“Boswell’s Presumptuous Task” by Adam Sisman

This is the third book I have read this summer that could be described as a biographical study of a biographer. James Boswell (1740 -1795) was a fascinating figure in all kinds of ways, more interesting in many respects as a man who failed in his lifetime to achieve what he set out to achieve.

He met and became friendly with a diverse range of eighteenth century a-list celebrities including Rousseau, Voltaire, William Pitt, Adam Smith, David Hume, Joshua Reynolds and King George III. He wanted to become, at various stages in his life, a senior judge, a dashing army officer, a significant writer and a Member of Parliament. By his own reckoning he under-achieved in all these fields. But, of course, he excelled towards the end of his life in the one particular ‘presumptuous task’ that he set himself, and it was for this which he became – but only after his death – widely admired and celebrated, as remains the case today.

Having befriended his great literary hero Dr Samuel Johnson, a man who was thirty years older than himself, after engineering a ‘chance’ meeting in a bookshop in 1763, he proceeded for the next twenty-one years to develop and deepen the friendship, and to keep a detailed record of the many conversations he had with the great man. These mostly took place in London at private houses and in taverns and coffee houses around Fleet Street and the Strand, but the two men also went on little trips together, most famously in 1773 when they went on tour of the Scottish highlands, an account of which Samuel Johnson published two years later.

After Samuel Johnson died in 1784, booksellers were keen to capitalise on his celebrity by commissioning ‘lives’ to be written by his friends. Two shorter works came out quite quickly and were reasonably widely read, but Boswell’s ‘definitive ‘Life of Johnson’ took over five years to write, finally being published in 1791. Second and third updated editions then followed in subsequent years as additional materials came into Boswell’s possession.

It is a vast book that I have been reading and enjoying in chunks over the past year and have still to finish, and it is by any reckoning a terrific literary achievement. Not only was Boswell writing a comprehensive study, he was also in the process really inventing the art of modern biographical writing, and his subsequent influence has thus been vast. Right at end of this splendid account of Boswell’s life and approach to writing his ‘life’, Adam Sisman sums up his contribution as follows:

The ‘Life of Johnson’ was soon acknowledged as a masterpiece. Boswell had extended the form into new territory, borrowing techniques from the novel, the theatre, and the confessional memoir. With meticulous care, with long-practiced skill, and with a generous imagination, he crafted a character who lived and breathed. He also set new scholarly standards; his verification of every possible detail, which seemed so eccentric to his contemporaries, would become the norm. In doing what he did, he relied mainly on instinct, his sense of what would serve his purpose best. Boswell was influenced by other biographers, by Johnson in particular, but his book was quite different from any that had gone before – or indeed, any that would be published after. For though the ‘Life of Johnson’ was a pioneering work which opened up new possibilities for biography, it was also unique; never again will there be such a combination of subject, author and opportunity.

Adam Sisman is himself, of course, an outstanding practitioner of biographical writing. His book about Asa Briggs was one of my favourite reads of last year, and his study of Hugh Trevor-Roper one of the books most enjoyable books I have read. So I had high expectations when I started to read this, and was not disappointed.

In many respects it is a straight forward biography of James Boswell with an emphasis properly being placed on the relationship with Samuel Johnson and the writing of the ‘Life’. It goes rather further, however, in its discussion of the book itself, its publication, reception and burgeoning posthumous reputation.

Boswell is a terrific subject for a biographer because he kept very detailed and frank journals for much of his life that were never intended for publication. Like Pepys he wrote some passages in a code so that he could read them later, while also keeping them private. These were however soon cracked and they revealed a side to Boswell that was not especially pleasant, particularly his addiction to ‘whoring’ and the instances of VD that followed in their wake. The accounts of others also reveal him to have been a pretty serious alcoholic and someone who was forever getting himself (an his extensive estate in Ayrshire) into financial distress. He was not a great husband or father either. His habitual indiscretion – including a lack of squeamishness about offending influential people in print – was also a factor in preventing him from advancing his career as he would have liked.

Many of his journals and letters were kept under lock and key by his descendants who were rather ashamed of their connection to him, but their ‘discovery’ and publication in the mid-twentieth century has led to a serious reappraisal of Boswell for a more liberal and less censorious age.

I learned a huge amount from reading this book, about both Boswell and Johnson. I had not appreciated previously, for example, that Boswell’s account of the famous highland trip he made with Johnson was only published after Johnson’s death, and that its commercial success led him to decide, finally, that a full biography was something he would like to write. Neither had I appreciated the significant role played by Edmund Malone in assisting Boswell with ‘his presumptuous task’, nor the extent to which many people who had known Johnson were really unhappy about the way they were portrayed in the life (ie; honestly!). I had not appreciated the extent of criticism from those who consider ‘The Life of Johnson’ to be hagiographic in intent and the extent to which Boswell omitted material that he felt might lead readers to form a less favourable view of his subject’s life.

With all great biographies, the reader also learns a lot about the times in which the subject lived out his or her life, and that is very much the case here. The figure of James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, looms particularly large here as a typical eighteenth century aristocrat, who owned vast tracts of land, was immensely wealthy, unpleasantly powerful and happy to use his wealth and power to bully acolytes like Boswell who had little choice but to tug their forelocks and to grin and bear it in order to secure and retain preferment.

All in all another excellent book from the very admirable Adam Sisman.