James Boswell was chiefly known asthe biographer of Samuel Johnson, and his journal of the rip to the Hebrides and life of Johnson were often reprinted in the noneteenth and early twentieth centuries. Boswell's other papers, including his masses of journals were consigned to the libraries of his descendants, who were a good deal less impressed by the memories of the private man, as oppposed to the monumental biographer. These respectable Prebyterians regarded James B, as a very poor specimen of humanity. Here the papers moldered until 1948, when the journals were gifted to Yale University in the USA. Frederick Pottle idly encuntered them in the catalogue, and read with increasing enthusiasm, the mass. It was the equivalent of Samuel Pepys' diary, so far as evoking the image and spirit and rhythmn of the 18th century British upper class. By 1950, the first volume chronicling Boswell's descent upon London, where he was trying to get himself a commission in the Guards' Regiments, allowing himself complete access to London literary and theatrical life, while enjoying a healthy allowance from his father, a pillar of the Scottish Bar. James B, inevitably clashed with that man, who much wished for his son to follow in his own respectable and financially remunerative footsteps. But, while Boswell was in London, he was in what he would have called the thick of the social whirl, in a bubbling of private culture. At this time, Boswell was writing everything down that he could remember before turning in for the night, and it creates a rich portrait of this cultural period. It reads extremely well, and Pottle provides a competent critical framework for appreciating the journal
. ( )

Boswell was the complete "young man about town" during his year in London. The journal seems honest enough (although the editor's wonderful notes refer to episodes which have been glossed over).
Boswell presents himself as a determined individual who won't give up in pursuing his dream of joining a Guard's Regiment based in London. He is fearless in his repeated requests to those with influence in government that they persist in his petition to join up - and, of course it must be a London based outfit that won't be posted overseas.
He's honest too about his need for sex - the Louisa (aka Mrs. Lewis) episode reveals him as a cad after he is unwontedly visited by "Signor Gonorrhoea".
"What! thought I , can this beautiful, this sensible and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled? Can corruption lodge beneath so fair a form?.... No, it is impossible. I have just got a gleet by irritating the parts too much with excessive venery."
Wonderful Eighteenth Century!!
Go the Boss.

Glorious stuff if you're into the 18th century, probably quite impenetrable if not, though Boswell is surely one of the greatest characters in literary history. Here we have him in all his youthful folly, living through what Sheridan quotes Fielding calling "a trifling age," (50), and doing a good deal of trifling himself. He flits between deep piety and evenings with prostitutes. He records: "I see too far into the system of things, to be much in earnest. I consider Mankind in general & therefore cannot take a part in their quarrels when divided into particular states and nations. I can see that after a war is over and a great quantity of cold & hunger & want of Sleep and torment endured by mortals, things are upon the whole, just as they were." He inquires into his own personality and realizes that "altho' the judgment may know that all is vanity, yet Passion may ardently pursue." "The pleasure of gratifying whim is very great. It is known only by whose who are whimsical."

He suggests to a friend that the world would be much better is "venereal delight" were permitted only to the virtuous, because priests could then "incite the Audience to Goodness by warmly and lusciously setting before their imaginations the transports of amorous Joy." That is right. Boswell thinks all would be well if only priests were also pornographers.

He fails to go out when his barber is sick, apparently being incapable of shaving himself. He sees another prostitute and describes her. He eats out. His friends are witty. And then he meets Jonson--which gives birth to a great book, of course. But after reading just the first volume of his journal, I'm pretty convinced that Boswell was both a more enjoyable man than Jonson, and, dare I say it, a vastly superior writer. ( )

As a professor of mine is wont to say, "Life ran very high in those days." ( )

I read this for a Samuel Johnson course in college, and it was my favorite reading of the course. Boswell is funny, lively, contradictory, adventuresome, flirtatious, remorseful, religious (and yes, misogynistic)--just as any 22-yr-old male embarked from home to the big city. Samuel Johnson was lucky to meet Boswell during the time covered by this journal. (And I was a lucky girl to have such a wonderful professor, Dr. Helen Louise McGuffie, noted Johnson scholar and generous soul, for the course.) ( )