doesn’t tell us so much about the literary system of the early 1760s as it was, but as Boswell wishes it w ­ ere.

“Just when the whimsical Adventure happened”: The Composition and Publication of The Cub Boswell was just shy of twenty and on his first extended visit to London when he composed The Cub in a corner of the Jockey Club’s Coffee Room, likely

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during the spring racing season of 1760, which was held that year in April and early May. Newmarket racing was entering its heyday, and the spring season always promised an impressive array of fabulous p ­ eople attending fabulous events.7 As the 26 April 1753 issue of the World gushes, “This is the vernal season for the cele­bration of ­t hose curious sports and festivals, and as they are, at this time, likely to be held with the utmost splendour and magnificence.”8 Boswell himself describes the experience in a similar awestruck tone, as his narrator is  greeted by “a Throng / of DUKES and LORDS—­-­Bless me! he thought;/ Enchantment surely ­here has wrought!” (14). For Boswell, the attraction of the Jockey Club likely was neither its ­horses nor its races, but its ­people: the club maintained an appealing exclusivity, and its members ­were exceedingly well connected both po­liti­cally and socially.9 Moreover, Boswell had spent his first visit to London cultivating just such attractive connections, literary and other­wise, and was ­eager to cultivate more, a fact that might give us some insight into both the dedication’s extreme forwardness and the poem’s imitative style.10 Frederick Pottle pronounces Boswell’s semiautobiographical poem “not a model of narrative clarity,” which, I confess, is a fairly accurate description.11 The plot is somewhat difficult to summarize. ­After a brief frame in which the narrator discusses the “distribution” of Nature’s “favour” with the figuratively named “Lord Rich” (12), the narrative recounts the misadventures of “a curious Cub . . . ​ newly caught” by one Lord E*******N “on SCOTIA’S Mountains,”12 brought to London and then to the Jockey Club, where the action of the poem takes place (13–14). At the Jockey Club, Boswell rec­ords the Cub recording his poem, describing its composition as a response to knowing “not a single soul” (16). A ­ fter a ­couple of hours of solitary scribbling, and still “Afraid to venture on the floor,” our hero is interrupted by Sir Charles Sedley, “a truly worthy Knight / In whom strong sense quick parts unite” (17), who accosts him for his antisocial be­hav­ior and promises to subscribe when the proposals are out. While the Cub and Sedley are conversing, an unidentified “sprightly PEER” (18) (whom the text ­doesn’t identify but who may be Eglinton) interrupts them with his plan to produce the finished product together as a communal effort: “Come, touch us up a sketch in rhime / And shew your genius—­-­now’s the time. . . . ​And I, who have a knack that way, / ­Will whistle Notes to what you say” (19). He also promises to render the frontispiece and suggests a patron. The last section, whose action is decidedly compressed and muddled, involves one Justice P—­—­N and a “thin Spectre” lugging in to the coffee room a “MONSTER,”13 which ­causes the hero so much consternation that “Th’ affrighted Animal would skulk, / And hide him from th’ ENORMOUS BULK.” This response draws a merry crowd, all of whom, “seiz’d” by “th’ infection” of this “mighty joke,” laugh at the Cub u ­ ntil “this blithe Chorus did assault / The Coffee-­Room’s resounding Vault:” (20). Boswell’s public embarrassment thus becomes the tie that binds them all, that effectively shapes this community of “DUKES, LORDS,

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and COMMONS fondly join’d” (21). Boswell closes his poem with a return to the frame and a moral that ties back to his opening conversation with Lord Rich: even ­t hose with ­great understanding but “some external Oddity / . . .”Or some par­tic­u­lar defect” can be the entertainment for “harmless Satire” (23). Such is the way, ­we’re told, that the universe maintains its balance. Boswell arranged, from Scotland, to self-­publish The Cub with the Dodsleys (price one shilling), and by the time he arrived in London for another visit in 1762, it had been printed. Th ­ ere are no subsequent editions, nor any evidence that it made any real waves in the literary world, though Boswell himself does rec­ord in the London Journal that “it had sold well, and that t­ here ­were thirteen shillings of profit, which I made [Dodsley] pay me down.”14 As James Caudle notes, “reactions to the poem ­were varied. One copy [now ­housed in the British Library] that was bought for the Chapter Coffee House” has, in the same “unknown hand” that inscribed the Chapter’s owner­ship, a defaced title page: “THE CUB is a Scrubb[;] AT NEWMARKET he does Jockey—­it—.”15 Most of the hubbub surrounding the poem seems to have been concerned with Boswell’s rather inappropriate dedication to the Duke of York and not the content of the text itself. Indeed, in his preface, Boswell lays out his modest hopes, which in a sense prefigure this reception. He published The Cub, he tells us, for two reasons: ­because “­These Verses have had the honour of being approved by ­t hose whose Taste it would be the highest Arrogance to call in question” (presumably the Duke of York), and “in order to let my friends have Copies of it.” In publishing his Cub, he is simply ­doing what taste demands, and as such, “may be rather excused for making the Press my Amanuensis” (Preface, viii). Boswell’s poem is a literary production about literary production, a poem that poeticizes its own composition and reflects on its own publication, distribution, and reception. The occasion and context for The Cub curiously become the content, and in all its ele­ments, it reflects on the method by which it comes into being. In what follows, I proceed through the poem’s vari­ous parts—­t he dedication, the preface, and the poetic text—­with an eye to thinking through Boswell’s unmasking of his, and his poem’s, creative pro­cess. If, as Donald Nichol argues, the Jockey Club became a popu­lar target of po­liti­cal satire midcentury, as “horse racing became analogous with politics,”16 then we might think of Boswell’s poem, set in the social heart of that club, as “mak[ing] sport of t­ hose in power” by highlighting the literary, and not just the po­liti­cal, authority that originates in this exclusive communal space.

“Permit me” . . . ​or D ­ on’t: Boswell’s Public-­Private Dedication to the Duke of York While dedicatory letters often take pains to “remind patrons of their national responsibility” (Griffin, 41), Boswell puts this public, nationalistic function to

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work for his own self-­interest. The result is a dedicatory letter that seems to want to remind us of its Newmarket origins—­and to remind Augustus, we might say, revising Griffin slightly, of his personal responsibilities. In this way, Boswell’s dedication to the Duke of York stages a collision between public and private forms of interaction. Boswell opens by entreating the duke to “permit me to let the World know that this same Cub has been laughed at by the Duke of York;—­has been read to your Royal Highness by the Genius himself, and warmed by the immediate beams of your kind Indulgence” (Dedication, v). The dedicatory relationship is ­imagined ­here as a sympathetic laugh, a joke exchanged between and enjoyed by two gentlemen friends. Boswell’s diction is delightfully ambiguous at the opening of this passage: that he is referring to the poem Cub and not the poem’s hero i­ sn’t clear ­until a­ fter the series of dashes, a choice that underwrites his interest in transforming the formal relationship a dedication promises into a friendly, one-­on-­one exchange. To laugh with and approve of the Cub, the dedication implies, is to laugh with and approve of The Cub. Griffin understands the patronage relationship as reciprocal, as involving a kind of exchange or “commerce” (Griffin, 17–18), and we see Boswell remarking on this reciprocity in his dedication, where the dedicatory letter itself is understood as a mark of gratitude to Augustus “for condescending to like” the poem that follows (Dedication, v). We are greeted in Boswell’s dedication by a literary marketplace fueled by the warmth of “your kind Indulgence,” an interaction so moving that Boswell cannot conceal his regard, a regard at once encapsulated by and gifted in the form of the poem that w ­ ill follow (Dedication, vi). However, it is the “Spark” of his “Composition,” and not necessarily Augustus’s beams, that reveals the text to its audience; that is, Boswell is quick to note that his own “enthusiasm,” as he calls it, is what makes him unable to keep the poem private. And, in an in­ter­est­ing inversion of the trope of the reluctant author, Boswell explic­itly connects this spark to his own “Vanity,” which he proclaims “an inseparable Characteristic of a Poet.” What began as an entreaty—­“permit me”—­ends as a testimony to the generative power, not so much of the poet’s wit, but of his enthusiasm and even his pride. The Cub might be a “Trifle,” and it “would not presume to interrupt you,” but it does “beg leave” (without asking, mind you) “to pay it’s [sic] Re­spects in an hour devoted to cheerful Festivity” (Dedication, vi). Boswell almost certainly had treated Augustus to one of his infamous recitations of his Cub, when, his friend Andrew Erskine reports, he would adopt a “gravity of countenance,”17 and ­here he insists on reliving the moment in print. Boswell’s dedication (re)stages this recitation for the reader; indeed, it makes recitation (to which Boswell ­will refer again in the preface and twice again in the poetic text) the very occasion that has brought the poem into print.

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“I must declare”: Boswell’s Preface If Boswell’s dedicatory letter plays around a bit with the conventions of the genre, then it ­shouldn’t surprise us that his preface opens with a similar delight in generic mixing. What we are about to read, he explains, is a “Tale”; it has a “Hero” and accounts a “whimsical Adventure.” Yet it is also “what very few Tales now-­ a-­days are,—­true.” It was written at a par­tic­u­lar place and time, the Jockey Club’s Coffee Room, where the author spent “several sprightly good-­humoured Eve­ nings,” and its composition was to the moment, “catching the merriment as it ­rose” (Preface, vii). Boswell stresses the poem’s status as an occasional verse with a kind of improvisational drive. It is a product of “Poetical License,” but it is also the bubbling up of experience, a sharing of the warmth and conviviality of his time at the club. This is a tale that arose from and among convivial society; it is a faithful rec­ ord of the plea­sure Boswell takes in that society, even as it delights in exaggeration. Given that what follows actually poeticizes the occasion for writing, it’s in­ter­est­ing that he opens with reminding us what “is h ­ ere related.” As w ­ e’re to find out when we read the poetic text, what is “­here related” in the preface is indeed ­here related in the poem; the preface is curiously redundant. In other words, Boswell spent some delightful eve­nings in the Jockey Club Coffee Room, where he composed a poem that narrates his composition of a poem, which includes a preface that narrates the composition of a poem: this is poetic occasion as a h ­ ouse of mirrors, but it is also, I would argue, a kind of nonmechanical reproduction, a repre­sen­ta­tion of a repre­sen­ta­tion of a repre­sen­ta­tion. The Cub, whose composition is staged and then reproduced multiple times, arose from an occasion, or a series of occasions, of gentlemanly society and conviviality; thus, we are reminded by the author that its coming into print serves a similar sociable and (re)productive purpose. While he declares rather cattily that he published the poem due to its “merit”—­after all, men of refined taste like the duke approved of its production—he also gives a second, more in­ter­est­ing reason for its publication: “The latter [reason] is in order to let my friends have Copies of it, which they may be in no danger of not being able to read. And surely I may be rather excused for making the Press my Amanuensis than the noble Lord, who might have had half a dozen Secretaries at his command” (Preface, vii). As a literary production born out of, and indeed in honor of, “good-­humoured Eve­nings,” The Cub pays reverence to friendship in its very distribution. Dodsley becomes Boswell’s secretary in this extended meta­phor, transcribing the poem for the benefit of the poet and his inner circle. Reduced to a mere copy machine, he produces the reading material that ­w ill strengthen the bonds between Boswell, the noble Lord of this analogy, and his noble friends. H ­ ere,

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then, print culture is just a more con­ve­nient (not to mention cheaper) form of manuscript circulation; a­ fter all, who needs a scribe when you can just hire a Dodsley, who ­w ill do the work of half a dozen secretaries for a reasonable price? Boswell’s press—­and indeed the literary marketplace more generally, for this certainly i­ sn’t a money-­making enterprise—­becomes subject to private interests. And this marketplace of carefully copied and distributed Cubs has neither the time nor the patience for critics and their criticism: “Pray, good Gentlemen, be quiet. Do not apply your confounded Squares and Compasses to a Per­for­mance, whose Beauty—if it has any—­but that, you know, is understood—­consists in a careless ease. What have your grave Countenances to do ­here?—­It is not at all becoming in P ­ eople of your Dignity and Consequence to keep com­pany with Cubs. What the Deuce! c­ an’t a comical fellow take a hearty laugh, but one of you sage Phi­los­o­phers must clap on a pair of damnation Spectacles, and stare in full in the Face, in order to find out Pimples upon his Nose?” (Preface, viii–ix). Squares and compasses are out; careless ease is in. Laughter supplants gravity in the world of Cubs, a world where pimples are acceptable facial/textual adornments, not to be examined but simply accepted as part of the beautiful ­whole that is the face of the work. “Commend me, however, as much as you please,” Boswell continues, but save your criticism for something more serious; ­you’re spoiling my fun. Instead, he offers his critics a bribe, which is also, perhaps unsurprising to us now, a drinking date: “If you w ­ ill tickle my fancy with a few obliging encomiums, I promise you a SCOTCH-­PINT-­BOTTLE of mine excellent Host WILDMAN’S best Claret” (Preface, ix). To “commend me” is to enjoy a drink with the poet, while to criticize is simply not to get the joke: as readers, we are being trained to read what follows, and ­we’re to read as we drink—­ heartily and with an aim to enjoy ourselves. The text itself, not unlike the Host’s best claret, is designed to “relax the Muscles” around the mouth, “­t hese organs of risibility” through which we take in drink and also laugh at what is to follow.

“Gelasticity agog”: The Poem Boswell may have prodded the poem along at the end of his preface (“go along;—­ push thy way;—­shift for thyself”; Preface, ix), but the poetic text opens with yet another prologue of sorts, a Shandean frame that fictionalizes the occasion for the tale Boswell ­w ill tell and again turns our attention to the masculine camaraderie that drives this literary world. As I noted above, the poem recounts the occasion of its own composition in the Newmarket Coffee Room, so we might think of this frame as yet another copy of the poem’s origin story, an alternative history of the poem’s occasion for existing. The frame follows a conversation, or rather debate, between Boswell’s speaker and a thigh-­slapping, grunting booby squire named Lord Rich, a debate that begins with a good-­natured interruption and ends with some back-­scratching—

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or back-­t rimming, to be exact—of the literal variety. With his opening line, “Poets, for most part, have been poor,” Boswell seems to situate The Cub in a literary marketplace in which poets’ economic value is low; indeed, our “experience tells us” that this is an unalterable, if regrettable, fact of life. Strange, then, that when Lord Rich interrupts our speaker, he is the one reminding Boswell that poets “still have Jollity around ‘em”; in other words, he is the one to return us to the friendly economy that was so lauded in the dedication and the preface (11). ­Here, though, at least initially, Boswell seems to be arguing for the reverse, for a literary marketplace in which creators are compensated for what they create, in which ­t here is “distribution right” and poets enjoy Nature’s “favour” just like every­one ­else. But Rich ­isn’t buying what Boswell’s selling, and he lets it be known. ­After a series of dismissive, and decidedly uncouth, gestures—­a shrug, a slap on the thigh, and a grunt—he ­orders the young poet to make good on his promise to “give us now that same new Tale / Of Mirth.” In keeping with his ­earlier encomium to “Jollity,” Rich informs the poet that his recitation w ­ on’t be in exchange for money or fame, but ­because friendship simply demands it: an amusing poem would “serve my spleen t’appease / And set my troubled mind at ease.” Some ­simple amusement set to rhyme surely would help Lord Rich get out of the doldrums. This is public per­for­mance as private gesture, certainly, but one that is hardly figured as a gentlemanlike exchange; rather, as Rich puts it, this is all about what the poet can “give us” (12). And yet when Boswell responds using the veiled economic language of patronage, hoping Rich ­will “make / Allowance for a Youngster’s sake,” the roles reverse, with Rich vowing, “O never fear” (he w ­ ill “make / Allowance,” presumably) and Boswell requesting a comically Rabelaisian form of quid pro quo. “­Don’t look so grim,” he urges the booby squire, presumably with a wink and a nudge, You seem dispos’d my back to trim; That Cudgel looks so wondrous strong, ’Twould sweep a dozen Tars along. . . . Bravo! my Lord! Oh, now I’m fee’d, Wise as a L ­ awyer I’ll proceed. (12–13)

The economic language with which the poem opens comes back ­here in parodic form (not that Boswell ever ­really is in earnest): “I’m fee’d,” the speaker confesses, but his payment is the plea­sure he hopes to receive from the stout cudgel Rich ­will employ to trim his back, ­here compared to brushing off a dozen Tars. The gesture is at once intimate and grotesque, a ­little intimidating but undeniably pleas­ur­able (“Bravo! my Lord!”). Thus, in an exchange that frames a poem about literary production as gentlemanly interaction, Boswell seems to take his point to its furthest ends, and tit for tat becomes a mutually satisfying, albeit slightly revolting, grooming ritual between men.

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Significantly, too, this scene prefigures our hero’s per­for­mance in the coffee room, in which he is humiliated for the good of the group and ends up rather liking it; one pleas­ur­able but humiliating ritual follows another. I’m reminded of Thomas King’s consideration of “the performative effects of Boswell’s textual reflexivity” in the London Journal, Boswell’s “impulse to manufacture the gaze in which he might display himself and to negotiate the visual field in which par­ tic­u­lar male bodies acquired visibility and accordingly distinction.”18 The Cub opens with just such a manufactured, even curated, per­for­mance, where he assumes his place in front of his (male) audience and reflects on the effects—­t he plea­sure, the disgust—­t hat such a tableau elicits. And this theatrical tableau frames the poem in more ways than one, for we see Boswell’s hero time and again become an object of both speculation and spectacle. We are told, for instance, as the scene shifts to Newmarket, to “View him in the New Coffee Room!”19 As he looks on “with a stupid won­der” at ­t hese beautiful, fash­ion­able ­people (14), the Cub begins to mimic them “with an awkward stride,” an unusual display that succeeds in shifting the gaze back to him: the Cub “Began to think some look’d at him; / And Bashfulness, he knew not why, / Brought tears into his sheepish eye” (15). In effect, the poem rec­ords the Cub’s slow movement t­oward the biggest spotlight, as he learns how to put himself forward into the gaze of the gentlemanly throng by humiliating himself in the pro­cess. He may be “sheepish,” “Wild,” and even “defect[ive],” but t­ hese are the very characteristics that secure him fame within the universe of the poem (16, 23). Boswell’s self-­caricature throws this strange paradox into high relief. The narrator “pause[s] awhile” to give his readers “The Portraiture of this Wild Man,” and, by stopping the action for this portrait in words, invites us to gaze on his image. What follows is a blazon of sorts: Tho’ he to Combat could advance— Plumpness shone in his Countenance; And Belly prominent declar’d, That he for Beef and Pudding car’d. He had a large and pond’rous head, That seem’d to be compos’d of lead; From which hung down such stiff, lank hair, As might the crows in Autumn scare. (17)

The Cub’s grotesque physique, with his g­ iant head and ample belly, should put us in mind of the grunting, fleshy Lord Rich—­and it foreshadows the Caliban-­ like monster we ­will encounter near the poem’s close. Monstrous, unwieldy male bodies therefore abound in The Cub, but not as objects to incite our disgust, as we might expect; rather, w ­ e’re invited to fix our gaze on them, to study them with care. Indeed, part of the humor in the passage above, I would argue, is the

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almost loving way in which Boswell cata­logues his hero’s attributes, only telling us at the end of his careful description that crows ­can’t stand to look upon what we already have spent eight lines—­that’s almost half the page in the original—­taking in. The Cub’s sheer weight propels him to the center of the poetic action; we are reminded repeatedly throughout the poem that he cannot be ignored, that he cannot simply blend into the woodwork of the bustling coffee room. In the same way that Boswell seems unable “to conceal” his poem from the world in his dedication, he writes his protagonist as an intrusive body that cannot remain hidden. And this body i­sn’t, we would do well to remember, simply a parody of our poet. Certainly, the poem is autobiographical, and Boswell obviously is poking fun of his penchant for puddings, but it’s also figurative: in the world of the poem, the Cub is a “curious” (13) specimen that Eglinton acquires and brings to the Jockey Club so that members can “View him” (14). Is Boswell’s protagonist ­human, or i­sn’t he? He would seem to be both, just as Boswell’s tale is both a “whimsical Adventure” and “true.” Hybrids like t­ hese, Boswell seems to suggest, might be monstrous, but ­t hey’re also strangely titillating—­I’m reminded once again of that friendly l­ ittle back-­trimming episode with which the poem opens—­ and it is this strange, almost prurient plea­sure that The Cub seeks at once to explore and exploit. The hero’s conversation with Sir Charles Sedley returns us to the constellation of themes with which I began this essay: gentlemanly goodwill, friendship, and literary production. Sedley interrupts the Cub’s study, shooting a “friendly leer” in his general direction before fi­nally “accost[ing] him” about his writing (18). Interestingly, Sir Charles frames the product of the Cub’s l­abors as neither a tale nor an adventure, but a “History”—­“Our History,” in fact—­completed and then transmitted by “you and Eglintoun” (18). The solitary imagination of the author, that spark of enthusiasm that propelled the poem into the world in Boswell’s dedication, h ­ ere becomes a cooperative effort by men and for men, an enterprise that ­w ill preserve this place and ­t hese gentlemen in literary history: “All former Authors,” Sedley proclaims, “­will be beat,” and, if his promise to subscribe at once is any indication, this l­ittle history might have some real commercial appeal. The poem, w ­ e’ll recall, began with an interruption by the cudgel-­w ielding Lord Rich, and now, a “sprightly PEER” holding a “switch of oak” stages yet another interruption, this time of the conversation between Sedley and the hero. ­After dismissing what he presumably has overheard with a “Faith, good enough,” the Peer turns to Sir Charles—­“You Jockey bluff!”—­and fi­nally to the hero, who, he insists, has a poetic job to do: “Come,” he ­orders, “touch us up a sketch in rime, / And shew your genius—­now’s the time.” Like Rich, the Peer seems to associate poetic recitation with male bonding, but he ­doesn’t stop ­t here, for he continues by proposing a unique literary collaboration: “the best JUSTICE in the Nation” would make a perfect dedicatee for their efforts, “And I, who have a

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knack that way, / ­Will whistle to what you say.” The Peer even ­will execute a frontispiece of a “CALIBAN grotesque,” a fitting emblem of their “ludicrous” efforts (19). We w ­ ill remember that, in the preface to The Cub, Boswell had called the publication of his poem, undertaken so that his friends could have copies, “making the Press my Amanuensis,” so it is fitting that the Peer frames both of his contributions as forms of transcription: he whistles “Notes to what you say” (prob­ably a double entendre), and his artistry obeys the “mirth” of the poet (20). Before we get ahead of ourselves—­which is so easy to do in a Shandean universe—­let’s summarize where we are in this maddening series of poetic meta-­ events: the poem opens with an interruption, a call to poeticize; then it poeticizes the writing of the very poem we are reading; then it is interrupted by a look into the ­f uture of its reception—­“I’ll instantly subscribe, I swear”—­only to be called on to poeticize once again, this time with support from loyal friends. Single authorship becomes communal, and time seems to fold together the moments of poetic composition and print reception, oral recitation and print publication. Out of this strange mixture emerges the “grotesque” “Design” that is The Cub, a poem that contains both social and published, both in-­process and finished ele­ments. The choice of frontispiece seems apt, then, as Caliban “in attitude burlesque” captures the monstrosity of both the Cub and The Cub (19), but in a world of colliding universes and grotesque mixtures, sometimes a frontispiece is not just a frontispiece: the Peer’s “last Design was scarcely broached, / When, lo! the MONSTER fell approach’d!” (20). What was merely a figment of the Peer’s artistic imagination in the previous stanza now comes alive, in one final interruption of the poetic action. Like the poem as it is described in the dedication, the monster, too, proves impossible to conceal; he seems to lumber off the page, a kind of poetic inevitability. Although the narrator ­doesn’t describe this Caliban as carefully as he does the Cub, pausing only briefly to remark on his “­triple chin,” he nevertheless affords him real heft, as his carriers heave and “tug” his “ENOROMOUS BULK” to the center of the action. The monster utterly intimidates the Cub, causing him to “Quak[e],” “skulk,” and fi­nally “hide” (20). But as we have learned by now, the laws of this place make hiding impossible, and so, just as his attempt to retreat at the beginning of the poem was rewarded by Sedley’s intrusion, h ­ ere, too, such be­hav­ior serves only to “set . . . ​/ Their Gelasticity agog.” While we might have expected the entrance of the monster to be the final spectacle this poem affords, instead Caliban recedes into the background as a circle of “DUKES, LORDS, and COMMONS” forms around the Cub, initially curious and fi­nally raucous, each man “seiz’d” with “th’ infection” of laughter. This risible disease, passed from friend to friend, de­moc­ra­tizes and unites: “friend ­behind turns equal Dunce,” one by one succumbing to laughter ­until “this blithe Chorus did assault / The Coffee-­Room’s resounding Vault” (21).

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With this final, ridicu­lous spectacle, Boswell revises some of the themes we have been tracking throughout the poem, namely the way it celebrates the creative potential of male bonding. H ­ ere, it is our hero’s “Oddity” that precipitates such bonding and moves him, not only directly into the center of the action, but also into the center of the poem’s moral universe, for “defect” (23), we learn at the close, “in harmless Satire serves for sport” (24). The Cub may have begun with a dedicatory letter of almost obnoxious overreach, but it ends with the painful humiliation of its hero. Pottle calls The Cub “an extreme example of [Boswell’s] lifelong strategy of lying down of his own accord to avoid being thrown down,” a succinct statement of where we arrive by the poem’s end.20 In this Shandean, topsy-­turvy world, public shaming restores “the equity of heaven,” and the Cub’s humiliation curiously becomes his apotheosis. What I hope I have suggested, though, is that t­ hese vari­ous scenes of public humiliation, which would become Boswell’s “lifelong strategy,” as Pottle terms it, serve an impor­tant public function: they bolster the bonds between men even as they remind us that the literary marketplace is at its best when it is underwritten by such bonds. But I want to close by emphasizing the way the poem as a ­whole, as an autobiographical text whose “merriment” consists of mocking a hero who is associated si­mul­ta­neously with “the Author,” also invites us to think about its reception in precisely ­these terms—as male bonding (Preface, vii). ­Here we have a poem written by Boswell, about Boswell, which Boswell had the nerve to dedicate to the heir apparent, and which he had recited to friends so many times that Erskine could poke fun of the mock gravitas he ­adopted during such (likely tiresome) per­for­mances. Publishing would seem to be the ultimate act of self-­aggrandizement, but Boswell heads off such assumptions at the pass. Copies of The Cub, distributed to friends and indeed made for them, restage the Cub’s humiliation for their benefit, as well, and literary distribution becomes nothing more than an inside joke, a series of them in fact, at Boswell’s expense. This poem exists not for Boswell, but for “us,” the gentlemen friends who form a circle around it, and him, and laugh at what we see. In this world of friendly back-­ trimming, “Nonsense,” and “harmless Satire” (23–24), self-­aggrandizement is recast as a kind of ritual humiliation for the good of the gentlemanly group, and lit­er­a­ture is precisely the stuff that happens when the reader, “a comical fellow” himself, learns to “take a hearty laugh” at and with the poet (Preface, ix).

