Boswell, James 1740-95
Scottish writer and biographer of Dr Johnson

James Boswell was born in Edinburgh, the eldest son of a judge called Lord Auchinleck. He was educated privately and at the University of Edinburgh. He studied civil law at Glasgow, but his true goal was literary fame and the friendship of the famous. At the age of 18 he began to keep an astonishingly frank and self-probing journal. In the spring of 1760 he ran away to London, where he hobnobbed with the young Duke of York and with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's father, made plans to join the army, and skilfully resisted all attempts to lure him into matrimony.

He first met Dr Samuel Johnson on his second visit to London, on 16 May 1763, at Tom Davies's bookshop in Russell Street. By the following year they were on such cordial terms that Johnson accompanied him as far as Harwich. Boswell was on his way to Utrecht to continue his legal studies, but stayed only for the winter and then toured Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy. By an astounding process of literary gatecrashing he introduced himself to Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau. From Rousseau he procured an introduction to the hero of Corsica Pasquale de Paoli, whom he 'Boswellized' in Account of Corsica (1768), which had an immediate success and was translated into several languages.

Boswell had many love affairs. There was the serious and high-minded affair with 'Z�lide' of Utrecht, and liaisons with the Irish Mary Anne Montgomery, and with numerous others in London, Rome and elsewhere, including a disreputable episode with Rousseau's mistress, Th�r�se Le Vasseur. Finally, in 1769, he married a cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, a prudent, amiable woman who put up with his shortcomings.

In 1773 Boswell was elected to Johnson's famous literary club, and took the great doctor on a memorable journey to the Hebrides. He was called to the English Bar in 1786, but he hardly practised. Boswell's wife died in 1789, leaving him six children, and thereafter his drinking habits got the better of him.

Bibliography: The discoveries of Boswell's manuscripts, at Malahide Castle in Ireland in 1927 and at Fettercairn House in Scotland in 1930, which have been assembled by Yale University, are proof of his literary industry and integrity. A major literary enterprise (1777-83) was a series of 70 monthly contributions to the London Magazine under the pseudonym 'The Hypochondriak'. After Johnson's death the The Journal of the Tour of the Hebrides (1785) appeared. Its great success made Boswell plan his masterpiece, the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), of which The Journal served as a first instalment.

Bibliography: I Finlayson, The Moth and the Candle: a life of James Boswell (1985).