133. Boswell’s Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides, ed. F. A. Pottle and C. H. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1936), p. 300. The Life of Johnson was not Boswell’s sole biographical project even after 1773. In 1778 he expressed to Lord Kames his ‘determination’ to write Kames’s life, and to assume the literary character of Plutarch (The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, ed. Geoffrey Scott et al., 18 vols. (Mount Vernon, NY: W. E. Rudge, 1928–34), XV, 267). Biography was to some extent therapy for Boswell, as his essay ‘On Hypochondria’ suggests: ‘I have generally found the reading of lives do me most good, by withdrawing my attention from myself to others, and entertaining me in the most satisfactory manner with real incidents in the varied course of human existence. I look upon the Biographia Britannica with that kind of grateful regard with which one who has been recovered from painful indisposition by their medicinal springs beholds Bath, Bristol, or Tunbridge’ (Bailey, ed., Boswell’s Column, p. 51).
134. Boswell’s Journal of A Tour, p. 300, n. 8.
135. Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 31-3.
136. Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), p. 525.
137. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 358.
138. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 222–3. Note the Johnsonian principle, as expressed in a letter of 27 June 1758 to Bennet Langton: ‘It is a rule never to be forgotten, that whatever strikes strongly, should be described while thefirst impression remains fresh upon the mind’ (ibid., p. 180). However, note that when Johnson tested Boswell’s ‘way of taking notes’ by reading ‘slowly and distinctly’ a passage from Robertson’s History of America, it emerged that Boswell had recorded the passage ‘very imperfectly’ (ibid., pp. 668–9). On Boswell’s method, see Geoffrey Scott, ‘The Making of the Life of Johnson as Shown in Boswell’s First Notes’, in James L. Clifford, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 27–39.
139. Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 3 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), II, 194.
140. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 115, n. 5. To this Boswell replied that Johnson ‘was at all times flattered by my preserving what fell from his mind when shaken by conversation’ – a metaphor also present in the passage in the Life where Boswell records Johnson’s pleasure, on looking at Boswell’s journal, at finding there ‘so much of the fruit of his mind preserved’ (ibid., p. 114; Life of Johnson, below, p. 664).
141. Boswell for the Defence, p. 179.
142. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 373–4.
143. A recurrent subject in the Life is that of literary forgery: cf. ibid., pp. 87, 192–3. As well as reflecting light on the process which produced the Life itself, literary forgery brings together the eighteenth-century fondness for imposture and the contemporary patchiness of solid knowledge which gave that imposture scope to operate – on both of which Johnson comments in the Life (ibid., p. 220 (fondness for imposture) and 307 (patchiness of knowledge)). On the general subject of literary forgery in the eighteenth century, see Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
144. On the embroidery of memory in Boswell, consider F. A. Pottle’s judgement: ‘One also frequently finds Boswell adding sentences and paragraphs to portions of fully written journal. Some of these additions seem to be authentic but undated recollections for which he had to find plausible points of attachment; others, I have no doubt, are a second crop of memory, gathered as he relived the matter he had copied’ (F. A. Pottle, ‘The Life of Johnson: Art and Authenticity’, in James L. Clifford, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 69.
145. Life of Johnson, below, p. 244.
146. Ibid., p. 539.
147. Ibid., pp. 346–7.
148. Ibid., p. 5.
149. Ibid., p. 9.
150. Ibid., p. 892. Compare also the inclusion of Steevens’s reminiscences: ibid., pp. 942–3.
151. Ibid., pp. 763–81, 320–31. For the influx of new material into the Life after the publication of the first edition, see Malone’s comments at the beginning of the ‘Advertisement’ to the third edition: ibid., p. 9.
152. ‘… there is here an accumulation of intelligence from various points, by which his character is more fully understood and illustrated’ (ibid., p. 21).
153. Ibid., p. 818.
154. For an example of how densely juxtaposed these different forms of writing can be in the Life, see ibid., p. 268. The best account of Boswell’s artistry of incorporation, particularly in respect of the inclusion of letters, which has provoked some scholarly and critical controversy, is to be found in Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 113–36.
155. ‘Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 21).
156. Ibid., p. 19.
157. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest occurrence of the word ‘autobiography’ in the Monthly Review for 1797.
158. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. Jackson Bate et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 262. Rambler 60 (1750), Johnson’s other important statement about the principles and practice of biography, concludes with compatible thoughts about the temptation to falsehood in lives written by someone other than the subject. Contrast, however, another of Johnson’s opinions about who might best write a man’s life, delivered in conversation with Thomas Warton in 1776: ‘It [biography] is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 502).
159. The subject of ghosts is an important and recurrent one in the Life: cf. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 712–13 (the ghost of Ford), 683-4 and 736 (a ghost at Newcastle), 216 and 667 (the Cock-Lane Ghost). Boswell attributed Johnson’s preparedness to entertain the possibility of ghosts to his ‘opposition to the groveling belief of materialism’ which ‘led him to a love of such mysterious dispositions’ (ibid., p. 340). But biography itself makes a revenant of its subject.
160. The Poems of Mr. Gray, with Memoirs Prefixed, ed. William Mason (1775). For the misleadingness of this Boswellian identification of his model, see Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 115–16. Nevertheless, Boswell praised Mason to his friend Temple in February 1788: ‘Mason’s Life of Gray is excellent, because it is interspersed with Letters which shew us the Man’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 208).