Notes 1. Boswell’s London Journal,1762–1763, ed. Frederick Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1950), 52. Hereafter referred to as London. 2. London, 52–53. 3. Boswell seems to have been quite proud of his poem and enjoyed reciting it to friends. In a letter, Erskine writes mockingly of “the reluctance with which you always repeat your Cub, and the gravity of countenance which you always assume upon that occasion.” Erskine to Boswell, Kelly, 11 Sept. 1761, in The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763,

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ed. David Hankins and James J. Caudle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 91. Hereafter referred to as Hankins: Corr. In a spirit of friendship, and perhaps in keeping with the subject of this essay, I am very grateful to James Caudle—­who, at the time I was composing this essay, was associate editor of the Yale Boswell Editions—­for sharing with me a transcription of Boswell’s poem prefaced and annotated by himself. H ­ ere and elsewhere, I acknowledge Caudle’s unpublished work when it has directed my thinking or provided a contextualizing source, but I also try as much as pos­si­ble to direct the reader to the original texts Caudle references in his preface and notes. 4. London, 168. 5. James Boswell, Preface to The Cub, at New-­market: A Tale (London, 1762), ix. Hereafter referred to as Preface. The text is also available, with appropriate page divisions, at Eigh­ teenth ­Century Collections Online, https://­quod​.­lib​.­umich​.­edu​/e­ ​/­ecco​/0 ­ 04831825​.­0001​ .­000​/­1:5​?­rgn​= ­div1;view​=f­ ulltext. Accessed 29 July 2020. 6. Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in E ­ ngland, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. Hereafter referred to as Griffin. 7. For a thorough, and indeed enjoyable, history of racing at Newmarket, see David Oldrey, Timothy Cox, and Richard Nash, The Heath and Horse (London: Phillip Wilson Publishers, 2016). 8. The World, no. 17 (26 Apr. 1753). Again, thanks to James Caudle for tracking down this reference. 9. The club itself was restricted to members, and, despite Boswell’s insistence in the preface to The Cub that he was “elected a member,” ­t here is no rec­ord of that election. See Robert Black, The Jockey Club and Its [sic] Found­ers in Three Periods (London, 1891), 106. He must have been a guest of a member, Eglinton perhaps, or have received some kind of special pass to enter the club during the 1760 racing season. 10. Boswell was inspired to write several poems, including The Cub, in a Shandean style; its very title, in fact, casts Boswell as the Cub of Newmarket to Sterne’s Lion of London. According to Pottle, Boswell read the poem to Sterne, “at which Sterne ‘capered,’ patted him on the shoulder, and called him a second Prior!” Pottle goes on to say that “such a scene . . . ​is almost too good r­ eally to have happened.” Frederick A. Pottle, “Bozzy and Yorick,” Blackwood’s Magazine 217, no. 1313 (1925): 311. James Caudle has suggested that indeed it did not happen. See James J. Caudle, “ ‘Fact’ or ‘Invention’? James Boswell and the Legend of a Boswell-­Sterne Meeting,” The Shandean 22 (Nov. 2011): 30–­55. Thanks to one of this volume’s anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to Caudle’s essay. 11. Pottle clearly w ­ asn’t a fan: he calls The Cub “much less in­ter­est­ing . . . ​t han the unpublished epistle to Sterne” Boswell composed around this time, and even chooses to “spare the reader a quotation from the poem.” Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The E ­ arlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1966), 61. 12. Boswell’s policy on naming throughout the poem is inconsistent. Although he obscures Eglinton’s name on page 13, he spells it out just five pages ­later. And, while Charles Sedley’s name is used in the body of the poem itself, the Peer and Spectre remain unspecified and the Justice is footnoted as “Mr. P________N” but never specifically identified. 13. Cub, 20, 19. I’ve yet to see any of t­ hese figures—­the Justice, the Spectre, or the Monster—­ identified for certain, and in a poem that so easily traffics in inside jokes, we may never know. The Spectre enters and exits the stage so quickly that we hardly have enough evidence to speculate on his case. As for the attribution of the Monster, in correspondence with Richard Nash about this last cryptic chunk of the poem, he suggests the former regent William, Duke of Cumberland, “a man famous for his bulk” who suffered a stroke in 1760, the effects of which Boswell might be caricaturing in the poem. Nash theorizes that Boswell’s Justice Mr. P________N may have been Thomas Panton, who became Keeper of the King’s ­Running Horses in 1727 and died in 1782:

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I believe [Panton] was a shrewd jockey at the center of the group who took control of the Jockey Club (and effectively Newmarket) following the scandalous, riotous spring meeting of 1751. . . . ​Panton would not have been a “judge” in the low, trivial sense of the law; but he WOULD have been a judge in the far more elevated and impor­tant capacity of a placing judge—­one of ­t hose members of the Jockey Club to whom disputes would be referred in the case of ­either disputes over wagering or decisions in close finishes before the existence of the photo finish camera. And I think that Panton would have been known for the necessary integrity to be a trusted arbiter of contests involving as many sharpers, con-­men, knaves, and naifs as found their way to Newmarket. (Richard Nash, e-­mail message to author, 23 March 2017) I read this poem in­de­pen­dent of speculations about attribution, however, as my focus is less on the historical figures Boswell might be satirizing and more on the unique kind of poetic world he is sketching for us in his “Portraiture” of Newmarket’s “Throng/ Of DUKES and LORDS” (14). Moreover, I won­der if James Caudle is right when he conjectures that some of ­these characters indeed might be in­ven­ted. Caudle suggested that some of Boswell’s poetic works from around this time seem to be set in an “imaginary London of lit­er­a­ture and lore” (James J. Caudle, e-­mail message to author, 22 March 2017). 14. Almost exactly a month ­later, on 21 Dec., Boswell is still talking about this windfall: “I was romantically amused to think that I was now obliged to my wits, and living on the profit of my works, having got just 13s. by my Cub” (London, 48). 15. James J. Caudle, unpublished commentary. 16. Donald W. Nichol, “Jockeying for Position: Horse Culture in Poetry, Prose, and The New Foundling Hospital for Wit,” in British Sporting Lit­er­a­ture and Culture in the Long Eigh­ teenth ­Century, ed. Sharon Harrow (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 125. 17. Erskine to Boswell, Kelly, 11 Sept. 1761, Hankins: Corr., 91 18. Thomas A. King, “How (Not) to Queer Boswell,” in Queer P ­ eople: Negotiations and Expressions of Homo­sexuality, 1700–1800,” ed. Chris Munsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 116. 19. The Coffee Room at the Jockey Club opened in 1752. 20. Pottle, ­Earlier Years, 61.

chapter 7

Q

The Hypochondriack and Its Context James Boswell, 1777–1783 Allan Ingram

Boswell’s Hypochondriack series of essays, seventy in all, appeared monthly in the London Magazine between October 1777 and August 1783. His first paper, though, ­under the pseudonym “The Hypochondriack” was actually written in 1765, thirteen years before it was fi­nally published. He wrote it while on the Italian leg of his ­Grand Tour, in Milan, a city in which he spent only two brief sets of nights: 25 and 26 January, and 25, 26, and 27—­and possibly 28 as well—­July. He thus apparently confirms what he tells us in the published essay: “That Essay was hastily composed in a gay flow of spirits.”1 Given that in the January stay he spent Friday the twenty-­fifth looking at churches, and Saturday the twenty-­sixth walking outside the city and then visiting the Ambrosian Library, as well as more churches, followed by a call on “Padre Allenranza, a Dominican friar,” to whom he had a letter of introduction, and fi­nally attending the opera (“The singers seemed very slovenly”),2 he would have done extremely well to have squeezed in the composition of an essay, albeit a fairly short and trivial one. Equally, during the July stay, he was visiting with Lord Mountstuart and busily falling out with him and attempting reconciliations, leaving, it would seem, neither time for composition nor a mood that could be described, even ­a fter an interval of thirteen years, as “a gay flow of spirits.”3 He had, he tells us in introducing the Milan essay, formed the “scheme of writing a periodical paper, entitled The Hypochondriack . . . ​while I was travelling upon the continent,” 4 which places the idea anywhere between June  1764 and the ­actual writing of that first paper, though Margery Bailey, in her introduction to the work, puts it e­ arlier in the Italian phase,5 which in practical terms means from 7 January, when he arrived in Turin.6 A set of notes, however, on the reverse of his journal page for 108

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21 November 1764, when he was in Strasbourg, is headed “Hypochond,”7 which would seem to pin down the question rather more precisely: he was actively considering the proj­ect this early, even if the ­actual writing was put aside for several more months. What it does demonstrate, though, what­ever the facts of the conception and composition, is that Boswell in 1765, in his mid-­twenties, was far more compulsive, energetic, and speedily creative than the self of the late 1770s and early 1780s who actually sat down regularly and often unwillingly to compose the bulk of the series. Boswell in 1765 could act on a whim, without r­ eally caring a ­great deal ­whether the idea took off or not. In the years approaching and following his fortieth birthday, with a wife and f­amily responsibilities, he had quite a dif­fer­ent outlook and strug­gled to stay in touch with the freedoms of mind and spirit that had marked at least part of his youth. On a whim, Boswell had given the 1765 paper the number X,8 and in a gesture to his younger self and original intention, he preserved the number when the essay came to take its place in the series—he delayed it ­until July 1778, apparently unwilling to disrupt the enthusiasm of his first venture. Boswell was by no means new to newspaper or magazine publishing by 1777. Frederick Pottle, in his 1929 compilation The Literary C ­ areer of James Boswell, Esq., has shown the vastness of his publishing range, with pieces, from a few paragraphs to extended essays, in a multitude of organs: the Scots Magazine, which seems to have been the first, with poems and sketches dating from as early as the summer and winter of 1758, while he was still in his teens; the London Magazine, from 1767 onwards; the Gentleman’s Magazine, also from 1767 onwards; the Eu­ro­pean Magazine from 1782 onwards, including the two-­part “Memoir of James Boswell, Esq.,” which he published anonymously in May and June 1791; the London Chronicle, to which he was a prolific contributor from 1766 onwards, especially, in the early period, on behalf of the Corsican cause; the Edinburgh Advertiser, from 1767 onwards; the Public Advertiser from 1767 onwards; the Caledonian Mercury from 1767 onwards; the St. James’s Chronicle from 1766 onwards; and still more.9 One series of occasional essays, appearing in the Public Advertiser between 1770 and 1782, was published u ­ nder the name of The Rampager.10 ­These, as Paul Tankard says, “are almost exclusively topically po­liti­cal.” They are, moreover, “uniformly extravagant and frivolous” and, quite conspicuously, they failed, writes Tankard, “to make any impression on the imagination of the public,” even though “Boswell addresses each new occasion of publication with his characteristic gusto, writing as if he expects his name and persona to be recognized by his readers.” This was no doubt partly b ­ ecause of the highly sporadic nature of the series, with gaps, as Tankard says, of anything between one week and seventeen months,11 rather than b ­ ecause the “Rampager” voice was incapable of being fashioned into something that might have acquired a following. Boswell, in short, was already something of a publication junkie by the time he turned to The Hypochondriack, and he was also a Boswell junkie. Many of

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his pieces are about himself, not least his anonymous insertions—­t he “Notices of Boswell’s movements in Ireland” in the Freeman’s Journal for June and July 1769, for example, and “Notice of James Boswell’s having been seen on top of a hearse at an execution at Tyburn” in the London Chronicle for 24 October of the same year, followed a few weeks ­later, on 11 November, by “Notice of Mr. Boswell’s departure for Scotland.”12 What made The Hypochondriack a real­ ity, though, was less his addiction to anonymous journalistic self-­promotion than his becoming a partner, in the autumn of 1769, in the London Magazine, a position he very much relished, not least as “the only Scotsman among a com­ pany of En­glish,” as he put it ­after attending a partners’ meeting in London in April 1772.13 (The other partners w ­ ere Henry Baldwin, printer; Robert Baldwin, bookseller; Thomas Becket, also a bookseller, as was Edward Dilly; and John Rivington, publisher.)14 It was, though, clearly, another eight years before he could bring himself to commit to the series. The topic he chose in 1765 was “truth,” not an unusual subject for an aspiring essayist who saw himself at that time as working within the well-­established Spectator tradition. When Boswell had arrived in London at the beginning of his momentous year, 1762 to 1763, as a freewheeling young man about town, one of the role models he held up for himself was Joseph Addison. “I felt strong dispositions to be a Mr Addison”—in fact, “Mr Addison’s character in sentiment, mixed with a l­ ittle of the gaiety of Sir Richard Steele”15—­and his admiration for the essays of the two writers is clear in the model he had in mind for that first Hypochondriack. It is composed, as he says in his 1778 preamble to it, with “first an introduction in a more sedate style, by ‘The Hypochondriack’ himself,” followed by “a lively epistle from a supposed correspondent, whom in imitation of other periodical authors in like cases, I have not scrupled to praise.” He notes, though, what was clearly a change in the original plan from 1765: “It is proper to observe, that I had not then resolved to receive no assistance from correspondents.”16 It is significant. The would-be Addison seems to have realized during the intervening twelve years that the elegant mix of the serious and the frivolous that made The Spectator so influential a work ­will not do for The Hypochondriack, the very title of which suggests a more desperate and deeply felt style of writing and content. Moreover, the open-­door policy he had envisaged, with correspondents, real or fictitious, in the manner of The Spectator and its followers, was no longer one he could tolerate. The more mature, more emotionally needy Boswell of the late 1770s had to take responsibility for ­every word, even though ­those words might be ground out in the midst of work, f­amily, or the lowest of spirits. The point of The Hypochondriack, once Boswell came to write it, was its engagement as a hypochondriack with t­hose topics that fed into hypochondria, and with hypochondria itself. No external correspondent could do that for him, or should be allowed to; indeed, the benefit of the series would be its single voice,

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together with the knowledge that he, the hypochondriack, had continued to compose the essays, month ­after month, to a deadline, through thick and thin. Boswell begins the series proper, though, by denying that he is at pre­sent a suffering hypochondriack: “From my title of Hypochondriack I would not have it thought that I am at pre­sent actually labouring ­under that malady, but as it is a saying in feudal treatises, semel Baro semper Baro, ‘Once a baron always a baron’; or as one who has had a commission in the army is ever ­after called captain; so I call myself the Hypochondriack from former sufferings” (Bailey, 25). Being a baron, and being a captain, in fact, w ­ ere almost as close to Boswell’s heart as being a hypochondriack: the weight of his f­ uture inheritance, the Auchinleck lairdship and estate, was both a feared burden, in the anticipation that he could not live up to it, and a source of deep romantic pride, while a commission in the Guards, or some similarly fash­ion­able regiment, had been one—­unfulfilled—­ goal of his year in London. Both, therefore, w ­ ere likely contributing f­actors in the periodic sense of failure, of unmet potential, that was a strong ele­ment in his hypochondria. Nevertheless, Boswell continues, in his first number: “As I have now attained to tranquility and cheerfulness in the general tenor of my existence, I may encourage the efforts of t­ hose who have not yet escaped from the dreary mist; as the shouting of such as have reached the shore ­after a shipwreck gives double vigour to ­those who are still struggling with the waves” (Bailey, 25). He w ­ ill, he says, “sometimes apply myself immediately to the distemper,” but his “general purpose” ­will be to “divert Hypochondriacks of ­every degree, from dwelling on this uneasiness,” and he then makes the crucial point, both for his hypochondriack readers and, even as a former hypochondriack writer, for himself: “I desire not to have the assistance of correspondents however much I may want it, ­because I think this paper ­will be more beneficial to ­t hose readers for whom it is chiefly intended, when they are sure that e­ very original sentence is written, and e­ very quotation selected by the Hypochondriack himself” (Bailey, 25). In giving reassurance of his authenticity, moreover, Boswell also begins to sketch in what he means by “hypochondria”—­t hat is, not some of the more fanciful imaginings reported by authorities over the centuries: I am so well acquainted with the distemper of Hypochondria, that I think myself qualified to assist some of my unhappy companions, who are now groaning u ­ nder it. I cannot say that I ever fancied myself made of glass; or that my stomach was a stall with a cobbler at work in it, or had my brain impressed with any such wild and extravagant imaginations. But I have suffered much of the fretfulness, the gloom and the despair that can torment a thinking being; and the time has been that I could no more have believed it pos­si­ble for me to write even such a paper as this, than I can now believe it pos­si­ble for me to write a Spectator or a Rambler. (Bailey, 25)

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The fact that he has, clearly, written the pre­sent paper, though, together with his general tone throughout it, belies some of what went into its composition, and the context in which it was both begun and completed. It was started a good deal ­earlier than the autumn of 1777—­five years e­ arlier, in October 1772. As the editors of Boswell for the Defence put it, summarizing Boswell’s activities for the summer and autumn of 1772: “He had promised Dilly a series of monthly essays for the London Magazine to be entitled ‘The Hypochondriack.’ But this effort was apparently too much for the pre­sent inspiration. During the autumn he made some abortive attempts to produce a first number, then postponed the scheme.”17 Edward Dilly was both the publisher of the London Magazine and a personal friend and member of Johnson’s circle, as was Dilly’s bookseller ­brother Charles. At that time, Boswell was fully engaged in his work at the Scottish bar—­a successful and energetic advocate. We cannot know how much of the first number as it now stands remains from 1772—­perhaps the general tone of being a former hypochondriack is one aspect that survives, given his overall buoyancy at the time, but the essay was not completed ­until he resumed it in August 1777. By then, his mood, judging by his journal at the time, had become a lot less predictable. He seems to have finished the essay on 11 August: “Determined to rouse for Dilly. Wrote for London Magazine and to Dilly.”18 The fact that he describes himself as “Determined” should strike a warning note, just as “rouse” implies some considerable effort, less than willingly undertaken. Indeed, the previous entries in his journal show a series of mood swings and consequent inabilities to apply himself to the tasks at hand. During the week prior to Monday the eleventh, he was rather well—­indeed, on Wednesday the sixth he observes, “I wondered how a man was ever dull or melancholy, so well did all ­t hings appear,” and that in spite of having visited the sick Lord Kames in the morning. Not long ­earlier, from Tuesday 15 July, though, for over two weeks, he is not good—­first of all drinking too much, which leaves him “Sunk and ill” on Wednesday the sixteenth, “Sunk” on Tuesday the twenty-­second, falling over and hurting his backbone on Thursday the twenty-­fourth, and then “Melancholy” on Friday the twenty-­fifth, that single word being repeated in the entries for Saturday the twenty-­sixth and Monday the twenty-­eighth, with the variations “Very low and ill” on Tuesday the twenty-­ninth and “Very gloomy” on Wednesday the thirtieth. On Thursday the thirty-­fi rst, he enters: “Awaked thinking, ‘Oh, must I endure another day?’ ” followed on Friday the first with “Ill still,” and only on Saturday the second with “Somewhat better” and on Sunday the third with “some comfort as to hypochondria.” Boswell’s declaration in his opening number, in other words, is not to be taken at face value. He might be sufficiently well to compose a paper, though even that took him over five years to complete, but he certainly has no real right to speak of himself as a former hypochondriack. The pattern of moods while composing, moreover, improves ­little during the next few months. In October, when the

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first essay actually appears—in fact, the London Magazine tended to appear around the first day of the following month, with Boswell’s October paper therefore published in early November—he is in Edinburgh working on the second, on the subject of “fear.”19 ­After two days of overdrinking, on 9 and 10 October, the second involving being “horrible to wife,” and subsequently, on 11 October, reporting himself “Very ill forenoon,” he turns to the ­actual writing. This is his entry for Monday the thirteenth: “Exceedingly ill; as dreary and horrible as ever. Called Grange; groaned and could hardly speak. Wretched, wretched. After­noon, coffee and fell to Hypochondriack on fear. Did better than expected, but quite sunk. Bad cold appeared.” And on Tuesday the ­fourteenth: “Sunk with the cold. Vexed and fretful. Lay long. . . . ​Did more of Hypochondriack on fear.” It is over a week ­later, on 23 October, by which time he is staying at Auchinleck, before he is fi­nally able to post it to Dilly in London.20 The opening of the published essay stands out starkly once we are familiar with the circumstances—­self-­induced or other­w ise—of its writing: “Of all the sufferings to which the mind of man is liable in this state of darkness and imperfection, the passion of fear is the severest, excepting the remorse of a guilty conscience, which however has much of fear in it, being not solely a tormenting anguish of reflection on the past, but a direful foreboding of the ­future; or as the sacred scriptures strongly express it, ‘a certain fearful looking for of judgement.’ ”21 Boswell’s writing world, at the moment, was a dark place, racked with guilt for his own be­hav­ior, as well as suffering the effects of his cold. He might, by the end of the essay, be reassuring himself that hypochondriacks should guard “against the indulgence of unnecessary and excessive fear,”22 to which they are particularly prone, but the conclusion has taken him nearly thirteen days, and considerable wretchedness, to reach. Other papers are composed in happier moods: the third, on “war,” proceeds apparently smoothly between Tuesday 25 and Friday 28 November, but by December his mood has darkened again, once more affecting his task. Again, overindulgence in alcohol is followed by a series of bad days. “Excess of hock,” he reports on Saturday the twentieth, followed by “Very ill. Bed all day till near eight” for Sunday the twenty-­first. By Monday the twenty-­second he is “Pretty well,” but on Wednesday the twenty-­fourth he “Idled all day” and “Was fretful. Dissatisfied with life, yet not miserable.” Friday the twenty-­sixth sees him “Not well” and concludes, “Only comfort bed.” On the Saturday he is supposed to be discussing the continued confinement of his disturbed b ­ rother John, but reports, “Was so gloomy myself, could not well consider the subject.” In this state of mind, he is “Vexed that I could not write Hypochondriack No. 4. Had done very ­little of it.” The next day, however, while “Sunk,” he nevertheless “wrote Hypochondriack pretty well.” He finishes it on Monday the twenty-­ninth (Extremes, 200–201). The subject of the paper: “excess.” Ironically, however, when he comes, in February 1778, to write over two days his second successive paper on “hypochondria,”

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having “put it off” on Wednesday the twenty-­fifth, he “wrote well what I did write” on the Thursday, though he “Could not see how I should end it,” and then on Friday “got forward in Hypochondriack wonderfully.” He adds, l­ater in the day’s entry: “Had no melancholy at all” (Extremes, 209). ­Here, then, is the pattern for what is effectively the w ­ hole run of the seventy papers constituting The Hypochondriack. At some times, it is as if Boswell’s opening assertion of having attained “tranquillity [sic] and cheerfulness” is predominantly the case, at least insofar as he is able to complete his essay without fuss or anxiety. So, on 18 April 1778, in London, having “Got up in the most admirable spirits,” he finds a quotation from “Cicero’s Tusculan Questions which I seized and at once got into the finest frame and wrote my best Hypochondriack yet” (Extremes, 298–299). What is particularly remarkable is that the paper, the seventh, on “conscience,” was already severely late (“I had delayed so long by the dissipation of London that instead of its being ready for the press by the first of the month as usual, I had very l­ittle time”), a fact that in other circumstances, for example in Edinburgh rather than London, might well have cast Boswell into a depth of self-­recrimination (Extremes, 298). On 15 October 1778, in Edinburgh, he merely “Finished The Hypochondriack No. 13,” which is on “marriage.”23 On Thursday 17 June 1779, he “began to my Hypochondriack No. 21 and laboured close at it all the after­noon, hoping to have it ready for the post.” On this occasion he “could not accomplish it,” but nevertheless felt he “Wrote with a fluency of ideas and expression which surprised me,” not least ­because he had begun the day before “in a state of indifference” and was also feeling “averse to ­labour as a ­lawyer.” The paper, which was on “quotation,” was completed and posted to London the next day (Laird, 112–113). A good deal ­later in the series, in May 1782, having written “notes for No. 56” on Wednesday the eighth (the essay was on “penuriousness & wealth”) in Edinburgh, but finding himself, on Thursday the ninth, “unwilling to begin,” whiling away his time instead with looking “among old journal, ­etc.,” he “resolved to write it in the country,” by which he means Auchinleck, for which he was due to depart the next day. He does so, on Sunday the twelfth. “I felt a reluctance to begin,” he says, “But when once set to it, my notes pleased me; other thoughts occurred, and I was upon the ­whole in a very good frame. I finished my essay just about three in the morning, and went to bed satisfied.” As the editors of Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck add, the paper was “one of Boswell’s favourites in the series.”24 Boswell’s plea­sure in his essays, when inspiration and writing w ­ ere functioning well, was magnified on vari­ous occasions when he found opportunities to read previous—or even ongoing—­numbers to individuals whose judgement he respected, or when he received positive responses from friends to whom he has sent copies. This is especially the case as the series progresses. He reads, for example, “some of my Hypochondriack” to the antiquarian and fellow member of the Johnsonian circle William Seward while in London on 19 May 1781. On this occa-

