However, when it came to writing this up in The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell chose slightly different words, and a more elaborate treatment:
At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies’s back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us, – he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, ‘Look, my Lord, it comes.’ I found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson’s figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had published his Dictionary, in the attitude of sitting in his easy chair in deep meditation, which was the first picture his friend did for him, which Sir Joshua very kindly presented to me, and from which an engraving has been made for this work. Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’ – ‘From Scotland,’ cried Davies roguishly. ‘Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’ I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expence of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression ‘come from Scotland,’ which I used in the sense of being of that country, and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, ‘That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.’ This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down, I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come next.9
Comparing the two versions, one notices at once the fuller and more ceremonious form the episode takes in the Life; next, perhaps, the softening of Boswell’s original sense of Johnson’s disagreeableness into the milder emotion of nonplussed embarrassment. But it is the characteristic Boswellian allusion to the theatre – ‘he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes”’ – which is the pivotal element in the transformation of the original impression into the eventual work of literary art. The encounter between Hamlet and his father’s ghost is the event which determines the shape of, and gives direction to, young Hamlet’s life; at the same time, it is the occasion when old Hamlet lays an obligation on his son to do for him what death prevents him from doing for himself. Boswell’s reference to Hamlet was apt to his own case – in addition, of course, (and this is once again characteristically Boswellian) to being ludicrously self-flattering, casting Boswell as the glamorous protagonist in the momentous drama of his own life. But it was pertinent also to the case of Johnson. The task of memorializing Johnson gave shape and direction to Boswell’s life (and it was a task he performed with occasional Hamlet-like waverings and delays).10 Moreover, the friendship launched by that meeting in Davies’s back-parlour bestowed on Johnson a posthumous reach which would have eluded him had he been obliged to rely on his other biographers – that troop of the now all but unread, comprising Sir John Hawkins, Mrs Piozzi, Isaac Reed, George Steevens, Thomas Tyers, William Cooke, William Shaw, Joseph Towers, James Harrison, et al.11 That meeting, then, was not only the beginning of Johnson and Boswell’s friendship. It was also the seed of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and it is therefore appropriate that Boswell should have folded into his account of that primal scene a reference to the book which would result from it, when he mentioned the Reynolds portrait of Johnson ‘from which an engraving has been made for this work’.12
Boswell offers further implicit comment on the self-reflexive complexity of his book at the end of his account of his first visit to Johnson’s lodgings, when he congratulates himself on ‘having now so happily established an acquaintance of which I had been so long ambitious’:
My readers will, I trust, excuse me for being thus minutely circumstantial, when it is considered that the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson was to me a most valuable acquisition, and laid the foundation of whatever instruction and entertainment they may receive from my collections concerning the great subject of the work which they are now perusing.13
In this awkwardly articulated sentence, Boswell tries to express the relationship between a number of distinct entities: his appetite for literary detail; his friendship with Johnson; the production of literary instruction and entertainment; his ‘collections’ preparatory to the writing of the book; the Life of Johnson itself, which its readers are ‘now perusing’; and its ‘great subject’. It is tempting to take that last phrase as referring simply to Johnson himself: what could be more self-evident than that the great subject of the Life of Johnson is Samuel Johnson? But so to construe the final limb of Boswell’s ungainly sentence would be to short-change the Life of Johnson. It is about Boswell; it is about Johnson; it is about the friendship between Boswell and Johnson; and finally it is also about the process whereby those individuals and that friendship gave rise to the material ‘collections’ which made possible its own creation. Nothing less than all of this is the ‘great subject’ of Boswell’s book, and it is this complex amplitude which makes the Life of Johnson the richest example of life-writing in English. As Boswell himself put it in a letter of 21 April 1786 to Hugh Blair, ‘I will venture to promise that my Life of my revered Friend will be the richest piece of Biography that has ever appeared. The Bullion will be immense, whatever defects there may be in the workmanship.’14 That final note of diffidence is rather uncharacteristic for Boswell, inclined as he was to bounce and preen.15 It was also misplaced, as the workmanship – that is to say, Boswell’s deliberate and creative manipulation of the materials he had collected over many years – was, and remains, essential to the book’s triumph, as Bruce Redford has recently demonstrated.16 It was because of the workmanship that Vicesimus Knox would in 1791 recognize in Boswell’s Life of Johnson ‘a new Species of Biography’.17
‘Hyperion to a satyr’: so Hamlet expressed the profound discrepancy between Old Hamlet and Claudius.18 The difference between Boswell and Johnson was perhaps less absolute, but it was still pronounced. In 1763 Johnson was a literary figure of substance: a poet, the author of The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, a novelist, and the heroic compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language. In 1755 he had received an honorary MA from Oxford, and in 1762 he had been given a pension of £300 per annum by George III. Boswell, by contrast, was unknown, and virtually unpublished.19 Johnson was both admired and censured as the spokesman for a severe and Christian morality in a mid-century society which was given, perhaps with a certain disabling self-consciousness, to seeing itself as gripped in moral crisis.20 Boswell was fond of drink and women. Nevertheless, the friendship between this unlikely pair struck root and thrived.