Boswell and the London Journal (1762-1763)

First for fun: as the shaper of modern biography Boswell is frequently the subject of reflection on public and private preservation of memory--even today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrtRG5-53tM

Boswell on Memory:

Boswell's self-consciousness as a preserver of time and memory in his LJ (and the great biography of Samuel Johnson) is explicit in his philosophical essays.  In 1783, he published in The London Magazine a series of essays under the title The Hypochondriack, in which he struggles with mortality and the extent to which it can be countered through writing.  As Katherine Ellison remarks, Boswell, in these essays, "argues against contemporary tendencies, which he sees exemplified in John Locke's and Hume's philosophies, that materialize memory and overlook the religous implications of imagining the mind as a storage facility.  Unhappy with the pedagogies of death and memory he sees in religion, law, and philosophy, Boswell turns to his writings to counter his often despairing theological uncertainties" (39).


In No. LXVII (April 1783) "On Memory" Boswell reflects,
--When we talk of a storehouse of our ideas, we are only forming an imagination of something similar to an enclosed portion of space in which material objects are reposited.  But who ever actually saw this storehouse, or can have any clear perception of it when he endeavours by thinking closely to get a distinct view of it?  It is "the fabrick of a vision" and every candid man who has tried fairly to get at it will confess that he can have no confidence that it exists.
--[after contemplating Voltaire, with whom he has discussed the subject, Locke, and Watts, Boswell concludes] Memory is not in a great degree in our power.  But still less is forgetfulness.

See Katherine Ellison, "James Boswell's Revisions of Death as 'The Hypochondriack' and in His London Journals," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21.1 (2008): 37-59.

Who was James Boswell?

Boswell won his reputation as the creator of the modern biography in his majesterial Life of Samuel Johnson, that great man of letters and society.  Yet Boswell's own worth, not just as biographer, but shaper of his own rather extraordinary identity has won more attention especially with the new Penguin edition of the London Journal (1762-1763).

We can see Boswell in the LJ as a rather immature and arrogant young man, eager, as was the Pepys we see in his diaries, to climb his way up the social ranks, a venture rather easier in the Restoration and eighteenth century than it had been in any former period.  Yet, we can also see Boswell, especially if we look at the LJ in the context of his later works, as wrestling with a number of demons, which would continue to pursue him and which helped to construct the various personae we glimpse--and that are presented--in the LJ.

First, there was the  pressure from his parents to stay on ancestral lands (and then to return to them) and to replicate the life of his father, the laird.  See Penguin intro xxviii-xxix.

Then there was the melancholy that plagued him.  For some in the 18th c it was allied with madness; for others, it was a sign of greater sensibilities.  Jane Darcy's new book, Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), considers Boswell's melancholia as it affected his relationships, especially with Johnson, and his writings.  As Darcy points out, Johnson accuses Boswell of cultivating his melancholy--and in a series of London magazine articles (noted above) between 1777 and 1783, he developed the persona, The Hypochondriack.