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sion he does not specify which paper or papers, though the most recently published was number 43, on “marriage,” and he would have been writing the forty-­ fourth, on “prudence.” Nor does he give Seward’s reaction, but given that he reports that it was a “Damp night” and that he, Boswell, was “Hypped a l­ittle,” the concluding remark of the entry that “we did better than I expected” suggests at least a polite interest, if not outright enthusiasm. A few weeks ­later, on 2 June, while still in London, he does read the “prudence” paper to his “­Brother T. D.” (Thomas David), and notes that “He seemed much pleased with it.” In August 1782, on Monday the twelfth, in Edinburgh, he rec­ords more enthusiasm, this time from Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes: “This forenoon I had a note from Lord Hailes, to whom I had sent No. 40, ‘that it was a good essay, and gave an air of novelty to a threadbare subject.’ This encouraged me.”25 The paper, which was from January 1781 and therefore over eigh­teen months old, is on “plea­sure.” Boswell, clearly, chooses to miss the implied criticism of his choice of topic and to concentrate his satisfaction on what Dalrymple’s comment says of his approach. Again, on 27 January 1783, he breakfasts in Edinburgh with “Baron Gordon” (the Scottish Court of Exchequer judge Cosmo Gordon) and “Heard him read my first Hypochondriack on saving money, of which he highly approved. I left him it and the next, and the three on death, to read” (Applause, 55). Th ­ ere is a good spread h ­ ere, with the papers for May and June 1782, on “penuriousness & wealth,” numbers 56 and 57, alongside numbers 14 to 16, for November and December 1778, and January 1779, on “death.” Boswell is clearly expecting to get his m ­ oney’s worth of appreciation, or at least of meaningful comment, having found a reader ready to endorse the Hypochondriack’s perspective. More significantly, ­because of the literary eminence of the person involved, on 23 July 1782 he rec­ords that “One eve­ning last week I visited Lord Kames and read to him two of my Hypochondriacks: Nos. 45 and 46”—­t hat is, on “parents and c­ hildren” and on “parents and c­ hildren and education”—­and that “He was much pleased with them and agreed to revise some more numbers.” “His criticisms,” adds Boswell, “might do me some good.” In the event, having sent Kames the first forty papers, they are returned within a few days, read and uncommented on: Kames was offended by Boswell’s very third paper, on “war,” where “I had taken no notice of what he says on that subject in his Sketches. He said he thought it supercilious; and he returned my essays without giving me any remarks.”26 By November of the same year, though, he is again reading his papers to Kames, and at Kames’s suggestion. On 29, he rec­ords: “He put me in mind of finishing the reading of my Hypochondriack No. 61, in which I had been interrupted one forenoon. ‘But,’ said he, ‘begin it.’ I read it all to him, and he was much pleased with it. I then read him my paper on this age being better than former ones, to which he listened with seeming satisfaction and said I was right” (Applause, 24). Essay 61 is on “dedications,” and had been published that month

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(for October 1782), while the paper on “past and pre­sent” is number 52, from January 1782. Clearly, any bad feeling from the “war” paper had been forgotten, or was in the pro­cess of being smoothed over, while ­these subjects ­were a good deal less touchy for the by then eighty-­six-­year-­old Kames (who was in fact to die only a month ­later). Most significant of all, of course, is what Johnson thought, and ­here Boswell can be said to have hit the jackpot. Surprisingly, he does not rec­ord in his journals for the period 1777 to 1783 any instances of having read a Hypochondriack to Johnson, or of having sent him any—­even of discussing them with him ­either by correspondence or during his annual spring visits to London. He does, however, refer to Johnson in several of the essays, not, of course, as a friend, given the anonymity of his authorship, but nevertheless in glowing terms as one of the—­indeed as the pre-­eminent—­literary luminaries of the age: as he puts it in number 23, on “reserve,” which appeared in August 1779: “­t here does to be sure now and then appear an extraordinary man, by whom all should be willing to be instructed and entertained. Of such a man London can boast in the pre­sent age.”27 He also, in the Life of Johnson (1791), when writing of their extended conversation on 30 March 1783, includes an exchange about The Hypochondriack: “I told him I should send him some Essays which I had written, which I hoped he would be so good as to read, and pick out the good ones. JOHNSON. ‘Nay, Sir, send me only the good ones; ­don’t make me pick them.’ ”28 ­There is no reference to this conversation in the journal of the period, though Boswell does write of the crisis meetings with the other partners in the London Magazine, taking place at the same time, when the journal’s loss-­making is the agenda item. His series by then was nearly over—­t he last paper was for August—­making it all the more strange that this is the first recorded instance of his mentioning them to Johnson. The real triumph, though, in relation to Johnson comes ­after the ­whole series is finished—­a lmost a year, in fact, a­ fter the final paper. He reports it in an exuberant letter to his long-­standing friend, the Rev. William T ­ emple, written on 8 July 1784, from Carlisle, a­ fter his London visit of May and June: “I read some of my Hypochondriacks to Dr. Johnson, and he said, ‘Sir, t­ hese are very fine t­ hings; the language is excellent, the reasoning good, and ­there is ­great application of learning. I may say to you what my wife said to me a­ fter I had published four or five of my Ramblers. I thought very well of you before. But I did not expect anything equal to this. I would have you publish them in a volume and put your name to them.’ ” “Now my priest!” adds Boswell, scarcely able to contain his delight, “what say you? He is to revise them, and then I ­shall bring them forth in two or perhaps three elegant volumes” (Applause, 261; his emphasis). To have Johnson’s clearly genuine praise is one t­ hing; to have his papers compared to The Rambler by its author himself, a collection of essays that Boswell had long revered almost as devotedly as the Bible, took his sense of the miraculous to undreamt-of

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heights. Few hypochondriacks can ever have achieved so resounding an endorsement of their true worth! Critical to Boswell’s hypochondria, then, was the need to be constantly reassured, to be reinforced in his fragile good opinion of himself and of his abilities, preferably by p ­ eople whose judgment he took seriously, and if not by them, then to find ways of bolstering himself in his own mind. When this could happen, being “hypped” was less of a prob­lem: he could deal with it. When he could not, or when other events or alternative interpretations predominated, then we find him writing in a state of wretchedness, and even, at times, writing of his wretchedness itself. So, in Edinburgh, on Friday 17 September 1779, a day ­after he has recorded that he was “quite indifferent about every­thing,” and that “Nothing gave me any satisfaction at pre­sent but eating and drinking and lying in bed,” he completes his paper on “censure”: “Though in sad low spirits, got the 24 number of the Hypochondriack finished.” The achievement on this occasion makes no difference to his mood of indifference. He ends the day’s entry: “Maclaurin called on me in the after­noon and he and I drove in a hackney-­coach to Leith and Newhaven and saw the batteries which ­were erected to guard the coast. It was a dreary damp after­noon; I was sunk and dejected, and viewed the batteries as I have done potato beds at Auchinleck” (Laird, 136). Equally, number 55, the second paper of two on religion, is written in April 1782 during a miserable stretch of his life, with entries in his journal repeatedly stressing “Still idle,” “horrid at home,” “Very ill,” “Quite sunk,” “Afraid of virus,” “Miserable,” “Very idle,” “Still very idle” and, again, “Very idle.” On Sunday the ­fourteenth he is more specific: “Still afraid of virus. Was in miserable hypochondria. Saw my ambitious views in London all madness. Vexed at being neglected by Burke. Thought I’d indulge a proud distance and just be an old Scottish baron and Tory. A slumber in the after­noon produced shocking melancholy. Up to tea. A ­little better. Thought myself unworthy of valuable spouse. Was quite sunk. To bed without supper. Divine lessons” (Laird, 436; his emphasis). The next day, Monday 15, he writes the paper—­“Wrote Hypochondriack No. 55 agreeably” (Laird, 436)—an essay that seeks for consolation, indeed for reassurance, from earthly doubts in “Vital Religion,” something to set against the fear of impending death. As he puts it, “The dread of that aweful [sic] event is so habitual to me that I can conceive nothing so desireable [sic] as relief from its gloom.”29 He continues, ­later in the paper: Life being to the most fortunate, a mixed scene of happiness and misery, and to many, a scene of weariness and woe, especially in an advanced age, it is of much importance to us to have Religion as a comfort. . . . ​A ll of us, and particularly Hypochondriacks, should resolve not to despair in gloomy seasons, ­because ­a fter a long lapse of time, and many alterations which we have experienced in many re­spects, the real­ity of a ­f uture state does not yet seem clearer

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and stronger. Let us consider we are still in life as much as ever; and that it is not till we have passed beyond death, that we can be sensible of the ­g reat change.30

His ­father, Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, was in his last illness at this time, and sinking into infirmity—­Boswell notes that “Dr. Gillespie told me of his filing breeches” (Laird, 436)—­which would clearly have intensified Boswell’s already fragile sense of mortality and decay, as well as heightening his anxiety over contracting any kind of sickness. It also meant that he would become laird of the ­family estate sooner rather than ­later, adding to his sense of unworthiness. Moreover, when Lord Auchinleck did die, in August that year, Boswell acknowledged yet another source of pain, which must have been pre­sent in the months before the death: he “Wept; for, alas! Th ­ ere was not affection between us” (Laird, 477). Most telling of all, though, is when Boswell writes his third paper on “hypochondria” in December 1780. Th ­ ere are four “hypochondria” essays in the series: numbers 5 and 6, which take a personal slant while acting as introductory to the topic; number 63, which is more detached and deals with some of the lit­er­a­ture of hypochondria—­and opens with the extraordinary statement: “I have for so long a time been ­free of the direful malady from which the title of this periodical paper is taken, that I almost begin to forget that I ever was afflicted with it” (Bailey, 318)—­and number 39. The first two are full of interest—­t he editors of Boswell in Extremes describe number 6, which he was writing in late February  1778, as “a subtle and moving description of hypochondria as he himself had experienced it.”31 Boswell, certainly, is trying to make good his initial claim of being no longer a sufferer, in spite of serious relapses while writing numbers 2 and 4, but his air of critical distance cannot hide the genuine experience that persists b ­ ehind the references to Aristotle, the abbé Le Blanc, Matthew Green, Robert Armstrong, James Thomson, and Henry Fielding, and that gives the papers their value. One very practical way this comes across is in his refusal to distinguish between hypochondria and melancholy, as if this is a purely scholastic debate entered into only by ­t hose who have been relatively untroubled by ­either: “Perhaps t­ here is a distinction between Melancholy and Hypochondria, the first gravely dismal as in Armstrong, the other fantastically wretched as in Thomson. In my opinion, however, they are only dif­fer­ent shades of the same disease; for I know that what each of ­these poets has so strongly painted has been felt by the same person in the gradations of his continued distress.”32 Linguistic hairsplitting, in other words, tends to fade as a ­matter of concern when ­actual suffering is a pre­sent real­ity, rather than a poetic construct. So, he can undertake, at the end of number 5, that “In my next paper I ­shall pre­sent my readers with some of my own par­tic­u­lar observations of the effects of Hypo-

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chondria, which being the result of intense study of the dire disease forced upon me by sad experience, they ­w ill perhaps find come more home to their bosoms, than the observations of superior writers.”33 Indeed, this is largely what number 6 does. “Nothing characterises a Hypochondriack more peculiarly,” he begins, “than irresolution, or the want of power over his own mind,” before ­going on to admit to his “feeling myself strangely averse to enter upon the fulfilment of the promise which I made in my last, to pre­sent my readers with some of my own par­tic­u­lar observations of the effects of Hypochondria.” He has been irresolute, but now he resolves: “­whether I ­shall do it well or ill; for I believe that firmly to reject all pleas of temporary inability, is the best way to acquire that best of all habits—­a promptitude in execution.” He writes about languor, about neglect and regret, even about taking “shelter u ­ nder the cover of disease” in order to evade responsibility for the consequences of that neglect.34 But as the essay ends he moves to darker aspects of hypochondria, ones that begin to threaten the sufferer’s relations with o ­ thers, and with himself: “But t­ here is a worse state of Hypochondria, when the mind is so tender and sore that ­every t­ hing frets it. When a man is in that state, he is not only harassed by the same pieces of business, which when in a sound state afford rather an agreeable exercise to his faculties: but even the com­pany of t­ hose whom he loves and values is a burthen to him, and affects him with irritation.”35 Such tenderness, though, while indicating Boswell’s desire to be honest with his readers, is as nothing in comparison to what we find when we turn to December 1780, and to the extraordinary document that is Hypochondriack 39. “The Hypochondriack,” announces Boswell with the opening sentence, marking a striking departure not only from the myth he has been attempting to peddle about being a former hypochondriack but far more broadly from the w ­ hole Spectator tradition of the essay, with its tone of polite detachment and cultured conservatism, “is himself at this moment in a state of very dismal depression, so that he cannot be supposed capable of instructing or entertaining his readers” (Bailey, 207). The distance is down: the bond is broken. The essayist’s self that has been threatening to come through ever since his confessed reluctance, in Hypochondriack 6, to keep the promise made in number 5 regarding “my own par­t ic­u ­lar observations” (Bailey, 47) is suddenly standing before us, without pretense, naked but for a few apol­o­getic scraps of language. The game is up. He cannot go on. The moment is unique in eighteenth-­century published writing, matched only, in terms of a sudden dropping of all pretense, by Swift’s abrupt “But my Heart is too heavy to continue this Irony longer,” a ­little before the end of his pamphlet, A Short View of the State of Ireland, published in 1728.36 Unlike Swift, though, who then concludes his pamphlet by outspokenly and unironically condemning the reasons for Ireland’s continued poverty, Boswell doubles back on himself and reinforces his contract with his readers by writing

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on regardless. “But,” he continues, directly addressing his readers, “­after keeping them com­pany as a periodical essayist for three years, he considers them as his friends, and trusts that they ­w ill treat him with a kindly indulgence.” He therefore has “a mind to try what I can write in so wretched a frame of mind; as ­there may perhaps be some of my unhappy brethren just as ill as myself, to whom it may be soothing to know that I now write at all.” In other words, having broken the usual agreement between essayist and reader, that what is being read is a finished per­for­mance, preconsidered and deliberate in its delivery, Boswell is driving home the utterly spontaneous nature of this paper: he does not know what is coming. He is at the mercy of his miserable mood, just as his reader is. And he is quite explicit about how the essay ­will proceed: “Let us select some of ­t hose thoughts, the multitude of which confounds and overwhelms the mind of a Hypochondriack.”37 Such “thoughts” then provide large-­scale expansion on what Boswell has already said, e­ arlier in the series, about his experience of hypochondria, and they are given with a degree of frankness that ­will not much surprise modern readers familiar with the kind of personal details that are the essence of his journals, but would undoubtedly have had the capacity to shock deeply readers of the eigh­teenth ­century, accustomed to a diet of relative restraint in their periodical essays. Boswell’s “thoughts” mark a new departure from anything that the form had seen previously: “His opinion of himself is low and desponding. His temporary dejection makes his faculties seem quite feeble. He imagines that ­every body thinks meanly of him. . . . ​He envies the condition of numbers, whom, when in a sound state of mind, he sees to be far inferior to him. He regrets his having ever attempted distinction and excellence in any way, ­because the effect of his former exertions now serves only to make his insignificance more vexing to him. . . . ​­There is a cloud as far as he can perceive, and he supposes it w ­ ill be charged with thicker vapor, the longer it continues” (Bailey, 208). The paper becomes ever more frank, as the “thoughts” take over: Every­t hing appears to him quite indifferent. . . . ​W hat formerly had engaging qualities has them no more. The world is one undistinguished wild. . . . ​A n extreme degree of irritability makes him liable to be hurt by ­every ­t hing that approaches him in any re­spect. . . . ​He ruminates upon all the evils that can happen to man, and won­ders that he has ever had a moment’s tranquility [sic], as he never was nor ever can be secure. . . . ​Though his reason be entire enough, and he knows that his mind is sick, his gloomy imagination is so power­ful that he cannot disentangle himself from its influence, and he is in effect persuaded that its hideous repre­sen­ta­tions of life are true. . . . ​All that is illustrious in publick life, all that is amiable and endearing in society, all that is elegant in science and in arts, affect him just with the same indifference, and even con-

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tempt, as the pursuits of c­ hildren affect rational men. . . . ​Finding that his reason is not able to cope with his gloomy imagination, he doubts that he may have been ­under a delusion when it was cheerful; so that he does not even wish to be happy as formerly, since he cannot wish for what he apprehends is fallacious. (Bailey, 208–210)

As an outcome of undertaking to write a series of essays u ­ nder the name The Hypochondriack, such a set of comments, and the form in which they appear, is logical, and indeed, predictable. But Boswell did not expect to find himself writing in this way, not least b ­ ecause of the belief he strug­gled to hold onto for so long, in print even if he had abandoned it in his journal, that he was a former hypochondriack. It was the condition itself that eventually dictated such an outcome, rather than the design of the essayist. If we look at the journal for the time of writing this paper, December 1780, we are in for another surprise. ­There is nothing ­there: only a gap—­literally nothing. In one sense, nothing is a perfect symbol for what was clearly Boswell’s mood at the time, but one can hardly conceive that this is what he intended by leaving nothing. The editors of Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck explain, as the entry for Friday 15 December peters out: “Got up in sad hypochondria. Had several law papers and a Hypochondriack to be written without delay. Was quite in despair. Could not see any good purpose in h ­ uman life. Thought. . . .” Then the editors: “Eigh­teen pages, containing the entries from 16 to 26 December, have been removed from the journal at this point,” adding that Boswell fi­nally managed to write number 39 of The Hypochondriack—on hypochondria. “It is one of the best essays in the series, and perhaps comes closest to being a personal testament. For many of the essays Boswell ­adopted a rather stiff, aloof, and pedantic literary persona, but in this essay the persona is almost indistinguishable from the Boswell of the journals of this period” (Laird, 276). In fact, to go further, in the absence of any other voice remaining from t­hese days, this is as close as we can hope to get to the real­ity of Boswell’s experience of hypochondria at this time of his life. As Frank Brady puts it, “Boswell’s basic feeling about himself, though he could only admit it from time to time, had to be contempt”; in this essay he “took the public into his confidence,” expressing “his horrible state of mind with his usual clarity and power.”38 However, while the immediate days of the writing of Hypochondriack 39 are missing, presumably destroyed by their author, most of the surrounding period remains. To go back a ­little over three weeks, on Tuesday 21 November he rec­ords im­mense dissatisfaction with his c­ areer, having “no relish” for the Court of Session and being “vexed to think that I was now forty and had no office from Government.” He ends the day feeling discontent in all directions: “I was humbled to think how ­little I read, and what inconsiderable objects occupied my mind. I am depressed by the state of

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dependence in which I am kept by my f­ ather, and by being actually in straightened circumstances. I felt with some warmth Lord Mountstuart’s neglect of my interest” (Laird, 272). This is followed by an editorial note: “Six pages, containing the entries from 22 November to 1 December, have been torn out and removed at this point. Nothing on e­ ither side of the gap accounts for their suppression” (Laird, 272). Maybe not, but Saturday 2 December sees him “still in very bad spirits” and thinking that “I had no spirit, no manly firmness.” He is in “dreary despondency,” he walks for a while with his friend Grange “and groaned from low spirits” (Laird, 272). The following six days are spent in “sad low spirits” or “uneasy in mind” (Laird, 273–274), ­until Saturday 9, when a brief revival sees him through ­until Wednesday 13: “Was not at all well. Business was a burthen to me. I was fretted by it. . . . ​ Was quite sunk at night. . . . ​I did better than I could have i­magined. But was inwardly dark and cold.” The next day he is “still in wretched spirits” (Laird, 274– 275). This is Thursday 14. Then comes the day already quoted, then the gap, followed, when the journal resumes, by Wednesday 27, in which he remembers “last night in a dejected, uneasy state,” and comments: “I continued to be gloomy and had no relish of society.” So low was he that he finds himself, almost mechanically, in a dispute with “the Solicitor,” Alexander Murray, and engaged to fight a duel, though this is averted in the sober light of the next day (Laird, 279–281). In short, we seem to have been witnessing—or almost witnessing—­something of a crisis in Boswell’s life. He had passed his fortieth birthday in late October and was, as Peter Martin notes, prob­ably conscious that the figure he made in the world “was the result of achievements now more than a de­cade old,” and “that he had done l­ ittle since to enhance his reputation.”39 Add to this his increasing sense of dependence on his f­ ather, his resentment at his public neglect—­and perhaps his under­lying awareness of its justice—as well as his reliance on drink, and the dreary uniformity of the journal makes sense. And yet, actually destroying part of it was for Boswell a very serious step. As he puts it in his Hypochondriack 66, on “diaries,” which was written in March 1783, and therefore over three years and nearly thirty essays ­later: when he discovered, ­after his period in Holland, that his Dutch journal had been lost, “I was sadly vexed, and felt as if a part of my vitals had been separated from me.” 40 He occasionally inks out entries that he l­ ater regrets, or is ashamed of—­his cruel treatment of the Corsican mastiff, Jachone, presented to him on Corsica by General Paoli is one such instance41—­ but in general he considers it impor­tant that he preserves as exact an account of himself as he can, what­ever embarrassments or discomforts it might hold. To remove two sizeable sections within a few weeks, then, while we cannot entirely discount the possibility of their having been destroyed by an unknown hand ­after his death, represents a major breakdown of the norms of Boswell’s existence. As Susan Manning has put it, “More than anything e­ lse about his melancholy, Boswell fears its intractable silences, its unwriteability, that aspect of it that

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cannot be communicated or recognized by o ­ thers as part of himself.” 42 If he is unable even to face having expressed it in his own journal, written for himself about himself, what hope is t­ here of ever being able to put trust in the power of language, of self-­expression? The integrity of the journal is gone, one of its main functions obliterated, like so much waste paper. Silence does, in a sense, also exist in The Hypochondriack itself: it is found when Boswell makes do with a previously published essay, or a previously written one, in place of what he had committed himself to write. Such is the case, as we have seen, with number 10, on “truth,” and it is done for reasons that he makes clear. However, he also inserts number 47, on “the new freezing discovery,” previously published in the Public Advertiser for 2 June 1770; number 49, on “identification by numbers,” also from the Public Advertiser, for 22 January 1768; and number 68, on “executions,” from the same source, for 26 April 1768.43 In each case the reprinted essay is introduced by a few words of explanation. At the time he was supposed to be writing the first of ­t hese, number 47, August 1781, he is generally “dull,” “in wretched hypochondria,” “feeble and sunk” and “languid and sauntering,” and therefore “Could not write a Hypochondriack. Resolved to make an essay published before serve for No. 47.” He might, he says, “have forced myself to write, but thought it as well to adopt a good essay” (Laird, 391). In October of the same year, he simply enters: “Should have written a Hypochondriack. But could not. Resolved to make an old essay serve. . . . ​Was very insignificant” (Laird, 401). This becomes number 49. During May 1783, when he would have been expected to deliver number 68, he was in London, enjoying his annual visit. While he does occasionally report even ­t here being “in dreary hypochondria” (Applause, 140), and while ­t here are several days without entries, he is, as usual on t­ hese trips, lively, vigorous, fully booked, and often drunk. It should be safe to conclude that he merely supplied the ­earlier essay rather than interrupt the flow of his hedonism. But ­t here is silence and silence: silence on the part of an essayist, supplying an alternative voice, might stand for a life of fulfilled engagement being lived elsewhere, off the page, or it might stand for a state of wretchedness, being too miserable to do more than shuffle in a few extraneous papers. The inserted papers in The Hypochondriack are a substitute for silence, what­ever its cause. Silence on the part of the journalist, however, particularly silence where ­t here had previously been words, information, self, is a more devastating breaking of a contract: the contract the journalist makes with himself. This silence represents no kind of belief in a capacity to derive any value from preserving something of the individual—no belief, indeed, in the power of words to do anything other than damage. For a writer, it is submitting to voluntary self-­immolation. It has to be said that Boswell does, in fact, conclude Hypochondriack 39 on a positive note, with paragraphs on the saving benefits of religion—of “the comforts of GOD . . . ​whose mercy is over all his other works, and who graciously

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hears the prayers of the afflicted.” He stresses the need to “have the princi­ples of our holy religion firmly established in his mind when it is sound and clear . . . ​ so that the flame may live even in the damp and foul vapour of melancholy.” Religion ­w ill teach him “that his sufferings however severe ­w ill be found beneficial to him in the other world, as having prepared him for the felicity of the saints above” and ­w ill do so “by some mysterious constitution, to be afterwards explained” (Bailey, 210). Such a fallback position reads rather like a wish fulfillment ­a fter the increasing hopelessness of what has preceded it; nevertheless, Boswell has had the control to reach for that fallback and to assert it in meaningful, if somewhat mechanical, terms. Such belief, clearly, plays a part in getting him through this par­tic­u­lar night. He finishes, moreover, with a reassertion of the value, a­ fter all, of written language: “While writing this paper, I have by some gracious influence been insensibly relieved from the distress ­u nder which I laboured when I began it” (Bailey, 210). Writing is still t­ here, and religion is still t­ here, and both seem to have served him in this instance, though the surrounding gloom of his life may not yet have lifted. Despair ­here is for Boswell of l­imited duration and ­t here are steps to be taken to help to mitigate it—­which one cannot say, as I argue below, with any confidence of the final stages of his life in London. The issue brings clearly into focus the purpose The Hypochondriack seems to have served in Boswell’s writing c­ areer. The set task, for one t­ hing, was intended to provide a discipline that would be both productive and, he hoped, instructive and helpful to o ­ thers—to “my atrabilious brethren,” as he puts it in number 5 (Bailey, 43). Indeed, the productive aspect for a while so satisfied him that, as already noted, he looked forward to a handsome collected edition, a plan that never came to fruition. But the hypochondriack perspective itself was equally impor­tant, especially as the series progressed and as it became clearer, as it must have, that Boswell was not at all the former sufferer, but one whose proneness to utter wretchedness was ready to unfold on the page before us, as Hypochondriack 39 proved. He might not have begun the series expecting to learn t­ hings about himself—­particularly not in Italy in 1765—­but in explaining hypochondria to ­others, especially d ­ oing so dispassionately, while not actually suffering, he was clearly able to crystallize aspects of his be­hav­ior and emotions that much of his journal rec­ord, with its notes registering “very ill” and “dreary despondency,” failed to discuss. In this sense, The Hypochondriack gave him the space for a sustained understanding of the distinctive nature of his feelings about the condition and its implications for the hypochondriack individual. In the late 1780s and 1790s, ­after he had moved to London, with Johnson dead and with his own wife, Margaret, ­dying of consumption back in Auchinleck (she died on 4 June 1789), and with his hoped-­for ­career at the En­glish bar non­ex­is­ tent, Boswell experienced prob­ably the most sustained period of misery of his entire life. The journal of the time, of course, reflects that mood. It also contains

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a remarkable sentence, part of the entry for 10 October 1787: “N.B. Understood not well till a change is marked” (his emphasis).44 The moment is unique u ­ ntil this point in Boswell’s journalizing. He must be assumed ill u ­ ntil he rec­ords other­wise. Another, fuller, version of the same sentiment occurs two years l­ater, on 18 October 1793: “It is unnecessary to repeat my listless, fretful and desponding feelings, which, when I do not mention something dif­fer­ent, must be understood to continue.” 45 More even than destroying a previously written rec­ord, ­these entries represent the writer conceding defeat. Language can no longer cope with real­ity. From now on, it is to be silence that conveys the crucial information, information that is the only real­ity the journalist is experiencing. The written rec­ord w ­ ill not reflect what is most impor­tant about his life. We have, in other words, the very antithesis of The Hypochondriack, and particularly of Hypochondriack 39. ­There is no longer any point in saying anything. Frank Brady’s assessment of The Hypochondriack was that it “is Boswell’s only long work to be a failure; it brought out his weaknesses rather than his strengths” (­Later Years, 176). This, clearly, has to be challenged, on the grounds not only of the textual and contextual interest of the series but also of its place within its time. Glen Colburn has written that “The Hypochondriack demonstrates the hysterical diagnosis of En­glish society in the second half” of the eigh­teenth ­century: “Boswell makes hypochondria a meta­phor for the difficulty of understanding the self and managing subjectivity in an age that has lost traditional means of comprehension and control.” 46 In Boswell’s hands, he argues, “The hypochondriac, the very emblem of inconsistency, has become representative of ­human nature generally.” 47 I have argued elsewhere that Boswell was unusually sensitive to the mood of his time, and reacted to it in ways that he himself was prob­ably not wholly aware of.48 Certainly, in writing a sustained series of essays such as The Hypochondriack, he accumulated a remarkable rec­ord of an individual mind, quite distinct from a Spectator or a Rambler, or from a Rampager, reacting to a range of topics, more and less personal, both traditional and nontraditional, and in d ­ oing so managed to change the essay tradition in En­glish culture. ­After Boswell, it was legitimate for the self to be a core f­ actor within the essay. ­W hether that counts as a failure is a ­matter of opinion, but it is undoubtedly a significant shift within our literary inheritance.

