Peter Martin
A Life of James Boswell.
Yale University Press, 613 pages $35
Adam Sisman
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task.
Hamish Hamilton, 392 pages, £17.99.
reviewed by John Derbyshire
Published in 1791, the Life of Samuel Johnson became famous at once, but left everyone baffled that such a tremendous masterpiece could have been produced by James Boswell. The biographer was regarded by those who knew him as a talentless buffoon and by many others as something even less. Macaulay, most famously, pronounced Boswell “one of the smallest men who ever lived . . . a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect . . . servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot . . . a common butt in the taverns of London.” Does not a work of genius require a genius for its production?
The mystery endured for half-a-century, until a cache of Boswell’s letters was discovered and published in the 1850s. This began the long, gradual discovery of Boswell himself, as more and more of his journals and letters came to light. We now know that the great biography of Johnson had its foundations in a much larger work of art: Boswell’s obsessive chronicling of his own life. He observed early on that he would not like to live any more of life than he could record, and he seems to have remained true to this ideal, at least until his very last years.
