'London Journal 1762-1763' by James Boswell

I have been devoting many hours throughout 2025 to reading – sporadically due to its immense length – Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, which I have found to be endlessly engaging. I read his London Journal mainly because this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of its publication in December 1950, following its ‘discovery’ among a vast tract of Boswell’s papers in a manor house called Malahide located near to Dublin. And it is wonderful.

The diary recounts in a great deal of detail a slice of Boswell’s life and thoughts from 15th November 1762 (when he left Edinburgh by stage coach to visit London) and 6th August 1763 (when, having left London, he departs from Harwich at the start of his travels around Europe). He writes at great length, with elegance and extraordinary frankness about these months spent in London, giving us (his unintended readers) a magnificent portrait of himself as a young man uncertain of his future and of the city at that time.

Boswell was the son of a successful Scottish lawyer, whose estates he would later inherit, but with whom he had little in common. On arrival in London, aged just 22, Boswell’s prime aim was to secure for himself a commission in a London-based army regiment, and he sets about getting to know people of influence who may be able to assist him. But as the journal proceeds the reader – rather earlier than the author – realises that a military career would be a hopeless choice for him. He was far too sensitive, as well as artistically and intellectually inclined. By the end of his stay in London he has reached this conclusion himself and accepts that he will have to follow his father into the law and a life of estate management.

In the process, though, he devoted a great deal of time to socialising very widely, and building up a network of new friends and acquaintances. He mixes with some high-born titled individuals, but it is clear that he is not really at home in such company. He prefers the actors and writers he meets in coffeehouses, and the tradespeople he deals with. There are also quite a few encounters with prostitutes, for which fearing venereal disease, he is forever admonishing himself. This never stops him for long though. The way that description of these flings, is juxtaposed with discussion of sermons he hears, the books he is reading and his day-to-day financial concerns, makes the journal endlessly engaging to read.

For much of his time in London, Boswell lodged (as Samuel Pepys also did over a century earlier) at a house in Downing Street and so was living right in the heart of the city, from where he walked all over the place each day.

He looked to experience services in every church, also dining in numerous pubs and restaurants, visiting many bookshops while finding it hard to resist the streetwalkers. There is also a longer-lasting and more touching affair with an actress he called Louisa in his diary which is sweet by today’s standards (if scandalous in 17662) and which he later rather regrets bringing to an end. He observes the State Opening of Parliament from the gallery of the House of Lords and is impressed by the way that the young King George III reads his speech.

The journal really comes alive though, about half way through, when Boswell wrote his entry for Monday 16th May 1763. It starts very much as most of the entries do, then suddenly gets much more interesting:

Temple and his brother breakfasted with me. I went to Love’s to try to recover some of the money which he owes me. But alas a single guinea was all I could get. He was just going to dinner, so I stayed & eat a bit; tho’ I was angry at myself afterwards. I drank tea at Davies’s in Russell Street and about seven came in the great Mr Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr Davies introduced me to him.

And so started a friendship that would persist until Samuel Johnson’s death over twenty years later. Boswell gained a paternal figure who was far more supportive and conducive than his real father, while Johnson gained a companion to whom he would remain devoted. Literature would ultimately gain one of the greatest and most influential biographies ever written in English.