Notes 1. Boswell’s Column 1777–1783, Being His Seventy Contributions to the London Magazine ­ nder the Pseudonym The Hypochondriack, ed. Margery Bailey (London: William Kimber, u 1951), 65. Hereafter referred to as Bailey. 2. James Boswell, Boswell on the G ­ rand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1955), 46, 47. Hereafter referred to as Tour: Italy. 3. See Tour: Italy, 112–114, and Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The E ­ arlier Years, 1740– 1769 (1966; repr., New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1984), 233–234. 4. Hypochondriack 10, Bailey, 65.

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5. Margery Bailey, introduction to Boswell’s Column (London: William Kimber, 1951), xix. 6. See Tour: Italy, 24. 7. James Boswell, The Journal of his Swiss and German Travels, 1764, ed. Marlies K. Danziger (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), Appendix 1, 346–347. 8. Bailey, 65. 9. Frederick Albert Pottle, The Literary ­Career of James Boswell, Esq.: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 215–266. 10. On this, see Paul Tankard, ed., Facts and Inventions: Se­lections from the Journalism of James Boswell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), chap. 3, “The Rampager,” 108–221. 11. Ibid., 109, 108. 12. See Pottle, Literary ­Career, 264, 245. 13. Boswell for the Defence, 1769–­1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1959), 16 and n. 1, 100. Hereafter referred to as Defence. 14. Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1982), 92 n. 4. Hereafter referred to as Applause. 15. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 88–89. Hereafter referred to as London. 16. Hypochondriack 10, Bailey, 65. 17. Defence, 141. See also Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1971), 138 n. 1. Hereafter referred to as Extremes. 18. Extremes, 138. 19. Ibid., 136–137, 134–135, 136, 187 n. 5. 20. Ibid., 188, 189, 190 n. 7. 21. Hypochondriack 2, Bailey, 26. 22. Ibid., 26, 29. 23. Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick Pottle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 28. Hereafter referred to as Laird. 24. Ibid., 443–444, 444 n. 2. 25. Laird, 360, 369, 470. 26. Laird, 463, 465. 27. Hypochondriack 23, Bailey, 141. 28. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939–1950), 4:179–180. 29. Hypochondriack 55, Bailey, 277. 30. Ibid. 31. Extremes, 209 n. 2. 32. Hypochondriack 5, Bailey, 46. 33. Ibid., 47. 34. Hypochondriack 6, Bailey, 47, 48, 49. 35. Ibid., 51. 36. Jonathan Swift, A Short View of the State of Ireland, in The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 12:10. 37. Hypochondriack 39, Bailey, 207, 208. 38. Frank Brady, James Boswell The ­Later Years, 1769–1795 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1984), 204–206. Hereafter referred to as ­Later Years. I collapse parts of three dif­fer­ent sentences into the single quotation without, I hope, distorting Brady’s main point. 39. Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 431. 40. Hypochondriack 66, Bailey, 334. On this ­whole topic, see Allan Ingram, Boswell’s Creative Gloom (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982), 137–138, and more widely, 128–138. 41. See Tour: Italy, 241 n. 1, 243 n. 3.

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42. Susan Manning, ‘ “ This Philosophical Melancholy’: Style and Self in Boswell and Hume,” in New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of The Life of Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 139. 43. See Bailey, introduction to Boswell’s Column, xx; Pottle, Literary ­Career, 227. 44. Boswell: The En­glish Experiment, 1785–1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1986), 147. 45. Boswell: The ­Great Biographer, 1789–1795, ed. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1989), 243–244. 46. Glen Colburn, introduction to The En­glish Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions, ed. Glen Colburn (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 6. 47. Colburn, En­glish Malady, 9. 48. Allan Ingram, “In Two Minds: Johnson, Boswell and Repre­sen­ta­tions of the Self,” in Writing and Constructing the Self in ­Great Britain in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century, ed. John Baker, Marion Leclair and Allan Ingram (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 135–150.

chapter 8

Q

The Embodied Mind of Boswell’s The Hypochondriack and the Turn-­of-­the-­Century Novel Jennifer Preston Wilson

James Boswell began The Hypochondriack essays in the London Magazine in October 1777, and the series ran u ­ ntil August 1783. It was during this period that the medical definition of hypochondria was shifting from the category of somatic ner­vous ailment to a predominantly psychological condition. This was by no means an instantaneous or ­simple change in diagnosis. Prior to the seventeenth ­century, hypochondria had been known as an ambiguous illness of the abdominal organs, and among its symptoms was melancholy.1 In the late 1600s, Dr. Thomas Willis and Dr. Thomas Sydenham re­oriented understanding of both hypochondria in men and hysteria in w ­ omen as ner­vous disorders in which splenetic “vapours” affected the brain.2 Subsequently, Newtonian models prevailed, positing a structural interaction between ner­vous “fibres” and the ­great “Sensorium” of the mind. George Cheyne’s influential The En­glish Malady of 1733, for instance, held that a “lax, feeble, and unelastick State of the Fibres or Nerves” provoked the disease.3 In other variations of that time, ­t hese fibers ­were said to carry animal spirits or fluids as the medium of communication. As the eigh­ teenth c­ entury progressed, medical theories became more systematized. Robert Whytt argued that a pro­cess of sympathy united the nerves with the brain in a ner­vous system, and William Cullen identified all diseases, including insanity, as connected to the ner­vous system.4 Following Cullen’s 1780s identification of hypochondria as a functional, neurophysiological disturbance of the cognitive function,5 early nineteenth-­century doctors situated the condition entirely in the brain, ultimately separating the disease from its melancholic associations and defining it as the psychosomatic condition we know by that name ­today. 128

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Boswell aligns with the changing understanding of “the hyp” in his exclusive focus on the brain as the site of his illness and his insistence on the unknowable pro­cesses of that complex organ. Although he seldom refers to “fibres” or “impressions,” the core mechanisms of Cheyne’s nerve theory, Boswell does encourage self-­diagnosis and therapy much like his famous pre­de­ces­sor does. His language documenting the sorts of interventions that might be made by the hypochondriack, however, points ­toward nineteenth-­century psychological understandings of the condition.6 To remedy melancholy, Boswell advocates the cultivation of aesthetic experiences that expand cognitive capacities, much as his con­temporary, Edmund Burke, does in his Longinian treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Moreover, as he argues for diverse and diverting m ­ ental stimuli, Boswell often represents the unseeable brain in language that foreshadows the embodied portrayal of cognition in the turn-­of-­the-­century novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Read together, t­ hese writers mark a notable turn t­ oward portraying and understanding the mind in its most subjective and vulnerable states of being. Boswell’s emphasis in The Hypochondriack is on the essential, yet unknowable qualities of the mind. Even though in many of his essays on other topics Boswell likes to cite from his recent reading,7 in his discussion of cognition he refrains from allusion or quotation; this circumspection is apparent in Hypochondriack 7, “On Conscience,” where he argues, “The construction of the ­human mind is a mystery which t­ here seems to be no probability w ­ ill ever be known in this state of h ­ uman existence . . . ​of itself we know no more than of the original substance of the planets.”8 In this passage, Boswell gestures ­toward the magnitude of time and space to suggest how far distant science remains from understanding the mind. Boswell holds back comment on the nature of this mystery and does not cite the latest medical findings or ­hazard his own opinion on how the brain functions. In spite of this silence, Boswell returns to the subject again and again with more than half of the Hypochondriack essays on the subject of the mind and the needs or ailments thereof, showing a per­sis­tent interest in exploring the unknowable. In a ­later essay, Hypochondriack 26, “On Thinking,” he outlines the unending appeal of his subject, noting that “the extensive usefulness and plea­sure of Thinking can very well subsist, although our comprehension does not reach to a full knowledge of what Thought r­ eally is” (Bailey, 1:305). In this statement, he values the superabundant effects of exercising the mind, rather than seeking a definitive definition of what thought actually is. In Boswell’s theorizing, the mind, although ultimately inaccessible to scientific inquiry, is acutely susceptible to influences that can enhance or corrupt its capacities. In Hypochondriack 8, “On Luxury,” he cites the familiar meta­phor that ­people’s minds “shrink to the diminutive size of the objects with which they are occupied” (Bailey, 1:158). For Boswell, preventing this ill effect does not require

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outright avoidance of worldly objects, but necessitates strategic avoidance of materialistic small-­mindedness. In Hypochondriack 56, “On Penuriousness and Wealth,” he argues that wealth used wisely creates an awareness of beneficent power that fills the imagination. The conscious planning for pre­sent and ­f uture that accompanies the management of riches is an expansive incitement to the other­wise unoccupied brain. Boswell builds an argument that even without good financial fortune, the mind can be enlarged by other amplifiers such as immersing the self in learning, religion, or history.9 In each of ­these categories, the individual is taken out of himself and the pre­sent time to contemplate a larger pattern of h ­ uman be­hav­ior. The heightened perspective achieved through study of t­ hese vast areas of inquiry promotes mindfulness and, ultimately, happiness. As Boswell portrays it, any mind might benefit from such enlarging pursuits, but especially that of the hypochondriack: “[Learning] affords salutary food to his faculties, and prevents them from raging ravenously abroad, or secretly gnawing and preying upon the soul itself. . . . ​It gradually strengthens and gives a firm tone to the mind.”10 The externalizing of the mind on activities that involve a long view of knowledge, power, or perspective “gives a firm tone” to the brain. In this argument for turning away from destructive self-­consciousness and instead filling the mind with momentous questions that cannot easily be resolved, Boswell deploys the terminology of elasticity that George Cheyne uses to describe the condition of the nerves, but he applies it directly to the brain, arguing that its substance can, through effort, be modified for the better. Boswell departs from Cheyne’s idea that the sensory fibers suffer from weakness and thus cause the onset of the hyp, and instead holds that the mind when not given sufficient nourishment to maintain its trim ­w ill grow lax and self-­devouring. In Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796), the characterization of Eugenia engages with Boswell’s concept of the modifiable nature of the mind. Even though the selfishness and poor judgment of Eugenia’s b ­ rother Lionel and U ­ ncle Hugh have caused accidents that left her scarred, dwarfed, and hunched to one side, her brain has been cultivated so that when she experiences mockery for ­t hese physical defects, her mind is strong enough to prevail over melancholy. Eugenia’s ­father counts on her developed intellect when he surprises her with a visit to see a disturbing sight, a beautiful imbecile. Struck both in her judgment and imagination during this encounter, Eugenia’s mind w ­ ill never forget the impression and its lesson: “Beauty, without mind, is more dreadful than any deformity.”11 Ironically, Eugenia’s capacity for attaining this perspective has been achieved through yet another accident. Sir Hugh had employed a tutor for himself and his nephew who set to work only to find his students incapable and unmotivated. In a fortuitous switch, Eugenia is substituted as his pupil and excels at learning, thus finding an endless source of gratification. Burney represents the expansion of Eugenia’s mind through study as a “de­cided taste” that once established, leads her “to prosecute ­every plan for her improvement, with that vigor which accom-

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panies a pursuit of our own choice” (Camilla, 50). The language of “pursuit” ­here gives an active, healthy context to learning; her mind is aware of choice, not physical impediment, and her study is described as physically energizing. As Boswell might have predicted, Eugenia’s mind is modified and enhanced by her studies and extended by further ideas of improvement. In both Boswell’s and Burney’s depictions of the expandability of the mind, scholarly study is not identified as a cause of melancholy, as was traditionally the case,12 but as a remedy for its gnawing pains. For them, the pursuit of new knowledge creates a literal effect of stretching the brain. In a fit of the hyp, says Boswell in Hypochondriack 6, “On Hypochondria,” the sufferer’s languor makes him, like Tantalus, incapable of acting on his desires b ­ ecause the objects of his hunger perpetually recede from him. This image of attempted extension to no avail suggests the anger and regret that might have incapacitated Eugenia if her mind ­were to become consumed by the idea of her past beauty, an irredeemable loss. Her study of the classics (Camilla, 48), however, encompasses her mind and counteracts any pining for an e­ arlier version of herself, so much so that as she ages, that previous real­ity of her physical self before the accidents w ­ ill be forgotten. As she and Boswell orient their desires outward, exercising the brain in the search for knowledge, they may be able to reach a supplemental good. They may so identify with the objects of their study that through a pro­cess of transference they ­w ill not dwell on their individual curse, thus avoiding the fate of Tantalus. In a further parallel, both Boswell and Burney clearly stipulate that if t­ hese cognitive alternatives to melancholy are to be effective, they must already be identified and practiced before the fit of the disease comes on; they must be a regular support that becomes both essential and available in a time of need. Boswell urges in Hypochondriack 39, “On Hypochondria,” that “when the mind is sick and distressed, and has need of religion, that is not the time to acquire it. The understanding is then wavering, and the temper capricious” (Bailey, 2:46). During an attack of the hyp, the mind can rely on a foundation of belief or learning, but has not the strength to break ground to begin building t­ hese structures.13 Eugenia’s education is likewise portrayed as a previously laid infrastructure that protects an inner harmony: “­There [in her mind], in its purest proportions, moral beauty preserved its first energy.” B ­ ecause of its early configuration as a vault of “moral beauty,” her mind has no space for bitterness. Her misfortunes, having no place to lodge, “glided imperceptibly from her thoughts” (Camilla, 50–51). Such bulwarks against the hyp provide strong defenses ­because they fill the mind, replicating the effects of the sublime on the avid spectator. In Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, proximity to the sublime suspends all other ideas: since “the mind is so entirely filled with its object . . . ​it cannot entertain any other.”14 Sublime objects of contemplation take over the mind, occupying it completely and

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crowding out lesser thoughts. Both Burke and Boswell advocate pursuit of vast external conceptions of real­ity in order to take the mind away from its inward focus. For Burke, the true source of the sublime is power, especially that which invokes terror at the idea of pain, be it from a perspective of literal peril such as a precipice or a philosophical dread such as the vertiginous sense of time’s implacable course derived from the study of history or the awesome awareness of God’s might resulting from religious contemplation.15 Boswell similarly recommends such profound subjects of study for their therapeutic ends in anticipating and circumventing attacks of hypochondria. In both writers’ works, the experience and power of the sublime is rendered in embodied meta­phors for cognition.16 As he offers his advice on how his readership might manage their melancholic conditions, Boswell expends a ­great deal of energy on representing the mind in concise, concrete language. He frequently refers to the brain in bodily terms to make manifest its unseen activities. In Hypochondriack 10, “On Truth,” Boswell likens the newborn brain to the unclothed body of the infant, observing that “we come into the world bare-­footed, that is to say, ignorant” (Bailey, 1:171). By representing the mind with physical traits that all p ­ eople share, Boswell encourages understanding of and sympathy for o ­ thers’ subjective realities, particularly ­t hose of persons who face the challenge of living with disease. When u ­ nder the sway of his condition, Boswell confides, his mind lies languid, racked by waves of overpowering torpor that afflict him like “the troubled dreams of a person in a fever.” With this personification of his brain as a fever patient and other vivid meta­phors, Boswell gives interior states of being affecting material repre­sen­ta­ tions to foster awareness of unseen h ­ uman travails.17 Instead of Sterne’s famous formulation of body-­mind symbiosis, “Man’s body and his mind . . . ​are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—­r umple the one,—­you rumple the other,” Boswell draws on observable knowledge of the body and its feelings (the jerkin) to reason about the mind’s unseen qualities (the lining).18 Such attentive physicalizing of cognitive states of being in order to tune in to unseen qualities of mind that we find in Boswell also occurs in Jane Austen’s fiction, most clearly in Persuasion (1818). Austen’s last novel is a tale of the per­ sis­tence of love in spite of declining hope—­and of the material effects of such strain on both the mind and body. Its protagonist, Anne Elliot, desponds at the loss of her first, true love, a rift that has left its mark on her exterior appearance. Anne is now “faded and thin,” making her, in her f­ ather’s consideration, “of very inferior value.” Yet Anne possesses “an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any ­people of real understanding,” a lasting, interior beauty that is not noticed by her immediate f­ amily.19 In making t­ hese distinctions between external and internal worth, Austen gives physical descriptors to an interior landscape inaccessible to most ­people.20 Like Boswell’s attempt to manifest the conditions of his hypochondria-­racked brain

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for his London Magazine audience, Austen wants her readers to look within to visualize the “grace or s­ imple beauty” of Anne’s mind.21 Austen embodies Anne’s ideas, giving a material form to her active strug­gle against melancholia that resembles Boswell’s depictions and advice in his magazine column. In the long walk taken through the November landscape from Uppercross out into the countryside, Anne occupies an equivocal position. She harbors “some feelings of interest and curiosity” in observing Captain Went­ worth, and yet her “object [is] not to be in the way of any body.” To keep herself from interference and to cultivate “plea­sure” rather than bile, she eschews conversation for a ­mental turning over of “some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness” (Persuasion, 60). In this passage, Austen seems to enjoy the many meanings of the word exercise. The motion and expansiveness of walking through the autumnal landscape manifests, for Anne, in a harvest of the words of her favorite poets. At the same time as her body is moving through space, Anne is exercising her brain at a rapid rate, reaching out with her memory to pluck ripened passages of verse. John Wiltshire argues that in such moments “the novel’s treatment of Anne’s cultural capital amounts to the question: ‘Yes, but how far do ­these resources stretch?’ ”22 In this par­tic­u­lar scene and in a ­later parallel moment when she engages in intense discussion of lit­er­a­ ture with Captain Benwick, I would ­counter that, when cultivated in moderation, reading can assume a compensatory, if not a substitutive role for lost love. Boswell, like Anne in her time of affliction, relies on the cultural capital of books, particularly biographies, which serve as “­silent friends” who help move his “attention from [him]self to ­others.”23 The therapeutic motion of the mind, Austen and Boswell acknowledge, might be accomplished via any engaging activity. Boswell notes that he has observed men of business stick to their routine during an attack of hypochondria, faring like “a found­ered post-­horse [that] ­w ill keep up very well when harnessed to a chaise, though he falls at e­ very other step when rode f­ ree.”24 Austen, too, portrays Captain Harville, the shipman literally and figuratively run aground as he mourns a beloved ­sister, as harnessed to his professional habits of “usefulness and ingenuity [that] seemed to furnish him with constant employment within” (Persuasion, 71). In this passage, once again Austen parallels bodily and ­mental exertion. The fruits of Harville’s brain are vis­i­ble to the visitors from Uppercross in the many h ­ ouse­hold improvements he has seen through from idea to finished product. Anne stands in his small cottage, “lost in the pleasanter feelings which sprang from the sight of all the ingenious contrivances and nice arrangements of Captain Harville, to turn the a­ ctual space to the best pos­si­ble account.” What most amazes her is the way ­t hese inventions express the multiple influences on his mind, “connected as [they] all [­were] with his profession, the fruit of its ­labours, the effect of its influence on his habits, [and] the picture of repose and

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domestic happiness it presented” (Persuasion, 71). Harville’s artisanal handi­work thus lets Anne see into his pro­cess of thinking, his identification of needs for ­human living, and comfortable solutions to t­ hose challenges. While the narrator qualifies that Harville “was no reader” (Persuasion, 71), that phrase seems merely to distinguish him from t­ hose who cultivate reading as the core of their identity. Harville clearly turns over ideas in his brain via a mixture of meditation, conversation, and reading, as seen in his last lengthy and well-­informed interchange with Anne on men’s and w ­ omen’s capacities for constancy in love. As Captain Harville diverts his brain from melancholy with the design and execution of improvements to his living quarters, Boswell at numerous points in his essay series imagines direct, mechanical solutions to the interiorized difficulties his malady brings to his everyday life. In Hypochondriack 66, “On Diaries,” he envisions a more direct connection between m ­ ental and physiological structures, anticipating an invention that would give a transcript of the mind. This exteriorizing of an unseen, interior pro­cess, he enthuses, would be a g­ reat aid to diary writers who strug­gle to reach their innermost thoughts via the intermediary of writing. With the right technology, Boswell jokes, the diary would be an outdated form and thoughts could be accessed outright (Bailey, 2:259). Under­neath the humor, though, the desire for a brain that performs automatically manifests Boswell’s inner strug­gle to maintain the m ­ ental discipline that he expects of himself and that supports the reputation of a man of letters. In assessing the qualities of his own changeable personality, too, Boswell wishes that he had a more reliable and mechanically equipped brain. He imagines that with the addition of fanners (an agricultural tool to winnow grain), his mind would be able to sort through his vari­ous thoughts and control them better. Such a device might prevent Boswell’s frequent, after-­t he-­fact embarrassment at his garrulous socializing, and Hypochondriack 23, “On Reserve,” explores the idea that perhaps he simply lacks the equipment to act the part of the dignified man that he would like to be (Bailey, 1:283). The main reason Boswell wishes he could mechanically modify his mind is ­because he feels inundated with m ­ ental noise when suffering from the hyp. In his essays directly titled “On Hypochondria,” he speaks to the difficulty of writing while u ­ nder the onslaught of his affliction. Hypochondria generates an unsettledness that Boswell documents in ­great detail. His chosen epigraph for Hypochondriack 39, “In the multitude of my thoughts within me, thy comforts delight my soul,” shows how oppressive his divergent m ­ ental activity can be, with only religion offering some antidote to the flux of his varying thoughts (Bailey, 2:40). Boswell praises how closely this biblical passage mimics the dynamics of his condition: “Language cannot better express uneasy perturbation of spirits than the Psalmist has h ­ ere done. ­There is in [his] idea of multitude, disorder, fluctuation, and tumult.”25 While Boswell offers no permanent cure to this teeming cognitive activity, he does tout a temporary remedy for the hyp in diversify-

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ing one’s activities—­matching shifting ideas with shifting pastimes. In addition to recommending a variety of reading, so too, in his very first issue, Boswell advocates the writing of essays to occupy the mind.26 ­These enterprises, such as the one he at the moment is pursuing, act as “a pleasant airing” that invigorates by offering exercise and a variety of views. Through the social acts of reading and writing, Boswell finds variation and relief that gives his brain a well-­needed excursion away from encroaching melancholy. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry contains a parallel passage as he argues that unsettledness is a quality primary to all ­people. He begins his treatise with an analy­sis of “Novelty” as the chief concern of humanity: “The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the ­human mind, is Curiosity . . . ​what­ever desire we have for, or what­ever plea­sure we take in novelty.” By initiating his aesthetic theory with the prime mover of the ­human brain—­basic curiosity—­ Burke acknowledges it as a power­f ul, if transient, motivation, one that is soon satisfied and thus “changes its object perpetually” (31). Desire for novelty becomes a foundational princi­ple for Burke’s aesthetics as the brain pursues an accumulative knowledge and is motivated to seek new experiences. This pattern of animated learning and then movement onward to the next novelty is a very goal-­oriented, if fitful, motion. It does mark, however, an improvement on Boswell’s hyp, which in its worst form brings any ­mental pro­gress to a standstill. Boswell’s encouragement of new and diverse reading and writing is thus not a panacea, but in some milder attacks of the disease it might jump-­start a cycle of curiosity that could return the brain to its ordinary pro­cess of discovery. Boswell motivates himself in this endeavor in Hypochondriack 25, “On Diversion,” finding a role model in Xenophon’s life of Agesilaus, a king who could switch from serious leadership in moments of state importance to boyish simplicity in the com­pany of his friends. Boswell concurs with Xenophon’s praise of Agesilaus’s versatility, rather than imputing his changeableness to a reputation-­ damaging inconsistency (Bailey, 1:300). He seizes on this example of a successful although variable character to redefine his own perceived lack of dignity, as well he might in an eighteenth-­century social world that typically prized stoicism as an essential virtue. Against this pressure to remain reserved, Boswell uses one of his most vivid meta­phors to describe the compulsion the hypochondriack feels to conform: “Wretched is the state of an Hypochondriack whose distempered pride makes him imagine that he is to preserve incessant dignity of decorum in be­hav­ior. A Bramin who condemns himself to remain perpetually in one posture does not suffer more pain than the Hypochondriack who remains in continual uneasy elevation, and is for ever galled by the fetters of correctness.”27 Even though in other essays Boswell concedes that the mind is ultimately unknowable, ­here he uses the certainty of his own subjective experience battling the hyp to convey the cramped pain of forced conformity on the hypochondriack’s brain. The Brahmin provides a physical repre­sen­ta­tion of the

