Boswell, James
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
James (1740-1795), a Scottish writer. His father was a judge and gave him a liberal education. The young man had a fondness for literature, but showed no marked ability in any direction. During a visit to London he formed the acquaintance of Dr. Samuel Johnson, at whose feet he literally sat during the rest of that famous man's life. He became a member of the noted literary club of which Dr. Johnson was the center. In 1773 he induced Johnson to visit him in Scotland, and together they made a tour of the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. In 1791 appeared his Life of Johnson, the most famous biography in the English language. It goes into the details of a great man's life as none but a Bos-well could have gone. Boswell's character is not attractive. He was a hanger-on, he heard every word, saw every act, and he could not be snubbed. It must be confessed, however, that he had the greatest veneration for Dr. Johnson, and that to a prodigious memory he united an untiring industry as a note taker and no little skill in delineation. The Life is drawn out to extreme length-one edition occupies ten volumes, but no one would wish it cut down. It has gone through many editions, and is still an indispensable history, an authentic account, of the literary age in which Dr. Johnson lived. Carlyle and Macaulay have written essays on Boswell's Johnson which the student will desire to read. See Johnson James Boswell....was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous,-and yet his writings are read beyond the Mississippi, and under the Southern Cross and are likely to be read as long as English exists, either as a living or as a dead language.-- Macaulay's Johnson. A wine bibber,....vain, heedless, a babbler,. . . . . ..a sycophant,. . . . . ..bag cheeks, hanging like half filled skins. . . . . Behold, worthy Bozzy fly like iron to its magnet. The iron may be a Scottish squirelet . . . . . the magnet an English plebeian, a moving, rag-and-dust mountain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious, nevertheless, behold how they embrace and inseparably cleave to each other. . . . . . . . . . Boswell wrote a good book. He had a heart and an eye to discern wisdom. . . . . .... In worth as a book we have rated it beyond any other production of the eighteenth century.--Carlyle's Johnson.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote in 1910 that Boswell "showed no marked ability in any direction" and had an unattractive character, it was repeating the verdict Macaulay had fixed a century before. That verdict collapsed after Boswell's own private journals came to light: papers found at Malahide Castle near Dublin from the 1920s onward, famously including a bundle stuffed in a croquet box, and a further hoard at Fettercairn House in Scotland in 1930. Bought by the American collector Ralph Isham and eventually acquired by Yale in 1949, they yielded Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763, published in 1950, which became an international bestseller and established Boswell as a great diarist in his own right rather than merely Johnson's shadow. The Life is still routinely called the finest biography in English, so on that point the old entry holds.
Written for this edition, 2026.