James Boswell

Scottish · 1740 to 1795

Born James Boswell on October 29, 1740, in a third-floor flat on Parliament Close behind St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, the eldest son of the judge Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, and a strict Calvinist mother, he grew up delicate, prone to nightmares, and subject to the swings of mood that would shape his entire adult life. He entered the University of Edinburgh at thirteen, ran briefly to London at twenty intending to convert to Catholicism and take orders as a monk, was retrieved by his father, and resigned himself to passing the bar in 1762. On May 16, 1763, in the back parlour of Davies's bookshop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, he met Samuel Johnson; "Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." "That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help." A great European tour followed, during which he sought out Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli, whose cause he later championed in print. Back in Scotland he practised law without much distinction, married his cousin Margaret Montgomerie in 1769, and kept the journals that would prove his real life's work. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) memorialised his Scottish jaunt with Johnson; the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which assembled twenty years of saved conversation in two quarto volumes, is the most quoted biography in English. He died on May 19, 1795, in London, at the age of fifty-four, of kidney failure exacerbated by chronic drinking, and is buried at Auchinleck in Ayrshire.