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debilitating self-­control necessary to lock oneself to perceived duties. Boswell chooses an Eastern meta­phor, unfamiliar and therefore more sensational to his London Magazine readers, to break through the then-­conventionalized discourse of sensibility with its nerves and vibrations. In Frances Burney’s Camilla, the title character is valued by all her f­ amily as a living embodiment of the princi­ple of delightful mutability that animates Boswell’s censure of excessive decorum and praise of Agesilaus. Camilla’s impelling creativity “had a power which, without consciousness how, or consideration why, governed her w ­ hole ­family. The airy thoughtlessness of her nature was a source of perpetual amusement; and, if sometimes her vivacity raised a fear for her discretion, the innocence of her mind reassured them a­ fter ­every alarm.” The ephemeral repre­sen­ta­tion of energy and unconstricted playfulness in Camilla gives her ascendancy over the ­whole ­family, but it is a nonauthoritative fascination that draws every­one into her orbit. She is portrayed more as a dynamo of moods and ideas than as a consistent and fully sketched person, as she generates “perpetual amusement” for the domestic circle. Indeed, the book’s melancholic “humourist,” Sir Hugh Tyrold, identifies Camilla as his favorite companion and excludes her from his marriage plans for the rest of the younger generation at Cleves since “he found in Camilla a variety that was captivation” and wishes to keep her com­pany forever.28 Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) explores Camilla’s vivacity from a dramatic perspective, and Boswell also offers a complicated account of the mind as a theater “open to the inspection of the world.”29 Lady Delacour, in putting on the costume of the comic muse early in Edgeworth’s narrative, acts out willful high spirits against a real­ity of false friends and competitive cruelties. Her supposed ally, Harriet Freke, has joined the camp of her rival, causing Lady Delacour g­ reat pain that she nevertheless refuses to show. Privately, however, Lady Delacour expresses her distress, confiding that “now I find she can throw me off as easily as she would her glove. And this too I suppose she calls a frolic—or, in her own vulgar language, fun.”30 In name and be­hav­ior, Harriet Freke is an embodiment of the princi­ple of staying one step ahead of the other trendsetters. When Lady Delacour is no longer useful to t­ hese ends, Harriet discards her like a soiled accessory. Harriet’s endless energy for the next “frolic” ­really has more to do with the ruling class’s one-­upmanship than a natu­ral capacity for engaging variety. Lady Delacour, in siding with the Frekes of the world, has subjected herself not only to the fickle attention of society but also to the dangers of circumstance. She has become embroiled in ­matters of both conscience—­t he death of Col­o­nel Lawless ­after a duel with Lord Delacour—­and of health—­her own bodily corruption and ­mental anguish from a wound suffered in a parallel, female duel. The intertwined involvement in male and female duels represent the vio­lence within Lady Delacour’s psyche as she has repressed all inward misgivings in ­favor of social notoriety. Boswell identifies this trap as especially dangerous to the

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hypochondriack, and he urges his readers to ignore “the applause of men” when it conflicts with one’s own conscience.31 While scale theatrics of the self prove problematic, an internalized cognitive “elasticity” finds wide support in The Hypochondriack and subsequent fiction. Boswell’s essays collectively value elasticity of mind, but suggest that this was an ideal rather than a familiar state of being for him. He concludes his panegyric on Agesilaus with the classical simile that the brain should be flexible like a bow: “The bow if not sometimes extended w ­ ill break; but if extended too long, ­will become useless. So is it as to the relaxation of the mind.”32 While it is easy enough for Boswell to venerate this hero who knew how to divide time between seriousness and plea­sure and thus maintain elastic strength of mind, what would be the golden mean if he himself ­were to attempt to reach that end? In the very next essay, Hypochondriack 26, “On Thinking,” Boswell asserts that “­t here is an ‘art of thinking,’ however difficult it may be to attain it,” and argues that this should be the aim of education, “so that ­those who are instructed, may, by habitual reflection and animated exertions, get the use of their minds, [as] the exercises of the acad­emy give them the use of their bodies” (Bailey, 1:308–309; his emphasis). The parallel flexibilities of mind and body foreshadow the muscular Chris­tian­ity movement of Dr. Thomas Arnold in the nineteenth ­century; however, Boswell seems to be less looking forward to the f­ uture than looking backward on the deficiencies of his own education and ­earlier character and trying to establish a sustainable ratio of work and plea­sure. Boswell’s conflict over life-­balance was amplified by his perpetually fraught interactions with his ­father and his own perceived need to grow into the role of the respectable, landholding patriarch. This strug­gle animates his triplet of essays Hypochondriacks 36–­38, “On Country Life,” which reveal his failure to cultivate an elasticity of mind that would allow him a happiness that could transcend setting. Boswell repeatedly attacks the “country” state of being, portraying it as best for ­t hose whose brains are “somewhat indolent, feeble, and timid” or who are completely insensible to place, such as t­ hose who “have their minds as coarsely interested with proj­ects of gain . . . ​as brokers in Change-­A lley, or electors in Westminster.”33 ­These scathing insults convey Boswell’s distress over his own lack of consistency in playing the role of the Scottish laird-­to-be. ­Those who could ­settle in the country in his estimation must be ­either uniformly meek or avaricious. In disclosing his clear preference for city life, Boswell perhaps unwittingly revises his e­ arlier simile of the bow; more accurately, he might be said to value not all but only a certain kind of flexibility—­t he urbane va­ri­e­ties of com­pany and entertainment available in London. As if to illustrate his point, his third piece of “On Country Life” breaks form with the previous two that begin with a maxim; instead, in the third installment, Boswell inexplicably ranges about, writing about Dryden’s verse ­until he belatedly supplies the connector to his real topic—­since Dryden wrote lines that are triplets, Boswell has license to write

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essays in series of three. In this anomalous opening, he departs from consideration of the countryside to contemplate his ­great London pre­de­ces­sor, only to rather hostilely return to his subject, reminding readers that he “did not undertake to conduct them along any par­tic­u ­lar path of science” when he became an essayist.34 His reluctance to delve once again into his own chosen topic is symptomatic of his self-­contradictory promotion of elasticity of mind. At first glance, Burney’s Camilla does appear to achieve the ideal ­mental flexibility advocated by Boswell’s bow image. Her outside and inside states of being both are of one accord, as “her form and her mind ­were of equal elasticity” (Camilla, 15). However, u ­ nder the scrutiny of the person she most wishes to please, Edgar Mandelbert, she grows imbalanced in both realms. Her conflicted state of being is represented as a suspension of self-­government. This prob­lem occurs in multiple scenes, but arises at a raffle where Camilla is torn between the free-­spending spirit of the crowd and her conscience that counsels her to retrieve her already pledged half guinea and apply it to a more charitable cause. Edgar watches this self-­debate, and ­under his eyes Camilla knows what choice she wishes to make. ­Later, when she makes decisions on her own, though, she vacillates in body and mind, entering into conflicting commitments and wavering as to what direction to pursue. Aware of the compromised appearance of her be­hav­ior, Camilla grows disordered in Edgar’s presence, “overturn[ing] her plate and a sauce-­boat in the vehemence of her haste” (Camilla, 169). Camilla’s impulsive movements at the sight of Edgar are analyzed by Juliet McMaster as part of a series of obsessive-­compulsive tics in the novel, showing how the ungainly lurching of Camilla’s body betrays the worsening inelastic disorder of her mind.35 Mind-­body imbalance manifests as a symptom in Boswell, who “starts into the extremes of rashness and desperation” when affected by the hyp,36 and in Edgeworth’s Lady Delacour, whose religious and love melancholy deprives her mind of elasticity by fixating her thoughts on death and loss. Spiritual dread prevents Lady Delacour from dealing rationally with her m ­ ental and physical health, and the presence of Methodist tracts in the heart of her boudoir indicates how deep-­set and inflexible this obstruction is: “During the solitude of her illness, her ladyship had first begun to think seriously on religious subjects, and the early impressions that had been made on her mind in her childhood by a methodistical ­mother recurred” (Belinda, 270). The social traits of ephemeral wit and showmanship that motivate her make it unlikely that she can be serious enough to excavate her past and judge ­these volumes with a rational adult’s mea­ sured thought.37 They are set in her psyche and permeate a vague dread of deserved divine vengeance for her sins. Her outward, domestic situation is likewise caught in a rigid deadlock. The early impressions of a first love she experienced with Henry Percival make it impossible to incline her mind in f­avor of her a­ ctual husband, Lord Delacour. She even jokes about the unhealthy conditions in which their marriage took place, cynically arguing that she served as

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an “heiress lozenge” to soothe the irritation caused by Delacour’s debts (Belinda, 36). In the portrayal of her distrustful thoughts we see how hypochondria works once it transitions away from a somatic condition to a psychiatric one. While Boswell knows that his disease, a “cloud [extended] as far as he can see,” w ­ ill come in passing attacks,38 Delacour has no such resource. Her inelastic ­mental impressions, of religion and of love, are preventing her from healing; t­ here is no real reason—no cancer or fatal malignancy gnawing at her breast—­only the fixation that she ­will soon die as she believes she deserves to do. In Austen’s Persuasion, ­mental elasticity, or the lack of it, occurs as an act of the w ­ ill in spite of alterations of fortune and lapses in health that occur over time. This pattern holds true for Anne Elliot and is reinforced when she is re­united in friendship and resourcefulness with her old companion, Miss Hamilton, now known as Mrs. Smith. Despite being widowed and bedridden, Mrs. Smith has learned how to knit and produces wares such as “thread-­cases, pin-­cushions, and card-­racks” that she has her friend, Nurse Rooke, sell among her charitably minded, well-­to-do clientele. Anne marvels at Mrs. Smith’s industry and especially her “elasticity of mind” in the face of depressing life circumstances. Even though Mrs. Smith has reason to think worse of the world, she treats her miserable feelings as “a passing emotion,” shaking off her low spirits (Persuasion, 109, 110). Rather than write this description of a restricted life in sentimental mode, Austen emphasizes the business acumen of Smith, who finds gain in the crass, self-­obsessed world that has compromised her prospects. She now knows this world quite well and calculates on its inhabitants’ desire to feel like good ­people who help the misfortunate. When the elite experience the betrayal of their bodies into sickness, their morbid self-­awareness offers leisure time for them to indulge themselves with ­others’ stories of woe. Smith’s illness, although it leaves her confined to her meager living space, is thus grafted on to that of her social “betters” through the intermediary figure of Nurse Rooke, who circulates Smith’s history and sells her handi­work. Despite this symbiosis, Smith is not portrayed as an opportunist or grifter. The active language of her shaking herself f­ ree from depression shows that she refuses to become a static object of pity.39 Rather, she finds spectatorial plea­sure in knowing of the world but residing apart from it. Her adaptability is surprising but illuminating to Anne, who follows a stricter code of virtue but recognizes the greater weight of life disappointments her friend must bear. Time and habit have enabled Anne to see past temporary evils in her life, allowing her to model a perseverance that Boswell also set as his goal in writing a monthly paper in the London Magazine. In the last installment, Hypochondriack 70, “On Concluding,” he surveys the total effect of his proj­ect, and with some satisfaction notes that he has done what he set out to do: “Be what they may, I should not have written them had I not been urged on by the obligation of a monthly task which I imposed upon myself” (Bailey, 2:302). Anne, having grown

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“hardened” to the experience of renewed acquaintance with her former suitor, Captain Went­worth, can likewise pause to analyze the ironies of habit: “The sitting down to the same t­ able with him now, and the interchange of the common civilities attending on it—(they never got beyond) was become a mere nothing” (Persuasion, 72). Like Mrs. Smith’s distanced participation in the fash­ion­able world, Anne now regards her own be­hav­ior through a philosophic remove. When, late in the plot, she comments to Went­worth that she would like to see Lyme again, he is amazed that a­ fter the “stretch of mind” she suffered t­ here in her last visit, she would wish to return. To him, the accident on the Cobb has assumed horrific proportions b ­ ecause of his sense of responsibility and regret at his own lack of foresight. To Anne, while experiencing the accident itself indeed was traumatic, “One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, ­unless it has been all suffering.” She, like Mrs. Smith, preserves an elasticity of thought that rebounds to find plea­sure and interest in life. From her “lowness” of spirits early in the novel (Persuasion, 129, 73), she has developed resiliency from travel, expansive reading that encompasses prose as well as poetry, and her attentiveness to the concerns of the diverse members of her ­family—­a ll components of Boswell’s advice for preventing hypochondria. In the first installment to feature the hyp as its central topic, Hypochondriack 5, “On Hypochondria,” Boswell describes the disease as a fire that combusts all m ­ atter to differing degrees; he thus urges his readers not to foster a hidden volcano within the self, but to crush the fire in its beginning, offering his theories on how best this might be done (Bailey, 1:137). In Boswell’s depiction, the hypochondriack, by cultivation of sublime objects of study, willingness to read and write discursively for diversion, alteration of setting and activities, and development of elasticity of mind, can minimize the ravages of this combustible condition. Boswell’s advice follows the therapeutic model of Cheyne’s The En­glish Malady and other early-­century publications aimed at a general readership at a time when most other publications on hypochondria ­were targeting an expert audience.40 Bowell also follows the early-­century, eidolon-­based format pop­u­ lar­i zed by Addison and Steele.41 The specific and changing trajectory of his disease becomes the locale of each essay, just as the differing coffee­houses of London supply reports in The Spectator. So, too, just as the early newspaper “laid the groundwork for the development of novel-­writing by habituating readers to a sense of ‘now,’ or of contemporaneity, that made the pre­sent seem in­ter­est­ing and worthy of serious attention,” 42 Boswell’s Hypochondriack essays helped establish a new psychological perspective that undergirds the turn-­of-­t he-­century novel. Drawing on Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theories as well as subjective experience and self-­help journalism, Boswell formulates a course of action for sufferers of the hyp that resonates with character development in the turn-­of-­t he-­century novel. In their depiction of embodied cognition, The Hypochondriack, Camilla, Belinda, and Persuasion allow the reader to think about thinking, with par­tic­u­

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lar attention to minds in chronic stress or pain. While Burney and Edgeworth construct plots that pursue psychic disintegration u ­ ntil their resolutions, Austen offers a hopeful depiction of Boswell’s regimen to transform the mind’s perspective on the world, an outcome he most certainly would have liked to have seen come true.

Notes 1. German E. Berrios, “Hypochondriasis: History of the Concept,” in Hypochondriasis: Modern Perspectives on an Ancient Malady, ed. Vladan Starcevic and Don R. Lipsitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 6. 2. Berrios, “Hypochondriasis,” 78. 3. George Cheyne, The En­glish Malady (1733), ed. Roy Porter (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991), 66. 4. J. Darcy, Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 77–78. 5. Russell Noyes Jr., “The Transformation of Hypochondriasis in British Medicine, 1680– 1830,” Social History of Medicine 24, no. 2 (August 2011): 285. 6. George E. Haggerty asserts that “this attempt to diagnose a ‘sick mind’—is what Boswell offers his own and succeeding generations.” While Haggerty considers Boswell’s hypochondria as participating in “a culturally induced form of madness that would be known by ­later generations as the bourgeoisie,” I argue that he studies his own hypochondria both to mitigate its effects and to develop his own theory of cognitive aesthetics. See George E. Haggerty, “Boswell’s Symptoms: The Hypochondriack in and out of Context,” in James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations, ed. Donald J. Newman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 118, 123. 7. Robert G. Walker discusses editor Margery Bailey’s approach to annotating ­these many allusions in “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Annotations of the Bailey Edition of Boswell’s ‘Hypochondriack,’ ” En­glish Studies 91, no. 3 (May 2010): 274–288. 8. The Hypochondriack: Being the Seventy Essays by the Celebrated Biographer, James Boswell, Appearing in the London Magazine, from November, 1777, to August, 1783, and ­Here First Reprinted, ed. Margery Bailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1928), 1:151. Hereafter referred to as Bailey. All subsequent references are to this edition and are distinguished from the Kimber edition by the inclusion of volume numbers. Hypochondriack titles are hers. 9. Bailey, 1:50, 52, 54. 10. Hypochondriack 50, Bailey, 2:130. 11. Frances Burney, Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 311. Hereafter referred to as Camilla. All references are to this edition. 12. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 208–211. 13. Even though Boswell appears to be encouraging devout Chris­tian­ity, J. Darcy argues that in reading The En­glish Malady and in ­later writing The Life of Johnson (1791), Boswell misrepresents both Cheyne’s interest in millenarian mysticism and Johnson’s religious melancholy. See Darcy, Literary Biography, 81, 90. 14. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 57. 15. Ibid., 64–70. 16. Aris Sarfianos discusses Burke’s “multilayered biomedical language” in “The Contractility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 23. Sarfianos also considers body-­mind dynamics in an article

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on the roles that pain and physical l­ abor play in A Philosophical Enquiry. See “Pain, L ­ abor, and the Sublime: Medical Gymnastics and Burke’s Aesthetics,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 91, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 58–83. 17. Hypochondriack 6, Bailey, 1:44. 18. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (New York: Penguin, 2003), 144. 19. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2013), 5. Hereafter referred to as Persuasion. All references are to this edition. 20. Kay Young argues that Anne’s state of fadedness means that she is not “perceivable . . . ​ held as an admired object in another’s mind.” Only when Frederick Went­worth notices Mr. Elliot noticing Anne does she “bloom” in his consciousness once more. Kay Young, Imagining Minds: The Neuro-­Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 58, 63. 21. OED, s.v. “elegance (n.).” 22. John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 150. 23. Hypochondriack 6, Bailey, 1:149. Boswell l­ater contrasts the healthful effects of reading biography with the adverse consequences of contemplating individual words as signs of ideas. Thinking too abstractly about language makes him feel a “giddiness and a kind of stupor, the consequence of having one’s faculties stretched in vain.” Hypochondriack 53, Bailey, 1:150. 24. Hypochondriack 6, Bailey, 1:48. 25. Bailey, 2:41. The psalm referred to is Psalm 94. 26. Mary Ann Lund documents the tradition of therapeutic writing in her Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern E ­ ngland: Reading the Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6–7. Roy Porter more skeptically notes that “feeling ill tends to reduce even the most articulate to states of mute misery or speechlessness,” in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (London: Routledge, 1993), 2:1576. 27. Hypochondriack 25, Bailey, 1:301–302. 28. Camilla, 51, 15. 29. Hypochondriack 7, Bailey, 1:154. 30. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 66. Hereafter referred to as Belinda. 31. Hypochondriack 7, Bailey, 1:154. 32. Hypochondriack 25, Bailey, 1:302. 33. Hypochondriack 36, Bailey, 2:17, 35. 34. Hypochondriack 38, Bailey, 2:32. 35. Juliet McMaster, Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-­Century Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 161–163. 36. Hypochondriack 39, Bailey, 2:43. 37. Nicole M. Wright discusses Edgeworth’s embodiment of reason in the figures of Belinda and Dr. X. See “Opening the Phosphoric ‘Envelope’: Scientific Appraisal, Domestic Spectacle and (Un)‘Reasonable Creatures’ in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 24, no. 3 (2012): 513. 38. Hypochondriack 39, Bailey, 2:41. 39. Alan Richardson reads Smith’s adaptability as a sign of her optimistic “native ‘disposition’ ”; however, I would argue that the active language of choice and w ­ ill indicates that it is a conscious maneuver. Alan Richardson, “Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion,” Poetics ­Today 23, no. 1 (May 2002): 141–160. 40. Mullan, Sentiment, 204.

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41. For more on Boswell’s use of the eidolon, see Manushag N. Powell, Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Periodicals (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012). 42. Brian Cowan, “Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-­Habermasian Perspectives,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-­Century Novel, ed. J. A. Downie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 65.

chapter 9

Q

Princi­ple, Polemic, and Ambition Boswell’s A Letter to the ­People of Scotland and the End of the Fox–­North Co­ali­tion, 1783 Nigel Aston

James Boswell’s A Letter to the ­People of Scotland on the Pre­sent State of the Nation (1783) can readily be seen as an inspired though opportunistic attempt to endear himself to the incoming Pitt government. This essay argues that constitutional considerations weighed at least as heavi­ly with Boswell as frustrated ambition and that his antipathy to Fox’s abortive East India Com­pany Bill was underpinned by disappointment with the Fox–­North co­a li­tion’s rec­ord in office over the previous eight months. For Boswell to write in f­avor of Pitt’s precarious “Mince-­Pie Administration”—­only ten days ­after its formation—­was a personal ­gamble with unpredictable consequences for the author. This contextualized essay, based on A Letter to the ­People of Scotland and his other journalism of 1783 to 1784, offers a fresh assessment of Boswell’s place in the paper wars under­lying the “Crisis of the [eighteenth-­century] Constitution.”

—­I— Boswell’s condemnation of the co­ali­tion and its principal legislation could not have been foreseen. The Fox–­North government had been controversially formed in March 1783 ­under the formal leadership of the Duke of Portland as first lord of the trea­sury following Lord Shelburne’s resignation as premier the previous month. Shelburne’s Peace Preliminaries to ­settle the American War of In­de­pen­ dence had narrowly failed to gain a Commons majority as a result of the followers of Lord North (who had led the government during that war) co-­operating 144

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with t­hose of Charles James Fox (who had been the opposition’s most forceful spokesman in the Commons during the l­ ater years of the war). The co­ali­tion ministry came into office having “stormed the closet” entirely against George III’s wishes, and the country had in effect no government for several weeks while the king desperately looked for alternative candidates to form a ministry. Eventually—­ and with extreme reluctance—he accepted the logic of the co­ali­tion’s parliamentary dominance and its ministers kissed hands for their offices on 2 April. Boswell, like the rest of the country, had initially been surprised by the convergence of the forces of Fox and North to defeat Shelburne, but, by early April, opinion had largely come around to the prospect of this surprise combination taking office. ­There w ­ ere plenty of the unaligned who, in the columns of the press, expressed hopes that the co­a li­tion might just work, such as “A Small Country Gentleman” writing from Kent on 4 April 1783, appealing to “the m ­ iddle ranks of my countrymen” not to view the co­ali­tion with “surprise,” and suggesting that “the moderate Whig, and the moderate Tory, may at length be inclined to view it with—­APPROBATION.”1 Such sentiments did not exactly agree with Boswell’s at all points. He had been uneasy about the hiatus in government between Shelburne’s downfall and the formation of its successor. It was tantamount, he opined, to turning the Constitution into “a ­g reat dicebox shaken by a faction.”2 The upheaval occurred at a personally uncertain juncture when Boswell was attempting to determine his own public pro­gress, having become master of Auchinleck on his ­father’s death in August 1782, thereby enhancing his status by succession to a substantial estate. His ­legal ­career in Scotland stalely continued, but it was a sign of his disenchantment that in 1783 he did not attend one of the sittings of the Court of Session for the first time since qualifying as an advocate in 1766. Boswell, ever conscious of what he regarded as his “neglected merit” and the need to pay off his debts, was seeking a new start south of the border only days prior to the co­a li­tion’s formation: he began to consider qualifying to practice at the En­glish bar, to enter the House of Commons, and to look for an office of profit ­under the Crown. On 20 March 1783, he arrived in London. His first po­liti­cal port of call was on Henry Dundas on 3 April, the day ­after the co­a li­tion had come in. Boswell was thus consorting with a lynchpin of the old order, not the new, the man who had tried unsuccessfully to persuade his former leader, Lord North, to throw his weight ­behind Shelburne rather than Fox. But with Dundas remaining in office—­ for the time being—as lord advocate (he lost the trea­sur­ership of the navy to Charles Townshend), and all interested parties struggling to come to terms with the unforeseen outcome of the constitutional crisis of the previous twelve months, Boswell could be forgiven for an awkward misreading of the po­liti­cal runes. The meeting indicated his ingenuousness within metropolitan elite politics; it also underlined the fact that, irrespective of the ministerial changes, Dundas was his main point of entry into that world. The prob­lem was that Dundas had no incli-

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nation to help him ­either enter the Commons or obtain a Scottish judgeship,3 and he received minimal encouragement, let alone any offer of active help.4 With this road closed, what­ever his constitutional misgivings about the Fox–­ North coup—­and they ­were appreciable5—­its advent represented an opportunity for his ambition that he could ill afford not to explore. If he could secure some lucrative patronage through the intervention of friends newly come into office, then an En­glish f­ uture might work out. Boswell accepted that in the short term the odds ­were against him. Even if ­there might be “­little hope” of winning a position in London, despite his “­family, talents, and connexions,” eventually he would “set [his] mind to be satisfied with a judge’s place in Scotland.”6 Johnson, Paoli, and Dempster insisted throughout March and April that the expenses of relocation to London made it almost impracticable for him to move south permanently with his f­ amily, though Boswell, in his journal entry for 4 April, confessed he still had “foolish imaginations” and was “not yet settled as to [my] choice of life.”7 At least the arrival in power of the new administration would make it easier for him to discern if his chances of making a public figure had grown.

