Chapter One

IMMATURITY

* * *

He has a method of treating me, which makes me feel myself like a timid boy.

James Boswell was born in 1740, into a family of Scots landed gentry. He was the eldest of three sons; a daughter had been born earlier, but she died when he was only three months old. Boswell's father, Alexander, an Edinburgh lawyer, was himself the eldest son and heir of another James Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, a substantial Ayrshire estate about seventy miles south-west of Edinburgh and thirty miles south of Glasgow. This extended to some twenty thousand acres; it was said that the Master of Auchinleck could walk more than ten straight miles on his own land. Young Jamie was always keen to extend the estate, and even before he came into his inheritance he had already encumbered himself with sizeable debts in buying up adjacent property.

There had been Boswells at Auchinleck since 1504, living first in an old castle set on a crag high above a glen, and later in a more modern but still defensible house nearby. It was a romantic setting for the impressionable Jamie, who spent many of his holidays roaming the estate. In his imagination the Boswell family had lived there for ever; he conjured up images of classical scenes among the woods and groves of his ancestors.

As a boy, Boswell absorbed the family pride that made them (so his wife later said) appear ridiculous in the eyes of other people. He characterized himself as "a gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant passion." The Boswells could trace their ancestry back to the Scots kings, and Boswell once informed a startled George III that they were cousins. He styled himself "Mr Boswell of Auchinleck" or, when abroad, "Boswell D'Auchinleck." He affected a gravitas which he felt becoming to one who would some day inherit responsibility for an estate of six hundred tenants. But at the same time he found it hard to settle there.

Boswell's grandfather had been a successful lawyer, whose earnings had enabled him to enlarge the estate and pass it on to his son free of debts. That son, Boswell's father, also became a lawyer, and rose to become a judge in the Court of Session, the supreme court for civil cases in Scotland. The bench of the Court of Session consisted of fifteen judges, and the appointment entitled the bearer to the style of a lord, Alexander Boswell taking the title Lord Auchinleck in 1754. This title did not allow the bearer to sit in the House of Lords, nor did it devolve onto his descendants. The following year Lord Auchinleck was appointed a judge in the Court of Justiciary, the supreme criminal court in Scotland.

Diligent and forceful, and noted for his dry, sarcastic wit, Lord Auchinleck resembled the archetypal Scots judge, speaking from the bench in a harsh Scottish brogue. He was a learned classical scholar, with no interest in modern literature, which he regarded with disdain. Strict and stern, he was intolerant of anything fanciful. He shared the general Presbyterian abhorrence of the theatre. As a father, he was domineering; Jamie barely dared open his mouth in his presence. Like most practical men in Hanoverian Britain, Alexander Boswell was a Whig; his eldest son fancied himself a Tory, even a Jacobite. When Edinburgh was overrun by a Jacobite army in 1745, the five-year-old James had declared himself for the Pretender--until his great-uncle General Cochrane offered him a shilling to pray for King George instead.

Boswell's father succeeded to the family estate in 1749, upon the death of the elder James Boswell. His work required him to live most of the year in Edinburgh, though he took a keen interest in practical estate matters (particularly tree-planting) and tried to instil a similar enthusiasm in his son.

Boswell's mother, Euphemia Erskine, was a gentle, pious, mystical woman, who brought up her children very tenderly, rewarding any small ailment with excessive attention. Young Jamie learned early that he could escape the slavery of school by pretending to be ill.

He was a sensitive child: self-indulgent, physically delicate, timid, terrified of ghosts, frightened of the dark, and tormented by morbid ideas of eternal punishment, on which he dwelt perhaps excessively. He was educated partly at an Edinburgh private school and partly by tutors at home, who taught him the Latin poets and encouraged him to read The Spectator as a model of English prose. At thirteen (then not an unusual age) he was sent to Edinburgh University, where he was a promising but not an exceptional student. There he made two lifelong friends: the melancholic John Johnston, already Laird of Grange, a heavily mortgaged Dumfriesshire estate; and William Temple, a merchant's son from Berwick-upon-Tweed. Johnston would become a lawyer, Temple a clergyman. These three sat up into the night discussing philosophical issues and sharing their innermost thoughts; at the top of Arthur's Seat they chanted in solemn reverence the "immortal names" of Rousseau and Voltaire. Also at the university was a boy eighteen months younger than Jamie, Henry Dundas, whom Boswell and his friends looked down upon as a "coarse, unlettered dog"--though professionally he would eclipse them all.

