Boswell

Unless you’re an avowed enemy of the biografiend, today is a good day to raise a glass to the art of biography and, in particular, to James Boswell. This is the 250th anniversary of Boswell’s first meeting with his subject, Dr Johnson – or, as James Knox, the chairman of the Boswell Book Festival put it this morning, Boswell’s “creation” Dr Johnson – at the house of the actor and bookseller Thomas Davies, in Russell Street near Covent Garden.

The book festival, which opens tomorrow at Auchinleck House, was preceded this morning by a gathering at the house of the publisher John Murray on Albemarle Street – ahead of a symposium hosted by King’s College London and Dr Johnson’s House, Professor Gordon Turnbull and the actor John Sessions made an excellent double act, the first running lightly through the story of Boswell’s life before Johnson, the second supplying the necessary range of accents – Ayrshire, Cockney, Lichfield – to bring the occasion to life.

For an audience, the speakers had some of Boswell’s descendants, both lineal and literary, biographers, academics, hangers-on (guess which category I put myself in); for a set, they had the magnificent Murray drawing room. “Literary London” seldom looks so good at half past eight in the morning.

Raise a glass to booksellers, too, then; Boswell knew the first John Murray, and Boswell and Johnson share their Russell Street plaquewith Davies. In fact, Davies is the crucial link between them, and if his wife Susanna wasn’t so notoriously beautiful, Johnson might not have enjoyed calling there so often. (Professor Turnbull pointed out that Boswell didn’t record in his journals that she was present at the celebrated first meeting, but added her name to the version in his Life of Johnson; a telling detail, since when the Doctor put down the unknown young Scot, for the first of many times, he was very likely showing off in front of her.)

Boswell had hoped to meet Johnson through their mutual friend Thomas Sheridan, but by the time he got to London, in 1762, they were no longer on speaking terms. It was Davies who invited Boswell to meet Johnson, initially on Christmas Day, 1762, when Johnson opted instead to go to Oxford, and Boswell had to settle instead for Robert Dodsley and Oliver Goldsmith, “a curious, odd, pedantic fellow with some genius”, with whom he disagreed over the merits of Shakespeare and Thomas Gray.

The meeting that took finally place in the back-parlour of Davies's shop, around 7 in the evening of May 16, 1763, wasn’t planned. Boswell later “remembered” that Davies had announced Johnson’s arrival with a presciently symbolic line from Hamlet, as if he were alerting the prince to the presence of his father’s ghost: “Look, my Lord, it comes . . .”. Davies’s role doesn’t end there. He reassured the would-be acolyte that Johnson actually liked him, despite the initially ambiguous reception, and later that it would be acceptable for Boswell to call on Johnson. When Boswell was back in Scotland, he could rely on Davies for publishing advice and reassurance despite the lack of news from Johnson himself: “I am sure he has a true respect for you”, he wrote in August 1766, “but you know the Indolence of his temper”.

As Kate Chisholm wrote in the TLS recently (the whole piece can be read for free here), it is through Boswell’s Life of Johnson that we know about his views on “women preachers, Scottish savages, the temptations of the theatre and a man who is tired of London” – to the extent that this biographical “creation”, to use James Knox’s term again, eclipses the author of the Rambler, the Idler etc. “How, then, do we go back to read Johnson as if the Life, with all its anecdote and conversation, did not exist?”

It’s a good question. What greater tribute could a biografiend wish for?