Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763

When the London Journal first appeared in 1950, it created the biggest publishing event of the season. No work of eighteenth-century literature has made such an impact on the broad reading public over recent years. Hardly anyone active in the field can now remember this sensational premiere, and today we might find it difficult to recapture those feelings. What we need to recall is first, that only limited portions of Boswell’s private papers had yet been published, and those in an expensive limited edition. The London Journal inaugurated the trade edition which would form a more popular side of the Yale Edition of the papers. It constituted the first of fourteen such volumes: among these none quite managed to match the London Journal in broad appeal, despite come-on titles like Boswell in Search of a Wife and Boswell in Extremes. The Yale project remains under way with the gradual appearance of new volumes in the scholarly “research” series, now numbering a dozen or so. Second, we must remember that the segment chosen to open this sequence happened to be the most youthful and high-spirited. Chronologically, it marked the beginning of Boswell’s regular daily journal—a few earlier efforts had petered out. In terms of content, it charted the first real break for freedom on the part of an insecure Scot of twenty-two.

Up to this date, his life had been to a degree regulated, and he had seldom escaped for long the iron hand of his father, the senior Edinburgh judge Lord Auchinleck, and his slightly distant mother, Euphemia Erskine Boswell. Now he was permitted for the first time to spread his wings, and he launched himself into the myriad possibilities of London life. The world lay all before him, and well-known episodes such as his Corsican adventure and his conquest of literary London in the company of Samuel Johnson remained no more than a vague dream at this stage. He confronted everything, from high culture to crime, from the theatre to the coffee-house, from churches to bordellos in Covent Garden. His professed aim was to advance his career, particularly if he could get a military commission in a good regiment: “I am pushing to get into the Guards, where to distinguish myself as a good officer and to get promotion will be my favourite objects” (79). However, he decided he ought after all to emulate his father and become a lawyer: “By this means I would make money which would enable me to jaunt about wherever I pleased in the vacations” (200). Boswell also spent much of his time stalking literary celebrities such as Oliver Goldsmith. One famous evening in May 1763 he finally tracked down his real quarry, Johnson. Between these events, he drank and he fornicated—small wonder that this confessional narrative so captivated the 1950s.

But that was then, and this is now. What does the appearance of the so-called “second edition” mean, fifty years on? As for the content, the book remains an incomparably precise rendition of the workings of a contradictory mind and a peculiar sensibility. When Boswell feels drawn to attend a hanging at Tyburn, he turns himself into knots: “My curiosity to see the melancholy spectacle of the executions was so strong that I could not resist it, although I was sensible that I would suffer much from it. ... Accordingly I took Captain [Robert] Temple with me, and he and I got upon a scaffold very near the fatal tree, so that we could clearly see all the dismal scene” (252). After his money runs short and his intended mistress, “Louisa” (Mrs. Lewis, a minor actress), stalls him, he reflects: “I came home and dined in dejection. Yet I mustered up vivacity, and away I went in full dress to Northumberland House. There was spirit, to lay out a couple of shillings and be a man of fashion in my situation. There was true economy” (104). The piquancy attached to this train of thought derives not just from sudden shifts of mood, but from the observing eye through which Boswell catches a vein of absurdity in his own vacillations.

Most specialists in the eighteenth century will recognize the qualities in these passages, and a hundred more like them. For that reason they will be glad to have the chance to acquire the text in paperback, if they do not already have it. But no one should suppose that the second edition differs in any meaningful way. The sole fresh item is a three-page foreword by Peter Ackroyd, the novelist and historian of London, perfectly sensible and well written but not exactly stretching the writer’s talents. After that, we have what we have always had, verbatim and literatim. First comes an avuncular preface by Christopher Morley, a name to conjure with in 1950: an author and journalist who used to do a lot of radio work, a bit like Hugh Downs with more waspishness. Morley tells the story of the discovery of the Boswell papers, a narrative which has been filled out subsequently in much more detail by Colin Buchanan in The Treasure of Auchinleck (1974) and by Pottle himself in Pride and Negligence (1982). Morley lacked Buchanan’s legal expertise and Pottle’s firsthand familiarity with the material, but he did an accurate and readable job. The preliminaries conclude with an introduction by the editor—by this time proceedings are starting to resemble A Tale of a Tub, and the publishers would have struggled if required to name another prefatory item. This section carries valuable biographic and historical information, but glides fairly quickly over some of the literary aspects of the journal. When we reach the text, Pottle supplies light but instructive annotation. A map of London, two short appendices and a good index complete the volume.

Idle, perhaps, to complain that much has changed in Boswell studies over the intervening years. The fact that we could now annotate the text in completely new ways owes most to the work that Pottle and his fellow editors carried out for the Yale edition (both trade and research versions). The picture looks different, too, because of the two-volume biography by Pottle and Frank Brady (1966, 1984), along with subsequent studies in this vein. More generally, almost two generations of criticism have elapsed, and every reader today will ask questions of the text which the original editor would scarcely have formulated—although he might have come up with some interesting answers. No longer does Boswell’s journal stand alone in the period, as we have for example a full edition of Frances Burney. The diarists shared an overlapping stretch of time, but that was one of the few things they did share.

In spite of all these changes over the last half century, or perhaps because of them, it remains a good thing to have this book in print. Students will get almost everything they need, and instructors will be spurred to produce their alternative version in class.