At the age of sixteen, Boswell suffered a breakdown; "a terrible hypochondria seized me." Nobody knows exactly what happened or why: only that the young man became very depressed. One possible trigger was the course in logic and metaphysics he was taking at the university: this forced him to confront questions he was unable to reconcile with the Calvinist faith in which he had been raised. In particular, he agonized over the apparent contradiction between God's foreknowledge and Man's free will. Whatever the cause, the breakdown was serious enough for him to quit the university for a while. To recuperate he was sent to the border village of Moffat, known then as the "Spa of Scotland." It was his second visit: at the age of twelve, he had been sent there to recover from an earlier illness, almost certainly another nervous complaint. Young Jamie recovered, and developed into a robust and lively young man; but for the remainder of his life he would suffer from spells of black depression--which he called "melancholy" or "hypochondria"--each lasting up to two or three weeks. In trying to describe what he felt at such times, he would often say that the "enamel" of philosophy protecting his mind had cracked, or was wearing thin. During these depressions existence seemed to him futile; he sank into a lethargy; his mind became "clouded." In his worst moments, he feared that he would go mad and do "some dreadful extravagant thing."

There was madness in the family. Boswell's grandfather, James Boswell the elder, was melancholic; and one of Boswell's uncles, also called James, ended his life in a strait-jacket. Boswell's father may have accentuated this family trait by marrying a cousin, both being descended from a common feeble-minded ancestor. Boswell's younger brother, John, became increasingly eccentric, and by the age of nineteen was no longer responsible for his actions; eventually, he would be confined to an institution. Lord Auchinleck, on the other hand, never felt one moment of low spirits without a real cause, as he pointedly informed his eldest son.

The idea that madness might be hereditary, was prevalent in eighteenth-century Scotland. The landed classes were so intermarried that inherited qualities were all too evident. But it was also clear that madness took several distinct forms. There were those, like Boswell's younger brother, whose condition steadily deteriorated until they were permanently insane; and others, like Boswell himself, who suffered episodic attacks of gloom punctuated by long periods of normality. The origin of these attacks was not obvious; they did not appear related to any change in his circumstances. Boswell was certainly capable of bearing adversity without sinking into melancholia. He often ascribed his depressions to physical causes: inadequate circulation of the blood or incorrect functioning of the spleen. When feeling out of sorts he would sometimes refer to his mood as "splenetic." He would become listless, unable to concentrate or to exhibit interest in anything. Activity, particularly physical activity, provided relief. So did almost any form of distraction. The sulphur springs of Moffat would have been no use to a disordered mind, though perhaps the change of scene and long walks in the surrounding hills helped.

Boswell was not depressive by nature. On the contrary, most of the time he was high-spirited and boisterous: leaping up onto the back of coaches to hitch a ride, making romantic pledges on the hilt of his sword, writing extravagant letters, telling absurd stories, and roaring through the streets in search of adventure. Boswell himself had no doubt that the two sides of his character were connected, that the high spirits counterbalanced the low. "I have a flow of imagination that must not be altogether restrained," he wrote, "and spirits that must be fed with amusement, otherwise they will prey upon myself." He scorned those dullards, like Henry Dundas, whose minds were always in a state of unruffled tranquillity.

His depression seemed to become less intense as he matured. It remained a debilitating condition nonetheless. And though he did not sink so deep, neither did he fly so high. By the time he reached thirty, he no longer felt those "grand ebullitions and bright sparkles" that had lit up his youth. "I must submit to life losing its vividness," he complained on one occasion.

There is no doubt that Boswell's depression was real, but no doubt too that he felt a perverse satisfaction and pride in his gloom. A "cast of melancholy" was, he believed, a mark of a distinguished mind, or even of genius in the family. Melancholy was a fashionable pose; there was a general perception that it was an affliction of superior intellects.

All this was so much nonsense to Lord Auchinleck. "I was much hurt at being good for nothing in life," Boswell wrote later of his first breakdown--which sounds like an echo of his father's words. He appeared to prolong his convalescence in Moffat deliberately; this would have been very irritating to his father, who had little sympathy for his son's condition. Forever after, he treated Jamie as a fool, checked him in conversation, and spoke of him disparagingly to others. Many years later, when Lord Auchirdeck was dying, Boswell berated him for his lack of compassion towards his youngest son, John, by this time hopelessly insane. "If my sons are idiots," Lord Auchinleck cried out in exasperation, "can I help it?"

As Boswell grew into a young man, the differences between him and his father became obvious. Indeed, the two could hardly have been more unalike: the son flighty, the father down-to-earth; the boy romantic and impulsive, the man prudent and restrained. Inevitably they came into conflict, Jamie see-sawing between rebellion and resentful compliance.