—­II— The fact was that James Boswell was lacking in potential patrons at Westminster. He was barely known personally to Fox, North, the Duke of Portland, or any other member of the incoming cabinet;8 his best hope for a position lay with contacts at more ju­nior levels in the administration. Chief among them was his fellow club member, Edmund Burke, who had resumed office as paymaster general. Boswell visited Burke at his small country seat, Gregories, at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, in late April 1783, and enjoyed his hospitality—­but no more. Then, a month l­ater, ­after Boswell had been the minister’s guest at the annual dinner on Oak Apple Day (29 May) for Army Pensioners at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, just when Boswell might have anticipated that his hopes for advancement would move some small step ­toward fulfillment, Burke told him bluntly that he should fix his “mind on an employment in Scotland, and to come only for a visit to London.”9 Neither could Boswell expect to find his old ­Grand Tour friend, John, Lord Mountstuart, ready to make up for Burke’s disobliging candor.10 For a start, Mountstuart had only just returned to London from Turin; for another, as Boswell honestly admitted, he “would fain have asserted a lofty in­de­pen­dence of all aid from him and his ­family; as I am (though perhaps unreasonably) somewhat mortified at the want of warmth t­ owards me which I experience in them.”11 As a Portland Whig, Mountstuart supported the co­a li­tion that kept him on as ambassador to the court of Sardinia (where he had served consecutively since 1779) and confirmed his appointment as envoy to Spain, a position he had no time to take up before the co­a li­tion fell. They met on 25 March, when the peer, as Boswell, with the hint of a sneer, put it, “with his admirable calm clearness

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showed how the w ­ hole range of the party striving to get into administration w ­ ere needy men,” which, as Boswell saw it, “was a poor crop of old friendship.”12 They had several further meetings (29 March; 2, 19, and 30 April; 11 May), but t­ hese brought nothing immediate beyond Mountstuart’s insistence to Boswell (­after the latter had vaguely told him he “was to be with Duke of Portland, and should talk of management of Scotland”): “­There are but three ways in which a Man can have weight with a Min[iste]r: Talents, Parliamentary interest, or a ­great deal of Money to buy parliamentary interest.”13 And that was about the sum of it. Cast down by his own complete failure to elicit patronage and office, dejected by Samuel Johnson’s declining health,14 the hypochondriacal Boswell set out back to Scotland on 30 May.15 His encumbered estate and generally depleted finances made complacency in the hunt for preferment an impossible option. Henry Dundas’s departure from office as lord advocate in August opened up a new prospect, and Boswell unabashedly besought Burke’s “generous friendship” to take his credentials for high office in Scotland seriously and rescue him from a state of “dulness and discontent.”16 Even Boswell reckoned his chances of becoming lord advocate ­were negligible, but the solicitor generalship for Scotland (even if jointly held) surely lay within his grasp if Ilay Campbell was promoted from that position. Not so. It was not an area of administration that came remotely within Burke’s competence as paymaster general and, anyway, Boswell was just one suitor among many for ministerial notice. Burke did not take up Boswell’s offer of assisting the co­ali­ tion’s unpop­u­lar standing in Scotland, which, given the confined extent of his friend’s influence, was understandable. The best he could promise was that he would pass Boswell’s letter on to Portland with “my best recommendation.”17 And ­t here ­matters rested. The new lord advocate turned out to be the Honorable Henry Erskine, Boswell’s fellow advocate and firmly anti-­Dundas, and the new solicitor general (eventually) the little-­k nown Alexander Wight (an authority on Scottish electoral law), both appointments much to Boswell’s vexation.18 As he wrote, “All my lively ambition was mortified. I had no object, and indolence seemed to overwhelm me.”19 As so often, Boswell’s assessment of his advantages against other contenders for government f­ avor was cast unrealistically high. His lassitude and indifferent spirits eventually passed. By the autumn of 1783, perhaps goaded by the heightened awareness that if he wanted to make an impact on public life outside the ­legal profession, he had to cultivate his parliamentary interest and become known for endorsing a cause, Boswell identified himself with the movement for reform of the (Scottish) franchise and the internal reform of the burghs. Attitudes on this question crossed party lines and divided the co­a li­tion. It had been William Pitt, the opposition leader in the Commons, who had brought forward the modest reform bill that went down to defeat on 7  May  1783. Few assumed it would be the end of the ­matter, and the reform

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movement spread north across the border and, for the time being, caught up Boswell with it—­though, significantly, he never joined the main group commending it that was led by his rival, Henry Erskine. He did what he could in his own geo­graph­i­cal orbit. On 7 November 1783, a meeting of the freeholders of Ayrshire was held u ­ nder his chairmanship to press for the abolition of nominal and fictitious votes created by large landowners in the counties, and he forwarded their petition to the sitting MP, Sir Adam Fergusson, to pre­sent to Parliament condemning such votes.20

—­III— On the eve of the co­a li­tion bringing forward its controversial East India Com­ pany Bill, Boswell’s po­liti­cal position was detached and uncommitted to ­either the ministry or the Pitt–­Dundas opposition. Neither side had shown any interest in advancing him, and neither alignment had any apparent use for his ser­ vices, ­either po­liti­cal or judicial. Boswell had been left high and dry in Scotland,21 although, as his activities in Ayrshire suggest, he had at least been smart enough to consolidate his status as a local magnate with enough influence to make him worth courting. Conscious, perhaps, that Scottish public opinion was cautious to endorse the new ministry, he proudly held himself aloof. Interestingly—­and in a sign of his detachment from the co­ali­tion ­after his disappointment at receiving no job as a Scottish law officer—he made minimal effort to align himself with Sir Thomas Dundas, who acted as the government’s main man­ag­er in Scotland.22 As he wrote to Burke on 20 November: “You think it is not easy to sour my temper. But I should think meanly of myself did I entertain no resentment of the total neglect which I have had the mortification to experience, at a time when I had reason to think and when it was generally thought that I could not fail to receive some mark of attention from administration.”23 ­There is, however, no evidence up to this point (late November 1783) that, what­ever the level of his disgruntlement at the absence of his own preferment, he had any misgivings about the constitutional conduct of the co­a li­tion. Its creation had been achieved in the first place as an expression of the w ­ ill of the House of Commons, and even a monarchist as fervent as Boswell would not have denied the legislature’s ultimate supremacy as a princi­ple. However, the controversial dismissal of Fox and North the day ­after the flagship East India Com­pany Bill had been defeated in the House of Lords on 17 December 1783, with Pitt taking office on the nineteenth as premier in a weak administration with no Commons majority, once again made the con­temporary constitution the ­g reat po­l iti­c al background. Boswell did not miss his chance to wade in himself and, in so ­doing, make another bid for prominence.24 The abortive East India Bill had, he ­later told Burke, “alarmed my Tory Soul,”25 and he guessed correctly that he would articulate the discontents of many in speaking out against what he would

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pre­sent as a violatory proposal that justified George III’s dismissal of the ministers. Attention therefore turned back to what had made the East India Com­pany legislation so controversial in the first place. In a bill largely drafted by Burke (obsessed as he was with the malign influence of the Crown),26 the ministers had proposed to vest the government of India in a board of seven commissioners and eight (­later nine) assistant commissioners nominated in the first instance by Parliament. What made it made so controversial was that all of ­t hese men would almost certainly be Foxites, who w ­ ere uniquely—­and conveniently—­adjudged to be “impervious to the blandishments of Court and Com­pany”; they would hold office for four years, would report to Parliament, and could be dismissed only if an address to the king was passed by both h ­ ouses. It was a departure from the tradition of vesting all executive appointments in the Crown, subject to parliamentary accountability. ­Future assistant commissioners ­were to be elected by shareholders of the com­pany, but it was widely anticipated that in the preceding years the existing commissioners would acquire such complete control of the vast East India patronage that no shareholder would dare to defy them. The implicit threat seemed to be excessive influence over the executive by the legislature, “an unholy alliance of office-­holders and office-­seekers, the placemen created by North and the party magnates led by Fox.”27 The king’s good government would be subordinated to the needs of the patronage system run by co­a li­tionists. As Francis Baring had informed Shelburne a month e­ arlier, if Fox succeeded, “he ­will remain possessed of more real power & Patronage than any f­ uture Minister can possibly enjoy supported by e­ very ­t hing which the Crown can give.”28 The discussion ­either side of Christmas 1783 was therefore about the stark choice between ­either George III or Charles James Fox. It was for ­every voter and other interested parties to decide ­whether the balance of the Constitution was now more threatened by Fox allegedly trying to take over the powers of the Crown, or by George III trying to undermine the liberties of Lords and Commons. “No crisis had a sharper definition.”29 The press was divided, the public to be won over to one side or the other, and then Pitt’s position was made suddenly more vulnerable when his cousin and George III’s “messenger,” Lord ­Temple, resigned on the twenty-­second ­after just three days in office as joint secretary of state.30 It was over the days immediately following that Boswell intervened, in an effort to stoke up a public clamor supporting the king’s actions and encouraging o ­ thers to join it. He published ­after the government had come in; Fox had been dismissed but ­t here was e­ very possibility that he might return ­either in­de­pen­dently or in a joint ministry with Pitt. In thus committing himself very early to a pro-­Pitt position, Boswell was taking quite a ­gamble with his own chances of advancement. If the ministry was to survive, it was essential to rally public opinion across the entirety of Britain, and Boswell took the strategically sensible decision to

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appeal—at least initially—to Scotland in the knowledge that, contrary to expectation before ­Temple’s resignation, a general election would not be called for some time, and that Pitt would remain beleaguered in a pro-­coalition Commons.31 ­W hether the Pitt administration endured or not, at least Boswell would have gained public notice and, in the pro­cess, built up the electoral credibility that uniquely gave substance and credibility to his po­liti­cal ambitions. He had, in the short term, nothing to gain by courting ­either Erskine or Wight at the head of the Scottish l­ egal establishment, whereas Dundas, if no longer lord advocate, had already been appointed to office in the Pitt government and might be expected to resume—if not uncontested—­his ascendancy in the management of Scotland. Earning his goodwill would grant Boswell an incontestable advantage in positioning himself for Scottish ­legal preferment as well as consolidating his position in Ayrshire politics at what­ever point in the new year the general election should be held. As Boswell summarized his strategy on New Year’s Day 1784: “I thought my pamphlet might, at least o ­ ught, to do me good with a Tory administration, and surely with the King himself. And if it did not, I had the satisfaction of standing forth as a loyal gentleman, which would all my life give me better feelings than any preferment could do without the consciousness of that character.”32

—­I V— Thus t­ here ­were plenty of personal motives for Boswell speedily putting together his A Letter to the ­People of Scotland On the Pre­sent State of the Nation in the last week of 1783.33 The tract of forty-­four pages besought the Scots to rouse themselves from what Boswell presented as their current torpor on public ­matters, take cognizance of the precarious position of the new administration, and lend their aid to ensuring its continuation through petitions and addresses to Parliament and the king. Boswell took care to pre­sent himself in A Letter to the ­People of Scotland in a manner that would appeal to both Whig and Tory opinions with its two essential themes: the preservation of propertied rights and the protection of the Crown, for the East India Bill had been “ ‘an alarming attempt . . .’ to destroy the security of private property, and annihilate the constitutional monarchy of t­ hese kingdoms.” Boswell did not mince his words: “I look upon this bill as the most dangerous mea­sure to the country that ever yet was hazarded in Parliament.”34 In effect, Fox and Burke stood accused of abusing Whig princi­ ples, of infringing the spirit of the Constitution as established by the 1688 Revolution, a settlement that Boswell stood ready to protect when he paraded his own Whig credentials before readers with a reminder that he had opposed the American War and the princi­ple of no taxation without repre­sen­ta­t ion. For libertarian Whigs who may not have been convinced, Boswell provocatively inscribed—in his own hand—­the tract to John Wilkes,35 and, with a reference to

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“the flagrant injustice of the House of Commons, in the case of the Middlesex election,” indicated his willingness to champion the cause of out-­of-­doors opinion against overbearing majorities in the lower h ­ ouse. Interestingly, Boswell in A Letter to the ­People of Scotland returned attention back to the East India Bill when, as reflected in the press, it had gone instead to the controversial manner of the co­ali­tion’s dismissal and the appointment of Pitt and his allies. Boswell tried to show why both ­t hose events had to be read in the light of the bill and could be justified by it. Like many commentators, he expressed shock in anticipating that the parliamentary commissioners would have acted in detachment from the East India Com­pany, while their being required to manage it would be in complete violation of its original royal charter. “Can a more tremendous exercise of arbitrary power,” he asked (looking for Whig endorsement), “be figured than this?” It was so “shocking to the first notions of property and justice, as to make us shudder with consternation.”36 Boswell presented a royal charter as possessing an inherently sacred nature. To Scots who might raise objections that as recently as the reign of George II, chartered rights that particularly affected Scotland ­were capable of parliamentary amendment or even outright abolition (as the passage of the 1746 act for the abolition of heritable jurisdictions had shown), Boswell had a ready answer: such jurisdictions w ­ ere originally grants from the sovereign and w ­ ere capable of absorption back into the monarch. Furthermore, compensation was made to the heritors deprived of their rights.37 And, putting aside prerogative m ­ atters, the damage that Fox’s bill did to British good faith and international standing would deter ­f uture investment in British joint-­stock companies, for foreigners had invested funds in the East India Com­pany in good faith as “in this ­great and ­free country, ­t here is no danger of such confiscations or seizures by an unexpected stretch of power.” All that had been put in jeopardy by “the tyranny of that audacious bill.” Boswell less convincingly stressed that the bill had been rushed through Parliament and deprived interested parties of sufficient consultative opportunities, so that “when it came into the House of Lords, the alarm was,—­—­Stop thief.” Not much stronger was his contention that the bill potentially put at risk e­ very chartered body: “Cities, towns, banks, hospitals, w ­ ere in danger, and insignificance was the only security.” They would, he claimed, remember its defeat in the Lords “with admiration and gratitude.” Boswell likely calculated that a forgivable ele­ment of rodomontade was a means of frightening Scottish bodies to send pro-­Pitt petitions to Westminster and thereby serve the under­lying purpose of the Letter.38 He intended to provide them with ample constitutional justification in the second part of the Letter, the longest and most original part of the document, one that highlighted Boswell’s forensic capacities, laid out his (neglected) lawyerly capacities to make a formidable interpretative case, and, above all, disclosed a thoughtful assessment of constitutional protocols that he genuinely considered had been v­ iolated not by George III but by the co­ali­tion government.

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The foundation of Boswell’s stance was that the controversial dismissal of the administration ­after its defeat in the Lords (following the king’s rumored intimation of his wishes via Lord T ­ emple) was justified on this head:39 that the East India Bill drove a coach and ­horses through established thinking on executive authority in Britain. It was utterly inconsistent that Fox, of all men, should be its sponsor: “The very same Right Honourable Gentleman who insisted that the influence of the Crown o ­ ught to be diminished, and actually prevailed in having it rigidly curtailed, drove on this bill, by which seven men proposed by himself ­were to have an influence far beyond what the Crown ever had.” 40 Boswell likely sensed that he would need to do more to justify the king’s personal involvement than merely excoriate Fox. A ­ fter all, the bill had passed its stages in the Commons with minimal difficulty before it had been overturned in the upper ­house.41 Fox had denounced the peers’ rejection (­a fter they had, ­earlier on the same day [17 December], voted for it) as an “impudent avowal of po­liti­cal profligacy” that would, he declaimed, vilify the House of Lords “to the latest posterity.” 42 The best Boswell could do against this sort of charge was to propose that the peers ­were entitled to make common cause with the king and reject the bill as a defensive action to protect what he rather vaguely called the “security of their own order,” considered legislatively.43 The peers, he reminded his readers, w ­ ere also the hereditary councilors of the monarch, and therefore if George III had seen fit to consult with Lord T ­ emple during the parliamentary passage of the East India Bill, ­t here was nothing constitutionally inadmissible about that.44 Boswell was, somewhat disingenuously, inclined to dismiss the king’s intimation of his wishes to the peers in Parliament as nothing more than a rumor. But, tactically conceding that it might be true “that the Sovereign’s disapprobation of the bill was conveyed by a respectable Peer to o ­ thers of his order;” Boswell lauded ­Temple for his courage in rising to the occasion, for then “the Noble Lord who represented his Majesty in Ireland [July 1782–­March 1783] with so generous a splendor, and so much to the satisfaction of that kingdom, might justly say, (I love his phrase), ‘I ­w ill meet the charge with a high head.’ ”45   Boswell positioned himself as aghast at the republican spirit he detected at work in the co­a li­tion’s encroachment on the just prerogatives of the sovereign and the right to choose his ministers. Perhaps putting aside the par­tic­u ­lar concerns of a Scottish readership, he argued that the most plausible pre­ce­dent for this “jealousy of regal influence” was “that gloomy period of our history, the reign of Charles I, when faction grew more and more virulent, till it became rank rebellion.” 46 Boswell came up with an approximate pre­ce­dent for the events of December 1783 in ­those of December 1641, when the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland required speedy and effective mea­sures, and Charles I’s decisive conduct in crisis had been checked by the Long Parliament’s primary concern to limit his prerogative powers. All that the king’s bill for the pressing of soldiers had produced was the drawing up of the H ­ umble Remonstrance and Petition then

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presented by both ­houses to Charles I. ­Here, Boswell broadly suggested, was factional be­hav­ior of the worst kind, when the Stuart king had shown himself a model of rectitude and dignity confronted with parliamentary aggression and an assault on his legitimate royal powers. Boswell quoted at length from the king’s reply to the ­Humble Remonstrance and Petition. Charles I, Boswell intimated, was a precursor for George III, intent on maintaining royal power, not extending it, keen to behave in the interests of his kingdom, and willing to stand up to parliamentary intimidation. The consequence of not ­doing so in 1641 to 1642 had been civil war; the risks of such subversion recurring w ­ ere ­t here again in 1783 to 1784, if only the king’s subjects could see it and act in concert on his behalf.47 In the succeeding pages of A Letter, Boswell continued to shield the king from criticism and build up the case for the transparent legitimacy of George III’s ­handling of the constitutional crisis. In so d ­ oing, he relied on his relative familiarity with parliamentary procedure, references to the celebrated (recently deceased) jurist Sir William Blackstone, and his knowledge of seventeenth-­ century British history, balancing the three ele­ments with some skill and sensibly avoiding another three pages of quotation (employed to rec­ord Charles I’s response to the complaints of the Commons in 1641–1642). He began by looking at the options available to George III. What choice, he asked, did the king have in the circumstances of November to December 1783? He had an interest, Boswell argued, as a party in the East India Bill and was by pre­ce­dent entitled and required to lay his interest before the House of Commons.48 But what if his ministers had not previously and properly advised him (Boswell could not know ­whether such was the case or not) that his interest was involved on the scale it was? Then o ­ thers who w ­ ere acquainted “with the purport and tendency of the bill” could properly do so.49 In effect, the king had had two choices: ­either to secure the parliamentary defeat of the East India Bill or to use the royal veto (last used by Queen Anne in 1707). And he chose the least worst option, given that if George had denied royal assent to the bill, it would have occasioned an even greater “violent roar of faction.” Boswell grounded his claim by reference to the furor generated following the vetoing by William III of the Triennial Bill in 1693, when, as ninety years l­ater, prerogative rights had been u ­ nder threat. On that occasion, too, the king had resisted clamor: he had contented himself with making a general constitutional declaration in reply to the outcry raised by the Whigs in the Commons and, unlike his royal grand­father, Charles I, did not then yield. And ­t here Boswell rested his case. It remained to him to establish his bona fides with his audience, but first he implored Scots to act patriotically at this moment of crisis for the ­whole realm and to express through ­every public body “their sincere satisfaction” with the rejection of the East India Bill by the peers, the rectitude of the king’s conduct, and the appointment of the Pitt ministry (or

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indeed any ministers that commanded his approval). Unaware of the new government’s legislative intentions t­oward India (or indeed ­whether it would survive long enough to formulate a policy), Boswell could not be sure that t­ here might not be another attempt at drafting another bill along similar lines. And this issue was his starting point in his peroration: he reiterated to his readers that the public voice had been insufficiently heard against Fox’s East India Bill, and petitions directed against it now might have weight in forestalling any renewal of the attempt.50 Moreover, Boswell suggested, striking an ultra-­royalist note that combined commiseration with exaggerated deference, any such petitions would offer comfort to “our most gracious Sovereign, whose exalted worth and benignity are far above my panegyric.”51 All that mattered was that repre­ sen­ta­t ions should be made without delay by the Scottish p ­ eople. Think only, Boswell advised, “of property and the constitution,” and then act. And if anyone doubted the author’s disinterest, Boswell struck a personal note on the last page. He presented himself, with a degree of plausibility, as “no time-­server,” someone who did not stand to gain from the change of ministers; on the contrary, he observed, without being specific, “a demission of the Portland Administration, ­will prob­ably disappoint an object which I have most ardently at heart.” And, at last, he could pre­sent himself as a gentleman whose property rights w ­ ere not essentially dif­fer­ent from the East India Com­pany, for he, too, held his estate on the basis of charters granted in good faith by several monarchs. And, striking a Whiggish note at the very end of the Letter, Boswell presented “our excellent monarchy” as a foundation to be prized and protected, “that venerable institution ­under which liberty is best enjoyed.”52

—­V— Having completed his pamphlet, Boswell lost not a moment in securing its publication, even claiming it had been published when that was not the case! Printing was finished on 31 December 1783, and it made its appearance in the shops on New Year’s Day 1784, price one shilling.53 Initial sales ­were slow, for the crisis had been put on hold by the holidays, only to resume in full force ­a fter the resumption of the parliamentary session on 12 January. Pitt’s position remained as precarious as ever throughout that month, and the likelihood of his minority government being able to survive into February without significant signs of support in the country was slim. The opposition was resilient and uncompromising in the face of what Fox’s supporters viewed as constitutional outrage. As one of its supportive newspapers, the Morning Herald, put it on 19 January 1784: “The cloven foot of absolute monarchy begins to appear, as is evident when secret influence rises superior to the voice of the ­people in their representative body. . . . ​ We have lost Amer­i­ca—we have lost the dominions of the sea—we have nearly

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lost Ireland—­and what is worse than all, the Constitution is at the verge of death, and her expiring lamp of life almost extinguished.” Further Commons defeats during January led Pitt once again to contemplate resignation, and colleagues entreated him to continue, while the king, for a second time, pondered abdication, but was other­w ise determined to protect the Crown’s right to se­lection of the executive. The stakes remained exceptionally high. For the first fortnight of that month, Boswell’s abjuration to members of the public to rally to the premier’s defense appeared to have been slow to ignite opinion in Scotland. The Association Movement for Eco­nom­ical and Parliamentary Reform, nationally coordinated by the Reverend Christopher Wyvill, had spread slowly into Scotland during the early 1780s and had been taken up by some newspapers and periodicals such as James Donaldson’s Edinburgh Advertiser, which portrayed the Scottish reform cause as part of the wider politics of liberty. But burgh reformers ­were, at the close of 1783, as bewildered as any Briton about w ­ hether Fox or Pitt offered the most likely route to achieving their objectives, and though Fox’s association with North had tarnished his image as a reformer for some, ­others ­were reluctant to abandon their hopes in him. Thus, while Boswell had positioned himself in November 1783 as sympathetic to the reform of the Scottish burghs, the aggressively loyalist note sounded in the Letter may have done l­ ittle or nothing in itself to persuade Scottish reformers (or t­ hose who anticipated no benefit, public or private, from a return to prominence of Henry Dundas) to throw their weight b ­ ehind Pitt.54 The slow response to his call for action in Scotland may therefore have induced Boswell within ten days to publish the pamphlet in ­England to see what impact it might make.55 Certainly, an influential section of the press t­ here appreciated it, with both the Critical Review and the Monthly Review favorably reviewing it, the former describing Boswell as one who had “always distinguished himself by an attachment to public liberty.”56 Arguably, south of the border, what activated opinion was less well-­intended individual pleas such as his than the leading example of the City of London, which congratulated George III on dismissing the co­a li­tion in an address of 16 January.57 It was the catalyst for two months of similar addresses from all over Britain applauding the king’s action, with over 200 of them having been registered in the columns of the London Gazette by the time Parliament was fi­nally dissolved in late March, the greatest number recorded in any petitioning movement of the previous thirty years.58 And the county of Ayrshire was among them, with its own vote of thanks to Pitt proposed at the meeting of 17 March 1784 and largely composed by Boswell.59 The three months a­ fter publication of A Letter to the ­People of Scotland gave abundant evidence of Boswell’s being in retrospect a prophetic voice in articulating the sense that the king was the savior of the country from a despotic, aristocratic Whig oligarchy led by Fox.60 At the time of its composition, the author

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no more than anyone could have anticipated the extent of the pro-­Pitt outcome that the result of the general election of the spring of 1784 dramatically confirmed. The public verdict upheld the king’s controversial exercise of his prerogative and acclaimed William Pitt as its standard ­bearer, unsullied by faction or the kind of po­liti­cal horse-­t rading that had persuaded several of Fox and North’s own supporters to abandon them in ­favor of a “patriotic minister.”61 Boswell had done what he could to support the king, defend the Constitution, flatter Pitt, and prove himself a friend to the new government in its very first days, when he might well have calculated (as many ­others did) that publicly standing up for the co­a li­tion and the rights of the Commons might yet win him public office. In ­t hose circumstances, his decision to send a personal copy of the Letter on 3 January 1784 directly to Pitt appears po­liti­cally appropriate rather than fawning, especially with his observation that “you, Sir, are now the Prime Minister, called by the Sovereign to maintain the rights of the Crown, as well as ­t hose of the p ­ eople, against a violent faction. As such, you are entitled to the warmest support of ­every good subject in ­every department.”62 In an in­ter­est­ing coda to his pamphlet, Boswell also took steps to position himself publicly as something more than a Tory of the Johnsonian school and articulated more boldly than ever his commitment to parliamentary reform.63 The occasion arose within a distinctly En­glish context. He stood accused in the Public Advertiser (letter originally dated 10 February 1784) by one “Clarendon” of having an excessive partiality for Scotland and its inhabitants, and of displaying inconsistency in his support of demo­cratic liberty in Corsica alongside advocating “unqualified” loyalty in Britain. Not so, declared Boswell in a reply from Edinburgh dated 3 February. Boswell expressed himself comfortable with the “generous and comfortable Princi­ple” of loyalty, but one qualified by “the Constitutional Laws of this g­ reat and f­ ree country.” He also articulated his desire for an extension of the franchise so that “we may have, as much as may be consistent with good Order, the real Voice of the P ­ eople in our public Deliberations.” Boswell, it seems, was a reformer a­ fter all.64

—­V I— In so saying, Boswell sensed that the incoming ministry (whose position was so much more stable than it had been two months previously) would have parliamentary reform on its agenda, and to anticipate that policy direction was further to position himself astutely in relation to Pitt and Dundas. That po­liti­cally protean side of Boswell was never far away in the 1780s—­a lways an eye on the main chance, desperate to gain public recognition from as many sides as pos­si­ ble. But this aspect of his character should not conceal a genuine commitment to issues of princi­ple as displayed in A Letter to the P ­ eople of Scotland that made him inclined to stand up early for Pitt. It disclosed the habitually underestimated

