The Compleat Boswell

"Servile and impertinent," Lord Macaulay had called him, "shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London." That, for several generations of scholars, was the final verdict on James Boswell. The 18th Century Scotsman was regarded as little more than a toady and a drunken rogue, whose one claim to fame was his great and somehow accidental Life of Samuel Johnson. And many credited the book's virtues to the subject rather than the biographer.

Over the past 20 years, Lord Macaulay's colossal misjudgment has been reversed. With the rediscovery of a vast cache of notes and letters that the portly biographer spent a lifetime scribbling, Boswell has gradually but increasingly been getting his due. Last week in Manhattan, a new stack of Boswelliana was made public for the first time.

Tea with Talbot. Though critics had long known of some lost Boswell manuscripts, it was not until 1926 that an inquiring scholar reported that he had seen a box of them at Ireland's Malahide Castle, home of Boswell's great-great-grandson Lord Talbot. U.S. Bibliophile A.S.W. Rosenbach immediately cabled an offer of $250,000 for the lot. Lord Talbot huffily refused ("Who is this person?" he demanded). Another U.S. collector tried a different approach: he dropped in for tea. Courtly Lieut. Colonel Ralph H. Isham, a Yale man who had served in the British Army during World War I, got along famously with Lord Talbot. A few months later, he had bought the Malahide papers.

Immediately hailed as the literary discovery of the century, the papers contained huge chunks of Boswell's journal, and hundreds of letters--enough unpublished material to fill 18 thick volumes. As the years passed, the castle continued its yield: Johnson's diary turned up in the strong room, and the entire manuscript of The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides was discovered in an old croquet box.

But the Malahide papers were only the beginning. In 1936, a second wandering scholar announced that he had stumbled upon another cache of papers scattered throughout Scotland's Fettercairn House, home of Lord Clinton, descendant of Boswell's executor Sir William Forbes. Under the terms of his deal with Lord Talbot, Colonel Isham claimed those papers too, and after years of wrangling over Boswell's will, won half of them from a Scottish court. The other half, which had been awarded to the heirs of Boswell's granddaughter, he bought. Meanwhile, Malahide had yielded yet another batch--a cache as large as the first. Last week in Manhattan, Colonel Isham placed his latest acquisitions on display.

Breakfast with Garrick. The papers range from tiny scraps on which Boswell jotted his observations, to 1,300 pages of working manuscript of the Life. There are pages of Boswell's journal, letters from Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, Burke, Voltaire, a journal of Boswell's tour of Italy, notes for a life of General Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia. Boswell not only kept a copy of the letter he wrote Rousseau asking for an interview ("J'ecris mal le francais,'' he apologized), but managed to get his hands on a letter Rousseau wrote to his mistress, Mile. Levasseur (Boswell had a brief affair with her, while escorting her to London).

But Boswell's main, lifelong concern was always Dr. Johnson. Among the newly discovered pages of the Life is the record of his first impression of the Doctor: "... A man of most dreadful appearance . . . troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the King's evil [scrofula]." By 1772, nine years later, the new papers show, Boswell was writing Garrick that he was "determined" to write Johnson's life. He even interviewed a member of Johnson's household as to the Doctor's "amorous propensities."

The great friendship between men 31 years apart lasted 21 years--until the day Boswell received a letter from Johnson's physician, telling how Johnson died. But for Boswell he never died. He once dreamed that Johnson came back to earth and told him how terrible it was to die. "There, sir," replied Boswell, "is the difference between us. You have got that happily over."

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