At the age of seventeen, young Boswell began to study law, under his father's direction. But perhaps sensing that he could never become the kind of son Lord Auchinleck hoped for, he began to search for an identity of his own, trying out roles until he found one that suited. One moment he was the Spectator, the detached and philosophic observer; the next, Tom Jones, the lusty innocent. He sought out older men who might serve as models for different ways of living, whose strength of character would help him to resist being crushed by his powerful father. One such was Sir David Dalrymple (later elevated to the bench as Lord Hailes), a man fourteen years older than Boswell: though a lawyer like Lord Auchinleck, he had been educated at Eton, which had smoothed away the rough Scottish edges to his speech and his prose; he corresponded with English literati and contributed to London papers such as the Gentleman's Magazine . Boswell admired him as "a man of great ingenuity, a fine scholar, an accurate critic, and a worthy member of society. From my early years I used to regard him with admiration and awe, and look upon him as a representative of Mr Addison." Under Sir David's influence Boswell began to write verse (often of a ludicrous kind); a poem of his was published in the Scots Magazine while he was still only seventeen. Dalrymple became Boswell's first mentor, in whom he confided his schemes and from whom he sought advice; who also interceded for the young man when relations with his father became particularly strained.

It was not that Boswell rejected Lord Auchinleck: on the contrary, he respected him greatly and was careful never to voice the slightest criticism of him in public, even when they were in bitter dispute and Boswell felt sorely provoked. Once, he prepared to fight a duel to defend his father's honour against an imagined insult (typically, Lord Auchinleck dismissed the incident as trivial). But to achieve a sense of self-worth, of manly dignity, he needed an alternative to the standard set by his father, to whom he would be always a boy.

Lord Auchinleck's contempt undermined his son's confidence. Though he developed into an outgoing youth, Boswell remained unsure of himself, the child concealed within the man. He reacted stubbornly or even sulkily to criticism. He tended to avoid adult responsibilities; even in mid-life, he would ask others to determine his future for him--though if the advice provided was not to his liking, he ignored it and sought another opinion elsewhere, or tried to persuade the adviser to change his mind. His father's scorn might also explain Boswell's absurd vanity, so transparent as hardly to be objectionable. Boswell longed for approval; he was delighted by praise from any quarter-even from himself. But it was insecurity rather than conceit that fed his egotism.

By his late teens Boswell had grown into a swarthy young man, a little shorter and plumper than most, with a prominent, curving nose, dark eyes, a hungry appetite for experience, and an engaging cheerfulness, qualities which men found endearing and women attractive. For his part, Boswell became an enthusiastic participant in the game of love; melancholy temperaments, he once observed, are amorous temperaments. He became a shameless flirt. He was perpetually falling in love: falling out again just as readily, as one of his early poems suggests:

Boswell does women adore,

And never once means to deceive;

He's in love with at least half a score,

If they're serious he smiles in his sleeve.

Throughout his life Boswell could never quite free himself of the delusion that he had a talent for verse.

For all his philandering, Boswell was an innocent. Eager, inquisitive, and naïve, he was apt to repeat what other people had said without considering the consequences. He was not malicious, though his complete lack of tact sometimes made him seem so. "He had rather too little, than too much prudence," he wrote of himself many years later, "and his imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect was very different from the intention." Irony was alien to him. He could be very lively company, often acting the buffoon; he admitted that he would sacrifice almost anything for a laugh, "even myself." Boswell tried to curb his tendencies to talk too much and too freely, to laugh immoderately, and to imitate other people "in a manner that might be hurtful if they discovered it. But he was an entertaining mimic, capable of impersonating several individuals in conversation, and the temptation to do so was often irresistible.

Boswell adored acting, when he could be anyone he wanted to be. He liked to cut a figure. He played the part of the gallant highwayman Macheath at a country-house gathering, and fancied himself in the role ever after. He frequented the theatre, then illegal (but tolerated) in Edinburgh, and he began to socialize with some of the actors, particularly West Digges, very much a man of fashion, reputedly the best Macheath of his generation. The young Boswell became infatuated with an actress, Mrs Cowper, a widow. He ran up debts. Gossip about his activities began to circulate. "You are continually in the Playhouse, I am told," Temple wrote enviously from Berwick. "I heard an odd story here of you and one Mrs Cooper."