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extent of his constitutional expertise and the ­legal skill with which he could deploy it and make a persuasive case.65 The Letter was, by the nature of ­t hings, bound up with a determination to increase his public profile in Scotland (for he had none in ­England), but it could easily have misfired had the ministry collapsed, as a large proportion of the nation—­and many members of the incoming government—­anticipated it might at New Year 1784. Yet, his resolve to make plain his sentiments ­were for once l­ittle calculated and reached exceptionally early. Indeed, Boswell de­cided to draw up his own address on the day he heard the news that Pitt and ­Temple had been appointed—­and urged o ­ thers to do likewise—­for he felt himself bound to do so as “an ancient constitutionalist.” And he had no doubt that he “could view objects with as much light as ­others do, and at once let down a curtain and shade them.”66 By the time the pamphlet appeared in the bookshops, it acted as a significant though not decisive clarion call in what Michael Duffy has called the “patriotic popu­lar mobilisation.”67 As support for the administration rallied during the Christmas and New Year adjournment of Parliament, Boswell tapped into the growing sense that the king was a bulwark against overmighty ministers and that he had compellingly articulated it. However hard he coached himself against the indulgence of his hopes, he fancied that the king, Lord T ­ emple, “or some other of the g­ reat men to whom my congenial sentiments and good talents might recommend me, would call me into a respectable employment, and not improbably bring me into Parliament.”68 He had, ­after all, used his familiarity with publishers and the press to move speedily from initial composition to placing A Letter to the ­People of Scotland before the ­whole of Britain, and thereby confirmed how valuable his ser­vices might be to the incoming ministers.69 On that basis alone, he deserved notice from them, only to find once again, just as with the co­ali­tion, that a combination of attention fixed elsewhere plus reservations about his personality ensured that he would reap no advantage, certainly no immediate advantage, from his pluck. It was not him whom Dundas backed as the progovernment candidate for Ayrshire that spring, but Hugh Montgomerie.70 ­There was thus no po­liti­cal reason for him to come south and neglect his professional duties at the Edinburgh bar ­until the end of April, and when he eventually did so, the compelling motivation for being in London was not any form of ministerial public recognition but Samuel Johnson’s declining health.71

Notes I am grateful to James Caudle and Bob Harris for their comments on an e­ arlier version of this paper. 1. En­glish Chronicle or Universal Eve­ning Post (8–10 Apr. 1783). 2. Journ., 15 May 1783 (“Journ.,” unitalicized signifies manuscript); to Bishop of Killaloe, 28 Mar. (L 37); to Paoli, 8 Aug. 1783 (L 1016); Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (revised edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1950), 4:220–221, hereafter referred to as Life. Boswell had found it hard to determine his loyalties for some

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time, and had told Burke on 26 Dec. 1782 (L 319), “I am Sorry that I live in Such an age as this. My Loyalty is vexed.” All journal entries cited are at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in box 45, folders 1010–1016. 3. Boswell told Johnson once in London how much he wished to be in Parliament and insisted, despite Johnson’s derision, that he would never supinely support any ministry in the manner of most Scottish MPs (Journ., 15 May 1783). 4. Boswell put a fine gloss on their conversation as in, “He was for my continuing assiduously at my profession, and said that this . . . ​would give me a claim to a judge’s place. That this was a time quite improper for coming into parliament upon purchase, every­thing being in uncertainty.” Journ., 3 Apr. 1783; Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 459–460. 5. He told Bishop Thomas Barnard that he was “very seriously concerned to see such a general disregard of all good princi­ples of Government.” To Barnard, 28 Mar. 1783 (L 37). To Burke, in person, he “seriously regretted the situation of the King, overwhelmed by a faction,” and was dismayed by his laughter in response (Journ., 22 Mar. 1783). He told Lord Mansfield (Journ., 3 Apr. 1783) that he had been “Cursing Lord North” (for having entered a co­a li­tion with Fox). In Robert Burns’s words, the co­a li­tion was “yon mixtie-­maxtie queer hotch-­potch” (“The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer,” 1786). 6. Journ., 23 Mar. 1783. 7. Discussions between Johnson and Boswell over ­t hese weeks are discussed in John B. Radner, Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 266–271. 8. The best he could do as regards Portland was to tell Burke, somewhat desperately, “My ­Father Lord Auchinleck studied in Holland with the late [2nd] Duke, and had once the honour of entertaining this Duke at Perth as a Judge upon the Cir­cuit.” Boswell to Burke, 8 Aug. 1783, in The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, ed. Peter S. Baker et al. (London: Heinemann, 1986), 135–136. Hereafter referred to as Corr.: GBM. 9. Journ., 29 May 1783. When the two men met on 22 Mar. 1783, Boswell expressed the hope that “by his influence I might obtain the pleas­ur­able lot of an employment in London.” He seems to have been undeterred by the experience of getting nowhere when he had begged Burke by letter to appoint him judge advocate of Scotland when Burke was first in office as paymaster general (Mar.–­July 1782). 10. Boswell had assisted Mountstuart in 1776 in attempting to encourage support for a militia bill for Scotland, but it failed in its parliamentary pro­gress. John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 130–132. 11. Journ., 23 Mar. 1783. 12. Ibid., 25 Mar. 1783. 13. Ibid., 18 May 1783. Martin aptly describes Mountstuart as “about as warm and as affable as a slippery fish.” Martin, Boswell Life, 459. 14. As Radner perceptively notes, “Far less confident than he felt ten weeks e­ arlier, Boswell feared being unable to function effectively in a world without Johnson.” Radner, Friendship, 276. 15. Diaries of William Johnston ­Temple 1780–1796, ed. L. Bettany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 42. 16. Corr.: GBM, 135–136. 17. Burke to Boswell, Beaconsfield, 13 Aug. 1783, Corr.: GBM, 137–138. 18. Gentleman’s Magazine 53 (Aug. 1783): 718. Alexander Wight published An inquiry into the rise and pro­gress of Parliament . . . (1784), dedicated to Portland and indicative of an interest in electoral reform. 19. He recorded (Journ., 10–11 Sept. 1783), “The promotion of Harry Erskine to be King’s Advocate while I thought myself more deserving of that office, vexed me.” And he nursed

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his annoyance for weeks afterward, telling Burke, 20 Nov. 1783 (L 321): “I have an indignant feeling upon the occasion.” 20. Frank Brady, Boswell’s Po­liti­cal ­Career (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 99; Journ., 7 Nov. 1783; to Burke, 20 Nov. 1783 (L 321); Reg. Let. [JB’s register of letters sent and received, Yale] 29 Nov. 1783; Life, 4:248. Boswell had qualified as a JP for Ayrshire and had been chosen as preses of the quarter sessions on 28 Oct., “a real satisfaction to me as Laird of Auchinleck” Journ., 29 Nov. 1783. 21. “I find myself so dull and discontented in this narrow country, where ­there is no object to animate me that life seems a burthen. How hard is it that when so many ­people are raised to seats in Parliament and offices of consequence, I am wasting my days in provincial obscurity.” To Paoli, 8 Aug. 1783 (L 1016). 22. Boswell called on him in London (Journ., 23 Mar. 1783), but “the porter said he was very busy.” Dundas was the brother-­in-­law of Rockingham’s heir, Earl Fitzwilliam, and had major landholdings north and south of the border. It was he who had obtained the lord advocacy from Portland for Henry Erskine, his boyhood friend. Portland to Erskine, 15 Aug. 1783, quoted in Alexander Fergusson, The Honourable Henry Erskine (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1882), 239. 23. Boswell to Burke, Edinburgh, 20 Nov. 1783, Corr.: GBM, 140. Around this time, Boswell had met Henry Erskine in Edinburgh, and claimed he made “but awkward excuses for my not being appointed Solicitor General.” Journ., 21 Nov. 1783. 24. News of the royal coup reached Boswell in Edinburgh on 20 Dec., and he at once went down to the Faculty of Advocates’ Library “and drew up an Address to His Majesty from the Dean and Faculty of Advocates to congratulate him on it, and I moved for our addressing at our anniversary meeting this day. The dastardly fellows, afraid to take an open part, ­were all against it.” Journ., 20 Dec. 1783. 25. To Burke, 3 Jan. 1784 (L 322). Even before the publication of the bill, he had emphasized to Burke his own “old Tory steadiness” (Journ., 20 Nov. 1783), and on 20 Dec. recorded how the Lords vote against it “rejoiced my Tory soul.” 26. F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999–2006), 1:528–529; P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 20. 27. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial ­People: E ­ ngland, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 561–562. 28. Bowood MSS, 20 Nov. 1783, quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 64; John W. Derry, Charles James Fox (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 177–178. 29. Mitchell, Fox, 66. 30. Paul Kelly, “The Pitt–­Temple Administration: 19–­22 December 1783,” Historical Journal 17 (1974): 157–161; Paul Kelly, “British Politics, 1783–4: The Emergence and Triumph of the Younger Pitt’s Administration,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 54 (1981): 67–68. Michael Duffy, The Younger Pitt (New York: Routledge, 2000), 20. 31. On 22 Dec. 1783 the Commons had carried (in a committee of the ­whole House) a motion proposed by Henry Erskine for an address to the king desiring him not to dissolve Parliament. In return, Fox had allowed a land tax bill to pass and for the recess to last ­until 12 Jan. 32. Journ., 1 Jan. 1784. In fact, Boswell had as early as 23 Dec. 1783, before starting work on the Letter, written to would-be patrons, the Earl of Pembroke and Lord Mountstuart (unaware the latter had voted for the East India Bill in the Lords!) requesting them to use their influence to have him appointed solicitor general for Scotland, or at least joint solicitor. Alexander Wight remained in post and was being urged to continue in office (L 1051). Dundas’s nephew, Robert, was appointed. 33. He began work on 26 Dec. and completed it over the weekend on Mon. the twenty-­ ninth (Journ., 29 Jan. 1784). A full bibliographical description of the pamphlet is given in

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Frederick Albert Pottle, The Literary C ­ areer of James Boswell, Esq.: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 105–108. It was all the more remarkable an achievement as, at the end of the year, he was suffering from a cold, and venereal disease soon became apparent as well (Journ., 13, 14, 20, 25 Dec. 1783; 7, 11, 18 Jan.; 4, 14 Feb. 1784). 34. He insisted, on completion, that though he was “­really animated about public affairs,” he was “still conscious of indifference when I chose it” (Journ., 30 Dec. 1783). A Letter to the P ­ eople of Scotland on the Pre­sent State of the Nation (Edinburgh, 1783; repr., London, for Charles Dilly, 1784), 8, 9. Hereafter referred to as Letter. This text is also available, with appropriate page divisions, at https://­quod​.­lib​.­u mich​.­edu​/­e​/­ecco​/­004793487​.­0001​.­000​/­1:2​ ?­rgn​= ­div1;view​=f­ ulltext. 35. He had dined with Wilkes in London the previous May. Journ., 146. Wilkes had supported the Shelburne ministry in Parliament despite some loss of popu­lar support in his Middlesex constituency. He spoke in the Commons on 8 Dec. 1783 against the East India Bill. Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 193–194. 36. Letter, 10. 37. Letter, 12–14. The 1746 legislation abolished the traditional judicial rights accorded to a clan chief. 38. Letter, 11, 14, 16. 39. He had reportedly said he would consider “whoever voted for the India Bill, ­were not only not his friends, but he should consider them as his enemies.” George III’s words to ­Temple, quoted by Fox on 17 Dec., in William Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History of E ­ ngland from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 . . . (London, 1806), col. 24, column 207 [cfn. 47 usage]. Hereafter referred to as PH. Note that John Cannon, the leading recent historian of the co­a li­tion, concluded that “no constitutional defence of the King’s action [in dismissing the co­a li­tion] is pos­si­ble.” John Cannon, The Fox–­North Co­ali­tion: Crisis of the Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 130–132. 40. Letter, 17. 41. Boswell was reduced to writing that it was “seriously distressing” t­ here was a majority in the lower h ­ ouse for the bill (Letter, 20). It passed its third reading on 8 Dec. by 208 to 102. 42. PH, 24, 211, quoted in John Cannon, Aristocratic C ­ entury: The Peerage of Eighteenth-­ Century ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 104. 43. Boswell said nothing in the Letter of the Lords acting to fulfill their function as holding a constitutional balance between the king and the ­people, a point made in debate by the antico­a li­tion Whig, the fourth Earl of Abingdon (PH, 24, 135–136), though he did praise Abingdon by name. Letter, 19. 44. Letter, 21, 22. Boswell contended that exclusive ministerial responsibility began only ­a fter a bill had received royal assent. During its parliamentary passage, the head of state could consult more widely on draft legislation. The Whig press did not actually contest the peers’ rights as hereditary counselors of the Crown, but distinguished between that role and the constitutionality of ­Temple’s secret interview with the king and the whisperings that followed. Morning Chronicle, 16 Dec. 1783; Annual Register (1784), 69, 75. 45. Letter, 22. 46. Letter, 24. 47. M. W. McCahill, The House of Lords in the Age of George III (1760–1811) (London: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 25–30. 48. In support of this view, Boswell quoted from Pre­ce­dents of Proceedings in the House of Commons (London, 1776), 1:130–31, written by the much-­respected current clerk of the House of Commons, John Hatsell. 49. Letter, 33.

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50. Boswell noted that the only petitions against it to date had originated in London and Chipping Wycombe, the one influenced by the East India Com­pany, the other from Shelburne’s pocket borough. Charles Fox had mentioned as much in debate on 22 Dec. 1783. PH, 24, 236. 51. Letter, 41. 52. Letter, 41 and 42. 53. Boswell expressed his plea­sure to Sir Alexander Dick on 7 Jan. 1784 that the pamphlet was “to be had to my certain knowledge in at least eight shops [in Scotland].” James Boswell letters, MssCol 4049, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 54. See the exemplary discussion of “The Politics of North Britain,” in Bob Harris, A Tale of Three Cities: The Life and Times of Lord Daer 1763–1794 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2015), chap. 5, especially 115–123. 55. Public Advertiser (10 Jan. 1784). See Peter Martin’s reference to it as “a resounding success” (Boswell Life, 465). ­There may have been a second London edition. See Brady, Po­liti­ cal ­Career, 104 n. 2. 56. Quoted in Martin, Boswell Life, 465. Further assessment of the response in Brady, Po­liti­cal ­Career, 104–105. 57. Much of A Letter was summarized in the Whitehall Eve­ning Post (27 Jan. 1784). 58. Duffy, Younger Pitt, 24; John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, vol. 1, The Years of Acclaim (London: Constable, 1969), 139, 149. Eleven Scottish counties and twenty-­four burghs petitioned (Glasgow and Aberdeen three times each). Cannon, Co­ali­tion, 185–189, 187 n. 59. Brady, Po­liti­cal ­Career, 107; Harris, Lord Daer, 121. 60. G. Ditchfield, George III: An Essay in Monarchy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 75. 61. In Scotland, the general election confirmed that Scottish MPs ­were less ready to support the king’s new government than their pre­de­ces­sors: twenty-­four w ­ ere pro-­Pitt, fifteen pro-­coalition, and six classed as “doubtful.” Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790: Introductory Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 136; Cannon, Co­ali­tion, 215. Boswell’s pamphlet played an overlooked part in confirming party divisions north of the border. 62. Life, 4:188. The premier’s guarded acknowledgement [he thanked Boswell on 5 Feb. 1784, Yale (C 2267) for his “zealous and able Support” of the public cause] points up perhaps a contrast between Boswell’s out­spoken championing of the Crown and his own caution on that subject. Ehrman, Younger Pitt, 136–137. 63. Boswell would have been aware that many of his reformist friends would find the Letter characterized by what one of them, the Reverend W. J. ­Temple, called “rank Toryism.” ­Temple also quoted from a letter he had received from Wyvill, who wrote, “Your friend B. has entered the Lists in defence of Prerogative. I must own, though I like some of the Ministers, in whose cause he has engaged, I by no means admire his manner of defending them.” ­Temple to Boswell, 6–11 Mar. 1784, Yale (C 2821). Boswell himself referred to his “composed elevation as a royalist.” Journ., 17 Feb. 1784. Dempster playfully mocked Boswell as “Thou second Filmor—­Thou Sir George Mackenzie of the day.” To Boswell, 9 Jan. 1784, Yale (C 950). 64. This correspondence was not published by the Public Advertiser ­until its issue of 18 Mar. 1784. 65. Cf. Brady, who wrote that Boswell’s motives in writing ­were “obvious” and exclusively bound up with preferment, and that the pamphlet “was hardly the product of reflection”; rather, it was “the almost instantaneous reaction of a highly irritated man.” Po­liti­cal ­Career, 105. 66. Journ., 20, 26 Dec. 1783. 67. Duffy, Younger Pitt, 28. 68. Journ., 10 Jan. 1784.

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69. Dundas had indeed been happy to quote from “a public letter by his friend Mr Boswell” in debate on 12 Jan. PH, 24, 292. For Boswell’s extensive involvement in Ayrshire electoral politics in the run-up to the general election and pro-­ministerial letter in the Edinburgh Eve­ning Courant of 31 Mar., see Journ., 17, 18, 25 Mar. 1784. 70. Notwithstanding his Ayrshire disappointment, Boswell had an “excellent conversation” in Edinburgh on 1 Apr. with Henry Dundas, who vaguely mentioned “First waste of Opposition, ­etc.,” possibly hinting more posts would be freed up in the course of the year. That he was not forgotten by Dundas was good enough to raise Boswell’s spirits. Journ., 1 Apr. 1784. 71. See Boswell to Reynolds, 6 Feb. 1784, Yale (L 1099).

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Notes on Contributors

Nigel Aston is a reader in early modern history at the University of Leicester. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Enlightenment Oxford: The University in the Cultural and Po­liti­cal Life of Eighteenth-­Century Britain and Beyond, and numerous articles on British and French eighteenth-­ century religious and po­liti­cal history. He is editing a Yale Boswell Edition of The Correspondence of James Boswell with the Rev. W. J. T ­ emple, vol. 2, 1777–1796. Celia Barnes is an associate professor of En­g lish at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She has published work on Hester Thrale Piozzi, Laurence Sterne, bluestockings Elizabeth Car­ter and Catherine Talbot, and Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. She currently is coediting, with Jack Lynch at Rutgers–­ Newark, an Oxford World’s Classics edition of Johnson’s and Boswell’s accounts of their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, which is the first student edition of t­ hese texts to appear in over three de­cades. Her research returns time and again to an interest in how eighteenth-­century authors conceived of their own place in literary history, what Laurence Sterne refers to in his correspondence as his “futurity.” Some of t­ hese concerns find their roots in her dissertation, where she considered ­t hose moments when writers conceive of their posterity in what we might say are friendly terms, transforming literary memory and literary history into a kind of conversation or correspondence among intimates. While she continues to be guided by an interest in changing conceptions of literary memory, fame, and posterity throughout the period, more recently she has been writing and thinking much about Johnson and Boswell—­a rather natu­ral evolution, for Johnson’s and Boswell’s friendship is underwritten by precisely such concerns. James J. Caudle is a research associate in Robert Burns studies at the University of Glasgow. He worked for over two de­cades with the Yale Boswell Editions, most recently as associate editor from 2000 to 2017. His scholarship focuses on 171

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the history of the book, especially censorship and copyright, on sociability and social verse, and on mass communication of po­liti­cal ideas through the media of newspaper and magazine essays, pamphlets, and sermons. His essays on Boswell include “Affleck Generations: The Libraries of the Boswells of Auchinleck, 1695–1825,” in Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, and the forthcoming “The Case of the Missing Hottentot: John Dun’s Conversation with Samuel Johnson in James Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides as reported by Boswell and Dun,” and “ ‘Soaping’ and ‘Shaving’ the Public Sphere: James Boswell’s ‘Soaping Club’ and Edinburgh Enlightenment Sociability.” Allan Ingram is an emeritus professor of En­g lish at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. He has published books on James Boswell, on Swift and Pope, and on eighteenth-­century insanity and its repre­sen­ta­tion, as well as edited collections of primary material on the relations between insanity and medicine in the period. He has also published on Joseph Conrad and on D. H. Lawrence. He edited an edition of Gulliver’s Travels in 2012. Between 2006 and 2009 he was the director of a Leverhulme Trust research proj­ect, “Before Depression, 1660–­ 1800,” as part of which he was general co-­editor of a Pickering & Chatto four-­ volume collection, Depression and Melancholy, 1660–1800 (2012), and coauthor of Melancholy Experience in the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury. He was co-­director of a second Leverhulme Trust research proj­ect, “Fash­ion­able Diseases: Medicine, Lit­er­a­ture and Culture, 1660–­1830,” and co-­edited a volume of essays, Disease and Death in Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable. He co-­edited a memorial volume for Bill Overton, Voice and Context in Eighteenth-­Century Verse: Order in Variety, and is co-­editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, Writing and Constructing the Self in ­Great Britain in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century. He is one of the editors of the En­glish Association journal, En­glish. He is currently working on medical writing in the long eigh­teenth ­century, and on relations between Swift, Pope, and the medical profession. Donald J. Newman is an in­de­pen­dent scholar with research interests in James Boswell and eighteenth-­century journalism. Published in the Cambridge History of the En­glish Short Story, his most recent essay, “Short Prose Narratives of the Eigh­teenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” examines the development of the short story primarily in eighteenth-­century British magazines. He has edited a collection of essays on Boswell, James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations (1995), as well as published numerous articles about him. He has also edited two collections on eighteenth-­century periodicals: The Spectator: Emerging Discourses (2005) and co-­edited Fair Phi­los­o­pher: Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator (2006). Terry Seymour is an in­de­pen­dent scholar who concentrates on bibliographical topics. He is the author of Boswell’s Books: Four Generations of Collecting and

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173

Collectors, published in 2016. He is considered the leading authority on the J. M. Dent series, Everyman’s Library, and is the author of two books on that subject: A Guide to Collecting Everyman’s Library (2005) and A Printing History of Everyman’s Library 1906–1982 (2010). In 2008 he co-­curated an exhibition at the University of North Carolina titled, “The ABC of Collecting Everyman’s Library, Archives, Books, Collectors.” He presented a paper on the Everyman series at the Books in Series Conference in London, October 2007. His piece on Mrs. Piozzi’s Johnson’s Letters appeared in Other ­People’s Books in 2011. In December 2013 he was invited by the Johnson Society of London to perform the annual wreath laying in Westminster Abbey to honor Dr. Johnson. Following the ser­v ice he addressed the Society on the subject of Johnson and Boswell as book collectors. He has served on the Council of the Friends of the Prince­ton University Library since 1998. Mr. Seymour holds an AB degree in En­glish lit­ er­a­ture from Prince­ton University and an MA in En­glish lit­er­a­ture from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He is a member of the Grolier Club. Paul Tankard is a se­nior lecturer in En­glish at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, having come to Dunedin in 2003. He was a secondary school teacher and worked for The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, before returning to study in his late thirties to do an MA then PhD at Monash University, with his t­ heses on Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, and Johnson and the everyday. He remains interested in the essay as a form, paratextual issues, non-­c anonical genres, and the ­f uture of reading. As well as working on British eighteenth-­ century lit­er­a­ture, he works on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and supervises work on fantasy. Much of his teaching is focused on writing. He is publications editor for the Johnson Society of Australia and also the author of numerous articles and reviews. His selected edition of the journalistic writings of James Boswell, Facts and Inventions, was published in 2014, and in 2018 he was awarded the Mitchell Prize by the Bibliographical Society of Amer­i­ca. Jennifer Preston Wilson, an associate professor of En­g lish at Appalachian State University, is co-­editor with Elizabeth Kraft of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding (2015). Her recent articles include “On Honor and Consequences: The Duel in The Small House at Allington,” in Dickens Studies Annual; “ ‘We know only names, so far’: Samuel Richardson, Shirley Jackson, and Exploration of the Precarious Self,” in Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences; and “ ‘I have you in my eye, sir’: The Spectacle of Kingship in The Madness of King George,” in The Cinematic Eigh­teenth C ­ entury.

