Boswell the Biographer

by George Mallory

As a father, Boswell was no less kind. He had had six children altogether, three sons and three daughters;[¹²] one of the sons had died early in 1777. His interest in his children no doubt increased very much after their mother's death. Frequently in the 'Letters to Temple' after that event (June, 1789) one or other of them is mentioned, and Boswell shows anxiety both for their present happiness and for their future welfare. Malone, in answering a detractor of Boswell's, says:

This writer acknowledges that he was an affectionate father; he was more; he was extremely liberal and indulgent to his children, having, for some years past, expended out of his moderate income, £300 a year to educate his two sons, one at Eton and the other at Westminster, and one of his daughters at a boarding-school: to effect which he confined his own personal expenses within the narrowest bounds.

That Boswell could stint himself in this way for his children shows a larger degree of self-sacrifice than might be expected from one of his extravagant tastes. It shows also a development in his character. The old passion for being conspicuous could now be put aside for the sake of his children.

Boswell, in fact, became less extravagant and affected towards the end of life. He was less often carried away by his 'warm imagination.' He lived less in his 'castles in the air,' and nearer the solid earth.

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The next cause of this development is not far to seek. It lies in the result of the main struggle in Boswell's life. Truth had won the day. The irrepressible quality of Boswell's genius had triumphed in spite of his THE SUPREME QUALITY commonplace aims and the conventionality of his beliefs and standards; and it had found its expression in biography. The nature of that triumph reacted inevitably upon Boswell. The highest of his qualifications for writing the 'Life of Johnson' was simply honesty. He was honest about human nature. He had related without omission and without perversion the story of a man as he had witnessed it. All his powers of observing and of judging character had been brought to bear upon the great work of his life. His own character had developed in the process. It is impossible for a man to concentrate all his mind upon the effort to understand the human being, without involving himself in his investigations; and Boswell was no exception. He had always been interested in his own character, though in a rather uncritical fashion; and no doubt, as often happens, his knowledge of others began with himself. He was himself both the primer of psychology and the standard for comparison, upon which his whole view of individuals was based; and it is often clear, when he is discussing some moral question, that he has his own case in mind. The 'Life of Johnson' was necessarily concerned with Boswell in some degree; and so it was that the author, when he came to record his observations of Johnson and his friends and acquaintances, found that the process which he applied to others was being applied to himself.

Nothing in Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is more remarkable, as nothing is more charming, than the author's candour when his own person is concerned. He does not obtrude himself upon the reader's notice; he relates the events quite naturally as they occurred. And though Boswell was not a little vain, he was able to relate what was not to his credit. Most of the stories of Boswell's folly we know from himself. He has recorded the sledge-hammer blows of Johnson provoked by his own absurdity; he has told us of occasions when he lacked in manners, even when, more than once, he was drunk in a lady's drawing-room; he has described at length, in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' the story of a carouse at Corrichatachin, and has not failed to mention how very ill he felt next morning, and how much he dreaded Johnson's rebuke; it is in his own account that we read of the ridiculous figure he cut in a storm at sea; it is from his own correspondence with Johnson that we learn of all the weaknesses that earned the Doctor's reproof.

Boswell was perfectly conscious of his folly when he allowed us to see the absurdity of his behaviour. He was sometimes conscious, at the moment, of provoking ridicule. Occasionally, as he takes care to explain, he deliberately planned his own discomfiture:

Desirous of calling Johnson forth to talk and exercise his wit, though I should myself be the object of it, I resolutely ventured....