Lord Auchinleck decided to put a stop to this frivolity, and in September 1759 he informed his son of a change: Boswell would not be returning to Edinburgh for the autumn term. He was sent to continue his studies at the University of Glasgow, where there were fewer distractions (and no theatre). Among his tutors there was the Professor of Moral Philosophy, Adam Smith. Boswell attended Smith's lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, and he was particularly struck by Smith's advocacy of a pure English style. It was a period when many educated Scotsmen struggled to eliminate Scots pronunciation from their speech and Scotticisms from their prose. David Hume, for example, was said to have died in 1776 confessing not his sins but his Scotticisms. Boswell was by no means the only Scotsman who felt proud of his blood but self-conscious about his accent. Here was another difference from his father, whose broad Scots diction was all of a piece with his blunt, caustic character.

Boswell's success as a mimic was founded on careful observation of those around him: particularly of their mannerisms and the cadences of their speech. Perhaps his sensitivity to Scots accents made him attentive to the way people spoke.

After six months in Glasgow, Boswell ran away. Perhaps influenced by Mrs Cowper, he had become interested in Catholicism; deciding that his love for her was hopeless, he announced in a letter to his father his plan to become a monk. Lord Auchinleck summoned him home; instead, Boswell mounted a horse and rode the three hundred miles to London in two and a half days. There he found dingy lodgings and launched himself upon the town. His religious interests soon surrendered to more worldly distractions, as he experienced for the first time "the melting and transporting rites of love" with a Miss Sally Forrester at the Blue Periwig, Southampton Street. He haunted the London theatre, and through his Edinburgh connections contrived to arrange an interview with David Garrick, the leading actor of the day, "the man whom from a boy I used to adore and look upon as a heathen god." Garrick was quite a scalp for a nineteen-year-old--perhaps the most famous man in England, after the King.

Lord Auchinleck appealed to his Ayrshire neighbour, the urbane Earl of Eglinton, then living in London, to take the wayward boy in hand. Eglinton duly called at the unsavoury address he had been given, lent Boswell some money, and offered to act as his host. Soon Boswell was staying at Eglinton's elegant Mayfair house. His rebellion had lasted less than three weeks.

The Earl of Eglinton was a man of nearly forty, unmarried, with a reputation as a rake. He was very well connected, and soon introduced the young Boswell "into the circles of the great, the gay and the ingenious." He escorted Boswell to the spring races at Newmarket, and secured his admission to the Jockey Club. Among Eglinton's friends was another young man about Boswell's age, Edward, Duke of York, brother to Prince George (who would become King in a matter of months) and next in line to the throne. This was Boswell's first brush with royalty, and he found it exhilarating; he was astonished to find "simple Ned" a lad much like himself. An encounter with Laurence Sterne, then being lionized by London society on account of the recently published novel Tristram Shandy , renewed his enthusiasm for literature, especially when Sterne, accosted in the street by the young poet, commented favourably on Boswell's verse.

Boswell was intoxicated by the beau monde: the parties, the fine clothes, the fashionable society with its opportunities for gallantry with fine women, the glamour of Court, the excitement of the theatres and their beautiful painted ladies. Boswell decided that his future had to be here in London, and he wrote home suggesting that his father should purchase for him a commission in the Guards. This was the most glamorous of regiments, stationed in London or Windsor, with a splendid uniform.

"What have I done to deserve this?" asked Lord Auchinleck plaintively, when he received his son's letter. Not only would it be prohibitively expensive to purchase a commission in such a sought-after regiment; the life of an idle officer would surely prove ruinous to a young man like Jamie. The estate needed a man of business, not a man of pleasure; based in Edinburgh, not in London. Lord Auchinleck journeyed down to London to retrieve his feckless heir. After three months of freedom, Boswell returned home to resume his law studies, working under his father's strict supervision. If he worked hard, Lord Auchinleck promised that afterwards he might return to London, where he could try to obtain a commission through the favour of Eglinton, or some other influential person. Boswell reluctantly complied, though he felt like a "Newmarket courser" yoked to a dung-cart. He was perhaps less inclined to resist because he had contracted the first of many venereal infections and was suffering from its effects. In any case, he had little choice but to obey his father; he had no money of his own and Lord Auchinleck controlled the purse-strings.

But my mind, once put in ferment, could never apply itself again to solid learning. I had no inclination whatever for the Civil Law. I learned it very superficially. My principles became more and more confused. I ended a complete sceptic. I held all things in contempt, and I had no idea except to get through the passing day agreeably ... My fine feelings were absolutely effaced.

Boswell did not hide his resentment at being brought home in chains and compelled to "conform to every Scots custom." He had tasted the delights of London; by comparison, Edinburgh provided poor fare. The broad Scots brogue of Robert Hunter, Professor of Greek at the University, made him groan: " Will you hae some jeel? o fie! o fie! "

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BOSWELL'S PRESUMPTUOUS TASK by ADAM SISMAN. Copyright © 2000 by Adam Sisman. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.