Index

Addison, Joseph, 2, 41, 50, 55, 110, 140 American War, 19, 144–145, 150 Anglo-­Scots authors, 51 Anne, Queen, 54, 153 annihilation anxiety, 10, 25 anonymity (the convention), 9, 27, 32–33, 34 Aristotle, 118 Armstrong, Robert, 118 Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 137 Arthur’s Seat, 16 Association Movement for Eco­nom­ical and Parliamentary Reform, 155 Auchinleck, 55, 57, 59, 70, 76, 90, 111, 113, 114, 117; JB becomes master of, 145; JB’s wife dies, 72; wife ill at, 124 Augustus, Edward (Duke of York), 94, 95, 97, 98 Austen, Jane, 129, 132, 133, 141, 142; Persuasion, 132–134, 139–140, 141–142, 142n23 Ayrshire, 18, 148, 150, 155, 156, 157 Baldwin, Henry, 110 Baldwin, Robert, 110 Banks, Joseph, 17, 33 Bannatyne, George, 57, 61, 62; ed. Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600, 58 Baring, Francis, 149 Barker, Hannah, 3 Barnes, Celia, 28 Baskerville printing, 69, 70 Beattie, James, 51, 53 Becket, Thomas, 110

Bee, 55 Black, Jeremy, 3 Blacklock, Thomas, 51 Blackstone, Sir William, 153 Books of Scotticisms, 53 Boswell, Alexander (Lord Auchinleck), 6, 37, 51, 57, 59, 118, 122, 137, 145; criticizes teenage JB, 9 Boswell, James —­Biographical: active in Ayrshire politics, 18; attends James Gibson’s execution, 16; attends John Reid’s execution, 16; attends Shakespeare Jubilee, 10, 69; becomes involved in Douglas Cause, 14–15; becomes literary celebrity, 2; becomes master of Auchinleck, 145; becomes partner in London Magazine, 7, 110; becomes po­liti­cal commentator, 19; begins ­Grand Tour, 13; biographical research on ­others, 20; chairs freeholders meeting, 148; changes in personal life, 6; collecting materials for Life, 20; Corsica published, 2; criticized by ­father, 7, 9; Cub published, 4; denied ­legal office in Scotland, 147; expects fame and profit from Life, 21; f­ ather dies, 118, 145; first London visit, 95; first publications, 1; Hebrides tour, 21; journalizing relieves anxiety, 26; launches ­career as periodical writer, 13; Life earnings, 25; meets Mohawk chief, 17; moves to London, 124; plans work on Johnson, 7; pursuit of

175

176 I n d e x Boswell (cont.) commission in London, 13; quest to join En­glish bar, 51; religious fears, 25–26; returns to Scotland, 14, 147; second visit to London, 52, 110; seeks assistance obtaining preferment, 146, 147; seeks Henry Dundas’s help, 145; values literary fame, 1, 8, 9, 12; visits London, 145; visits Voltaire, 13; yearns for immortality, 25 Books: An Account of Corsica, 4, 6, 9, 10, 13–14, 19, 51, 68, 72; advised against publishing it, 5; a monument to liberty, 26; Corsica fame ­w ill survive him, 26; promotes Corsica in newspapers, 11, 44; published, 2; Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 37, 51, 52; critics attack JB, 21–­22; previews new mode of biography, 21–­22; promotes Life, 34; published letters describing, 18; sales, 22; Letters Between the Honourable Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq., 42; Life of Samuel Johnson, 7, 10, 21, 34, 37, 41, 45, 51, 52, 69, 116; disputes with Piozzi, 23; embalming meta­phor in, 26; false impressions of SJ to be corrected, 23; JB’s self-­promotion criticized, 24; Life and Corsica promotions compared, 24–25; Life to rescue JB from oblivion, 26; publicity campaign, 21, 23–24; published, 24; reactions to Life, 25; sales, 25; source of worry, 72, 78n15 Broadsides: “At SHAKESPEARE’s JUBILEE,” 17; favorable ballad on Douglas memorial, 15; known extant copies of “Character of a Corsican,” 70; known extant copies of “Grocer,” 76; preservation history of “Grocer,” 76–77; rarity of “Grocer,” 75–76; text of “Grocer,” 73–74; “The Mournful Case of Poor Unfortunate and Unhappy John Reid,” 10–­11, 53; “Verses in the Character of a Corsican,” 10, 27, 68, 70 Pamphlets: A Letter to Robert MacQueen, Lord Braxfield, 10, 43; An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady, 28, 80; corrections to first edition of Life, 10; Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of “Elvira” Written by Mr. David Malloch, 13, 91, 93n20; defends public liberties, 19; Dorando, 15; Essence of the Douglas Cause, 15;

intent of Letter (1783), 72, 144; ironic comparisons with classical authors in Elegy, 84; JB reviews Dorando, 42; Letter (1783) published first in Scotland, 150, 159–160nn32–34; Letter (1783) published in ­England, 155; Letters of the Right Honourable Lady ­ eople of Jane Douglas, 15; Letter to the P Scotland, On the Attempt to Infringe the Articles of the Union (1785), 19, 21, 37, 38; likes writing pamphlets, 10; No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love; a Poem, 21, 43, 48n38; Observations, Good or Bad, Stupid or Clever, Serious or Jocular, on Squire Foote’s Dramatic Entertainment, Intitled, The Minor, by a Genius, 12–13; Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, Upon Their Supposed Approaching Nuptials, 21, 22–­23, 31n40; po­l iti­c al strategy of Letter (1783), 150, 159–­160nn33–34; Reflections on the Late Alarming Bankruptcies in Scotland, 43; reviews of Letter (1783), 155; Scottish elegy tradition, 87; The Cub at New-­market, a Tale, 4, 28, 54, 94; The Pre­sent Po­liti­cal State of Scotland (1776), 19; The Pre­sent Po­liti­cal State of Scotland, A Letter to the ­People of Scotland on the Pre­sent State of the Nation (1783), 19, 29, 37 Periodicals: draws on existing generic forms for periodical articles, 8; newspaper, a happy invention, 7; publishes in nineteen newspapers, 7; reports on memorials for SJ, 21; Caledonian Mercury, 7, 55, 90, 109; articles on SJ in Scotland, 18, 30n33; letter on Braxfield pamphlet, 43; letter reporting McDonald masquerade, 18; objection to elimination of town guard, 18; objection to name change, 18; report on Reid transfer, 15; Edinburgh Advertiser, 7, 109, 155; account of “Grocer” per­for­mance, 74; announces Burke’s arrival in Scotland, 18; Dorando ballad, 43; likely reviewer of Late Alarming Bankruptcies, 43, 48n36; news hoaxes in, 14; report on Reid’s trial, 15; shorthand reporters hoax, 44–45; Edinburgh Chronicle, 55; Edinburgh Eve­ning Courant, 54; Eu­ro­pean Magazine, 109; third-­person memoir,

Index 7; Freeman’s Journal: “Notices of Boswell’s Movements in Ireland,” 110; Gentleman’s Magazine, 7, 109; false impressions of SJ w ­ ill be corrected, 23; prolonged dispute with Anna Seward, 24; London Chronicle, 4, 7, 30n10, 35, 109; Corsican news hoax, 14; Corsican newspaper campaign, 44; letter explaining Scottish customs to En­glish, 18; letter urging p ­ ardon for John Reid, 15; letter urging publication of Corsica, 42–­43; Life due next month, 23; news squibs promoting Corsica, 13, 14; “Notice of James Boswell’s having been seen on top of a hearse at an execution at Tyburn,” 43, 110; “Notice of Mr. Boswell’s departure for Scotland,” 110; publishes historic l­egal document, 37; publishes Paoli speech, 37; report on Reid’s execution, 15; reviews Dorando, 42; reviews Erskine–­Boswell Letters, 42; solicits Senaca translations, 39; thanks Senaca contributors, 39–­40; “The Boston Bill: A Ballad,” 19; “The Long Island Prisoners: An Irregular Ode,” 19; “Verses on seeing Mr. Boswell on the Top of an Hearse at Tyburn,” 43; “Verses on Seeing the Print of James Boswell, Esq., in the Corsican Dress,” 17, 43; London Magazine, 5, 7, 109, 112, 113, 132, 136; “An Account of the Armed Corsican Chief at the Masquerade, at Shakespeare’s Jubilee, at Stratford-­upon-­Avon, September 1769,” 17; “An Account of the Chief of the Mohawk Indians, Who Lately Visited London,” 17–­18; contributes regularly to LM, 7; essay series, “On the Profession of a Player,” 17, 50; history of masquerade in Scotland, 18; interview of adventurer James Bruce, 17; interview of Dr. Daniel Solander, 17; interview of naturalist Joseph Banks, 17; publishes Hypochondriack, 5, 6, 108; “Remarks on the Life and Writings of Gray,” 20; reprint of masquerade account from Caledonian Mercury, 18; series on debates in General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 18; series on the constitution of the Church of Scotland, 18; The Hypochondriack, 8, 9, 21, 41, 50, 59, 112, 133, 136; a failure,

177 28; changes essay tradition, 28; cognitive foundation for early nineteenth-­century novels, 28; common and uncommon subjects, 20; conceives of series in Italy, 13; dating conception of, 108–­109, 110; difficulty starting, 112; ends series at seventy numbers, 20; helps establish new psychological perspective, 129, 141n6; JB formulates self-­help treatment, 28; LaVopa criticizes, 38; SJ approves of Hypochondriack, 116; metropolitan English-­language in, 55; moody and meditative, 58; purpose of, 124, 139, 140; reprises original conception, 19–­20; silence in, 121–­123; Hypochondriacks: no. 1, 5–­6, 15, 21, 111, 112; no. 2, 113, 118; no. 3, 113, 118; no. 4, 113, 118; no. 5, 118–­119, 124, 140; no. 6, 119, 131; no. 7, 114, 129; no. 8, 129–130; no. 10, 13, 109, 132; no. 13, 114; no. 14, 113, 115; no. 15, 115; no. 16, 115; no. 21, 114; no. 23, 116, 134; no. 24, 117; no. 25, 135–­136, 137; no. 26, 129, 137; no. 27, 9; no. 36, 137; no. 37, 137; no. 38, 137–138; no. 39, 6, 8, 9, 118, 119–121, 123–124, 125, 131, 134; no. 40, 115; no. 43, 115; no. 44, 115; no. 45, 115; no. 46, 115; no. 47, 123; no. 49, 123; no. 50, 130; no. 52, 116; no. 55, 117; no. 56, 114, 115, 130; no. 57, 115; no. 61, 115–116; no. 63, 118; no. 66, 122, 134; no. 68, 123; no. 70, 139; Morning Post, 7, 34; Life in press, 23; Public Advertiser, 7, 40, 109; account of “Grocer” per­for­mance as observer, 74; account of Shakespeare Jubilee,” 43; “A Thralian Epigram,” 23; correspondent attacks JB’s Letter (1783), 156; Curtis dinner ballad defended, 44; denies anonymous praise, 38, 47n16; denies being correspondent D.C., 40; “Dilly and Dodsley,” 43; Dorando ballad, 43; explains copyright protection, 24; fictional autobiographies, 13; flurry of promotional articles, 24; Life advancing, 23; Life excerpt on Burke, 24; Life excerpt on Warren Hastings, 24; new freezing discovery, 123; paragraph about engraving of Johnson, 24; protects copyright on Chesterfield letter, 24; report on Gibson’s execution, 16; reports on Hackman case, 15–­16; reports on Highlander mutiny, 16; report on

178 I n d e x Boswell (cont.) Shakespeare Jubilee, 17; rewrite of MacDonald masquerade account in Caledonian Mercury, 18; shorthand reporter hoax, 44; speculates on author of No Abolition, 43, 48n38; three letters from Italy, 13; unsigned article on Life’s quality, 24; verses on bells to Corsica, 43; Rampager, 21, 50, 58, 59, 109, 125; allusive style in, 35; his “lively” essays, 41; JB’s authorship revealed, 9, 41; metropolitan English-­ language in, 55; no. 12, 19; po­liti­cal commentary, 19; Scots Magazine, 18; “An Original Letter, from a Gentleman of Scotland to the Earl of * * * in London,” 35; contributed for twenty-­ seven years, 54; Douglas Cause satire, 15; first to publish JB, 7, 109; news hoaxes in, 14; St. James’s Chronicle, 7, 34, 109; account of Lord Mayor’s party, 43; JB rescues Johnson’s memory, 24; JB superior biographer to Hawkins, 38; Life advancing, 23; Life extract on Burke’s wit, 24; Life outselling Burke’s Reflections, 24; no more unsigned articles about Life, 24; “Ode on Mr. Boswell’s Gong,” 43; reports on James Hackman’s trial and reflections, 15–16; thanks correspondent, 38, 47n15; w ­ ill publish what he pleases, 24 Pseudonyms (other than Hypochondriack and Rampager), 11; A Hungry Correspondent, 41; A Southern Soul, 18; An Old Correspondent, 42; An Old Courtier, 42, 47n33; An Old Town Citizen, 18, 42; Antiquarius, 41; B. M. Oxford, 42; extensive use of, 39; inconsistent use of, 41–42; Lelius, 43; Medicus Mentis, 41; Memory, 42; Mortalis, 41; Old Stingo, 44; Tantalus, 41; Trumpetarius, 41, 42; use of consistent pseudonyms, 41; Vetustus, 18, 41, 42 Unpublished works: “The B[***]M,” 53; Boswelliana, 52, 53, 59–­60, 76, 77; Dictionary of Scots, 54, 56, 57; “Howt owt Tobie Smallet maun ye lauch at me,” 53; journal, 52; Justiciary Opera (unfinished), 53, 59; “Keep ye weel frae Lord Galloway,” 53; “List of Scotticisms,” 53; London Journal, 94, 97, 102; potential works, 59, 67n55; “ten lines a

day,” 68; text of Sutiman proposal, 60–­61; translation of, 62–63, 66nn49–50; “Wi muckle ambition his mind he’s been creeshing” 53 Writing and reporting: appeal of periodical writing, 5–7; appropriates existing generic forms, 8; comportment more in­ter­est­ing than events, 16; contemplates Scottish periodical in Scots, 49; essays and letters contrasted, 36; has high expectations for Life, 21; hoaxes (“inventions”), 1; imagines himself “old Boswell,” 56; impact of SJ’s death, 20–21; interest in biography subject-­specific, 20; JB archives, 51; JB’s audience, 7–8; journalistic period, 14–20; kept clippings, 35; Life is perfect mode of biography, 23, 26; Life of Lord Kames never completed, 59; likes writing pamphlets, 10; literary genius period, 12–14; periodical output, 35; pre­sents himself as civic-­minded, 19; prints broadsides on celebratory occasions, 68; pursuit of immortality period, 20–27; signs few periodical pieces, 8–9, 31, 46n1; trajectory of JB’s writing ­career, 11–12 Boswell, James (son), 76 Boswell, John (­brother), 113 Boswell, Margaret (wife), 6, 9, 59, 72, 109; criticizes journalizing, 26; d ­ ying, 124; horrible to, 113; unworthy of her, 117 Boswell, Thomas David (T. D.), 115 Brady, Frank, 10, 69, 77; Hypochondriack a failure, 28, 125; JB’s best poem, 21; JB’s self-­contempt, 121, 126n38; JB’s singing voice, 68 British Essayists, 58 broadsides (general), 3–4 Bruce, James, 17, 21, 33 Buchanan, David, 76, 77 Buchan papers, 77, 79n32 Buckingham. See Villiers, George Burke, Edmund: drafted East India Bill, 149, 150; in Scotland, 18, 147; JB seeks help in Scotland, 148; JB should seek employment in Scotland, 146, 158n9; A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 129, 131–132, 135; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 24, 43

Index Burney, Frances, 129, 131; Camilla, 130–131, 136, 138, 141–142 Burns, Robert, 50, 51, 54, 63n9 Campbell, Ilay, 147 Cata­logue of the Papers of James Boswell at Yale, 50 Caudle, James, J., 27, 90, 97 Cave, Edward, 3 Cavendish-­Bentinck, William (3rd Duke of Portland), 144, 146, 147, 154, 158n8 Charles I, 152, 153 Chesterfield, Lord. See Stanhope, Phillip Dormer Cheyne, George, 129, 130, 140; The En­glish Malady, 128, 140 Clarke, Bob, 36 Colburn, Glen, 125 Collection of Original Poems by Scotch Gentlemen, 12, 54, 88 Connoisseur, 50, 55 constitutional crisis (UK), 28, 144–145, 153 Corsica (island), 1, 2, 11, 13, 14, 37, 72, 122; anti-­Corsica proclamation, 44; church bells sent to, 43; gives JB award, 25; meets with elder Pitt about, 77; solicits translated epigrams on, 39 Court of Session, 10, 13, 14, 44; lacks relish for, 121; missed session, 145 Critical Review, 155 Cullen, William, 128 Curtis, William, 44 Daily Courant, 2 Dalrymple, David (Lord Hailes), 58, 60, 61, 62, 115; advises caution, 15; Ancient Scottish Poems, published from the MS of George Bannatyne, MDLXVIII, 50; reviewed by Scots Magazine, 56 Davies, Thomas, 52, 64n14 Dempster, George, 50, 80, 91, 146 Diary, 69; account of “Grocer” per­for­ mance, 74 Dick, Sir Alexander, 20 Dilly, Charles, 25, 43, 112 Dilly, Edward, 4, 110, 112, 113 Dodsley, James, 43, 97, 99–100, 107n14 Dodsley, Robert, 4 Donaldson, Alexander, 7, 12, 54, 81, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91 Donaldson, James (Alexander’s son), 155 Dossena, Marina, 50 Douglas, Archibald, 14

179 Douglas, Gavin, 57, 58, 62, 67n56; Eneados, 56 Douglas, Lady Jane, 14 Douglas Cause, 14, 44, 53 Douglas-­Hamilton, James (7th Duke of Hamilton), 14 Dryden, John, 137; “Alexander’s Feast,” 85 Dudley, Henry Bate, 34 Duffy, Michael, 157 Dundas, Henry, 145–146, 147, 148, 150, 155, 156, 157, 158n3–4 Dundas, Sir Thomas, 148, 159n22 East India Com­pany, 151, 154 East India Com­pany Bill, 144, 151, 153, 154; controversial dismissal, 148; controversy, 149–150; rejected by Lords, 152 Edgeworth, Maria, 129, 141, 142; Belinda, 136, 138–139, 141–142 Edinburgh, 55, 57, 58, 70, 114, 117; theater riot, 33 ­England, Martha Winburn, 69 En­glish civil war, 152–153 Epigoniad, 83, 87 Erskine, Andrew, 13, 80, 89, 90, 91, 98, 105 Erskine, Henry, 147, 148, 150, 158–159n19 Fergusson, Adam, 148 Fergusson, Robert, 50, 51 Fielding, Henry, 118 Fitzgerald, Percy, 76, 77 Fox, Charles James, 35–36, 144, 145, 146, 148, 155, 156 Fox-­North Co­ali­tion, 29, 144, 145, 146, 148, 158n5 Garrick, David, 10, 17, 27, 43, 69–70, 77; “Jubilee Ode,” 40 Gaskell, Philip, 69 Genette, Gérard, 36, 40 Genoa, 2 Gentleman’s Magazine, 3 George II, 151 George III, 29, 57, 94, 145, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157, 160n44 Gibson, James, execution of, 16 Glasgow, University of, 18 Goldsmith, Oliver: “Ah me! when ­shall I marry me” (song), 37; She Stoops to Conquer, 37 Gordon, Cosmo, 115 ­Grand Tour, 2, 13, 19, 52, 108, 146

180 I n d e x Grange. See Johnston, John Gray, Thomas, Elegy Written in a Country Church-­yard, 82, 87 Green, Matthew, 118 Griffin, Dustin, 95, 98 Hackman, James (case of), 15 Hamilton, Duke of. See Douglas-­ Hamilton, James Hankins, David, 90 Hastings, Warren, 24 Hawkins, Sir John: JB criticizes, 22; poorly reviewed, 23; publishes Life of Samuel Johnson, 22; refuses to help JB, 72 Highlander mutiny, 16, 21, 33 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 20, 57, 112; JB plans biography of, 59; reads Hypochondriacks to, 115–116; Sketches on the History of Man, 115; suggests JB write periodical essays, 13 Homer, 81, 85, 87 ­Humble Remonstrance and Petition, 152–153 Hume, David, 20, 53, 55, 62 Hypochondria: JB formulates self-­help program, 129; medical definition shifting, 128 India, 154 Ingram, Allan, 13, 28 Ireland, 110, 119, 152, 154–155 Isham, Ralph, 70, 76 Isham papers, 49 Italy, 2, 13, 108 Jockey Club (London), 28, 95–96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 106n9 Johnson, Samuel, 1, 7, 20, 22, 24, 25, 29, 33, 59, 73, 112, 114, 124; acceptable to deny authorship, 39; advises JB against London move, 146; embalming meta­phor in, 26; health declining, 147, 157; Idler, 40; JB and SJ forever linked, 26; JB competes with, 26; JB meets, 52; JB’s publishing disgusting, 5; JB mocks, 21; Johnson’s death, 11; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 57; Ode expresses rage at, 22–23, 31n40; on anonymity, 40; Rambler, 19, 40, 50, 55, 111, 116–117, 125; Rasselas, 40; tour of the Hebrides, 18 Johnston, John (Grange), 113, 122

journal: gap in, 121–123; Holland journal lost, 122; journalizing copes with anxiety, 26; silence in, 125; wife criticizes journalizing, 26 Jung, Sandro, 87 Junius Letters, 7, 19, 40 King, Thomas, 102 LaVopa, Anthony, 28 Le Blanc, abbé Jean-­Barnard, 118 Le Vasseur, Thérèse, 73 London, 13, 15, 18, 52, 59, 60, 111, 114, 124, 146 London Gazette, 155 Lord Hailes. See Dalrymple, David Lord Houghton. See Milnes, Richard Monckton Lord Kames. See Home, Henry Lord North. See North, Frederick Lord ­Temple. See Nugent-­Temple-­Grenville, George Louisa (London paramour), 73 Lounger, 55, 58 Love, James, 52 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, declares JB first of biographers, 27, 31n49, 52 Macdonald, Alexander, 18 Maclaurin, John, 117 Magazines (general), 2; most numerous class of periodicals, 3 Maitland, Sir Richard (Lord Lethington), 37 Malahide ­Castle, 70, 76 Mallet, David, 13, 51 Malone, Edmund, 41 Manning, Susan, 122–123 Martin, Peter, 11, 122 Martinus Scriblerus, 84 Mayo, Robert, 3 McLean, Mark, 56 McMaster, Juliet, 138 metropolitan En­glish, 55, 57 Mickle, William Julius, 51 Midlothian, 52 Milnes, Richard Monckton (Lord Houghton), 76, 77 Milton, John, 87 Mirror, 55, 58 Mitchell, Joseph, 51 Mohawks, 17–18, 19 Montagu, John (4th Earl of Sandwich), 15 Montgomerie, Alexander (10th Earl of Eglinton), 35, 59, 94–95, 103

Index Montgomerie, Hugh, 157 Monthly Review, praises JB, 25 Morning Chronicle, criticizes Life, 25 Morning Herald, 154–155 Morning Post, 7, 34; criticizes Life, 25 Mullan, John, 39, 40–41 Murray, Alexander, 122 New Cambridge Bibliography of En­glish Lit­er­at­ ure, 10 Newmarket, 96 Newspapers (general): anonymity, 9; audience diversity, 3; “chronicle” appears, 4; desire early intelligence, 4–5; distinction between essays and letters, 36; growth in London and circulation, 3; imitate magazines, 3; reliance on anonymity and unsourced articles, 35; snippets, 33–35; squibs, 8 Nichol, Donald, 97 North, Frederick (Lord North; 2nd Earl of Guilford), 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 155, 156 Nugent-­Temple-­Grenville, George (1st Marquess of Buckingham), 149, 150, 152, 157 pamphlets (general), 3–4 Paoli, Pasquale, 2, 5, 9, 11, 25, 37, 73, 77, 122, 146 periodical publishing industry, development of, 2–5 Petty, William (2nd Earl of Shelburne), 144, 145, 149, 157–158n2 Pigott, John Hugh Smyth, 76 Pindar, Peter, 37 Piozzi, Gabriel, 22 Piozzi, Hester Thrale, 37; JB criticizes, 22; Letters triggers JB’s mockery of SJ, 22–23; Piozzi traducing SJ’s character, 23; publishes Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, 22; publishes Letters To and From the Late Samuel Johnson, 22 Pitt, William (the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham), 44, 77 Pitt, William (the Younger), 27, 72, 73, 74, 75, 151, 153, 154; becomes prime minister, 148; contemplates resigning, 155; JB flatters, 156, 157, 161n65; unsuccessfully proposes Scotland reforms, 147 Pope, Alexander, 4, 85 Portland, Duke of. See Cavendish-­ Bentinck, William

181 Pottle, Frederick A., 7, 35, 45, 49, 52–53, 68, 70, 74, 77; criticizes Cub, 96, 105, 106n11; criticizes Elegy, 80; Elegy origin theory, 89–91, 90, 92–93n18; The Literary C ­ areer of James Boswell, Esq., Being the Biographical Materials for a Life of Boswell, 1, 49, 68, 109 Pottle, Marion S., 50, 56 Prior, Matthew, 12 pseudonyms (not JB’s): Anti-­Gnatho, 40; Cassandra, 34; Chaunticleer, 34; Clarendon, 156; Felicity Ferret, 34; D.C., 40; A Small Country Gentleman, 145; Veritas, 34 Ramsay, Allan, 50, 51, 57, 60, 62; ed. Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600, 58; glossary for The Ever Green, 58 Reid, John, 11–12, 15, 52–53; execution of, 16 Rennie, Susan, 50; discovers JB’s dictionary manuscript, 54 Revolution of 1688, 150 Rivington, John, 110 Rogers, Charles, 77 Rousseau, Jean Jacque, 73 Rudd, Carolyn (forger), 73 Ruddiman, Thomas, 56, 58, 60, 62 Scots language, 50, 62 Scott, Sir Walter, 50, 57 Scotticisms, 53 Seward, Anna, 24, 37 Seward, William, 114–115 Seymour, Terry, 10, 27 Shakespeare Jubilee, 10, 17, 21, 27, 33, 40, 43, 44, 69, 72, 78n5 Shelburne, Earl of. See Petty, William Sheridan, Thomas, 52, 85, 92n10 Solander, Daniel, 17 Spectator, 19, 50, 55, 62, 66nn49–50, 110, 111, 119, 125, 140 Stanhope, Phillip Dormer (4th Earl of Chesterfield), 50 Steele, Richard, 110, 140 Steevens, George, 34–35, 38 Sterne, Laurence, 12, 132 Stoddard, Roger, 58 Strabone, Jeff, 58 Strahan, William, 4 Strathaven, 90

182 I n d e x Stuart, John (Lord Mountstuart), 19, 50, 108, 122, 146–147, 158nn9–10 Sutiman, 49 Swift, Jonathan, 4; Short View of the State of Ireland, 119 Sydenham, Dr. Thomas, 128 Tankard, Paul, 1, 8–9, 15, 19, 24, 27, 55; JB’s journalism, 33–34; on Rampager, 109 Taylor, John, account of “Grocer” per­for­mance, 74–75 ­Temple, William Johnson, 72, 116; criticizes JB’s periodical publishing, 9; recognizes JB’s desire for immortality, 25, 26 Thomson, James, 51, 118 Thornton, Bonnell, 50 Thorpe, Thomas, 76 Times Literary Supplement, 32 Townshend, Charles, 145 Triennial Bill, 153 Turnbull, Gordon, 77 Utrecht, University of, 13, 68

Villiers, George (2nd Duke of Buckingham), 85, 92n11 Virgil, 88 Voltaire, 13, 73 Walker, Robert, 39 Walpole, Horace, 73; criticizes Piozzi’s Anecdotes, 22 Werkmeister, Lucyle, 34 Whytt, Robert, 128 Wight, Alexander, 147, 150, 158n18 Wilkes, John, 73, 150 Wilkie, William, 83, 87 William III, 153 Willis, Dr. Thomas, 128 Wiltshire, John, 133 Wimsatt, William K., 52–53 Wolfe, James, 85 Woodfall, William, 69 World, 50, 55, 96; criticizes JB’s puffery, 24 Wyvill, Christopher, 155 York, Duke of. See Augustus, Edward Young, Katherine, 90, 91