Abstract
“If my sons are idiots, can I help it?” Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, fired that retort at his son James on August 1, 1782. Father and son were quarreling again about James’s younger brother John, who had spent much of the past two decades in an asylum.1 It was one more flash point in a relationship that was, to put it in the best possible light, hopelessly troubled. William Temple, James’s closest friend since boyhood, described their clash of temperaments: “[T]he one severe, steady, methodical; the other lively impatient, eccentrick, the one keeping one object constantly in view, without the least variations or distraction; the other full of various hopes and projects, now pursuing them with ardor, now with remiss.” Boswell senior, Temple added, “[had] a very imperfect idea of the pleasures of liberal conversation.”2
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Notes
James Boswell, Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1779–1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle, The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 467.
James Boswell, The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple, 1756–1795, ed. Thomas Crawford, The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 1:361–62 [hereafter, Boswell/Temple Correspondence].
M.S. Pottle, Claude Colleer Abbott, and Frederick A. Pottle, Catalogue of the Papers of James Boswell at Yale University (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), C215. The Catalogue will be referred to as “BP” hereafter.
James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 together with Journal of my Jaunt, Harvest 1762, ed. Frederick A. Pottle, The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (London: Heinemann, 1951), 188.
Helen Deutsch, “Symptomatic Correspondences: The Author’s Case in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Cultural Critique 42 (Spring 1999): 35–79.
See also Allan Ingram, Boswell’s Creative Gloom: A Study of Imagery and Melancholy in the Writings of James Boswell (London: Macmillan, 1982), 11–44;
Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, foreword by Simon Schama (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 69–93.
Indispensable on this subject is Ingram’s Boswell’s Creative Gloom. Peter Martin devotes a fascinating prologue to the centrality of depression in Boswell’s life; see A Life of James Boswell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 12–20. For a judicious medical diagnosis of Boswell’s mental disorder, see David Purdie and Neil Gow, “The Maladies of James Boswell, Advocate,” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh 32 (2002): 197–202.
James Boswell, Boswell’s column: Being the seventy contributions to the London Magazine under the pseudonym “The Hypochondriack” from 1777 to 1783, intro. Margery Bailey (London: Kimber, 1951), 207–10.
See Arthur Fawcett, The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1971), esp. 81, 101–12, 118–23.
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), esp. 103–29. Siskin uses Virgil’s The Georgics and its eighteenth-century successors to trace this modernization of the classical tradition. He offers a suggestive new framework for understanding the relationship between the revaluation of work and the technology of writing, but he largely ignores the context and role of Protestantism.
On Calvin’s view, see Angus Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” Past and Present 191, no. 1 (2006): 77–120.
See Nicholas T. Phillipson, The Scottish Whigs and the Reform of the Court of Session 1785–1830 (Edinburgh: Stair Society, 1990);
Phillipson, “The Social Structure of the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland 1661–1840,” in Law-Making and Law-Makers in British History, ed. Allan Harding (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), 146–56.
David Hume, “Of the Middle Station of Life,” in Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 548.
James Boswell, Life of Johnson: Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides: And, Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, 6 vols., ed. G.B. Hill; rev. ed. L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 5:375–84.
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 3 vols., ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1969).
James Boswell, Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1928; London: Heinemann, 1952), 388. See also Boswell/ Temple Correspondence, 69–71.
Frank Brady, James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–1795 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 235.
Background in Robert Demaria Jr., “The Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 527–48.
See esp. Marc Fumaroli, “L’empire des femmes, ou l’esprit de joie,” in La Diplomatie de l’esprit: De Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris: Hermann, 1994), esp. 322–38;
Anthony J. LaVopa, “Sexless Minds at Work and at Play: Poullain de la Barre and the Origins of Early Modern Feminism,” Representations 109 (Winter 2010): 57–94.
Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal in the Market Place, on the Hustings, and in the Pulpit (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1971), esp. 29–48.
Barrett Wendell and Chester Noyes Greenough, eds., Selections from the Writings of Joseph Addison (Boston: Ginn, 1905), 62.
See, e.g., Boswell/Temple Correspondence, 69–71. See also his remark to his friend James Johnston, in The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange, ed. Ralph Walker, in Boswell’s Correspondence (New York and Toronto, 1966), 1:126. Boswell warned his son against repeating this failing.
John W. Cairns, “Rhetoric, Language, and Roman Law: Legal Education and Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” Law and History Review 9 (1991): 31–58.
Adam Ferguson, The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, contributing ed. Robin Dix and Eugene Heath (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), 146.
See esp. Jerrold E. Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986).
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LaVopa, A. (2011). The Not-So-Prodigal Son: James Boswell and the Scottish Enlightenment. In: Ahnert, T., Manning, S. (eds) Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119956_5
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