The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [18]
Mr. Boswell has been collecting materials for this work for more than twenty years, during which he was honoured with the intimate friendship of Dr. Johnson; to whose memory he is ambitious to erect a literary monument, worthy of so great an authour, and so excellent a man. Dr. Johnson was well informed of his design, and obligingly communicated to him several curious particulars. With these will be interwoven the most authentick accounts that can be obtained from those who knew him best; many sketches of his conversation on a multiplicity of subjects, with various persons, some of them the most eminent of the age; a great number of letters from him at different periods, and several original pieces dictated by him to Mr. Boswell, distinguished by that peculiar energy, which marked every emanation of his mind.136
As it was calculated to do, this announcement raised public expectations. In January 1792 James Abercrombie mentioned to Boswell how he had been ‘most anxiously expecting’ the Life of Johnson ever since ‘your promise of it at the end of your Tour to the Hebrides, printed in 1785’.137
It is one thing to raise public expectation; quite another to satisfy it. Having decided to write a life of Johnson, how did Boswell collect his materials? Occasional obiter dicta within the book itself give us clues – for instance this explanation of the indifferent quality of Boswell’s account of Johnson in the early period of their friendship:
Let me here apologize for the imperfect manner in which I am obliged to exhibit Johnson’s conversation at this period. In the early part of my acquaintance with him, I was so wrapt in admiration of his extraordinary colloquial talents, and so little accustomed to his peculiar mode of expression, that I found it extremely difficult to recollect and record his conversation with its genuine vigour and vivacity. In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian æther, I could, with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper the exuberant variety of his wisdom and wit.138
Boswell’s attentiveness to Johnson occasionally exposed him to comment, as we can see from Dr Burney’s description of his manner: ‘His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropt open to catch every syllable that might be uttered: nay, he seemed not only to dread losing a word, but to be anxious not to miss a breathing; as if hoping from it, latently, or mystically, some information.’139 Burney’s amused puzzlement was however not the only response Boswell’s conduct provoked. Others such as Mrs Piozzi saw it not as eccentricity, but as an affront to society: ‘There is something so ill-bred, and so inclining to treachery in this conduct, that were it commonly adopted, all confidence would soon be exiled from society, and a conversation assembly-room would become tremendous as a court of justice.’140
Boswell’s journals contain many examples of notes taken down at or close to the time which subsequently were written up in the text of the Life, and we have already considered one example of this process when we compared the journal account of the first meeting between Boswell and Johnson with the account as printed in the Life. But the original and worked-up accounts of a less momentous occasion, chosen literally at random, will serve to demonstrate how Boswell’s notes were transformed into the narrative of the Life. Here is the journal entry for 9 April 1773:
This morning being Good Friday, I went in good frame to Mr. Johnson’s. Frank [Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant] said there was nobody with him but Dr. Levett. I never knew till now that Levett had that title, or