Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell

By Donald J. Newman, Paul Tankard, James J. Caudle and 5 more

Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writing, his contributions to periodicals, his pamphlets, and his broadsides. The essays collected here enhance our comprehension of his interests, capabilities, and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. This book will also be of interest to historians of journalism and the publishing industry of eighteenth-century Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781684482832

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Boswell’s Ephemeral Writing

AN OVERVIEW

Donald J. Newman

James Boswell’s first published work, a poetic meditation on Scottish history, appeared in a magazine. It was 1758, and he was a couple of months shy of his eighteenth birthday at the time. Over the next few months, the same magazine published three more of his pieces: two epigrams and a meditative essay on God’s presence in nature. These initial successes launched a decades-long pursuit of the one possession Boswell came to consider more valuable than any other: literary fame. He diligently pursued that possession for the next thirty-five years, during which, Paul Tankard writes in the introduction to his valuable collection of Boswell’s journalism, Boswell was a busy writer with a constant presence in the British press.¹

During those years, Boswell not only published books, he also published news and news-related articles (including news hoaxes he called inventions), opinion pieces, essays, poems, and reports on his personal and professional activities, all of which appeared in periodicals. He also printed broadsides and issued pamphlets. He wrote in a variety of styles on a wide range of subjects in multiple genres, and he weighed in on a variety of legal, political, and social controversies. By the end of his career as an author, Boswell had published, in addition to the two books about Johnson for which he is famous, a facetious collection of letters that he authored with a friend, two books on Corsica, nearly two dozen pamphlets, an as-yet unsettled number of broadsides, and more than 600 pieces in periodicals, the bulk of which appeared in newspapers.²

Except for Pottle’s 1929 bibliographical account of Boswell’s literary career and comments made by his biographers and the editors of his papers, scholars have, for two centuries, considered most of his ephemeral writing unworthy of serious critical attention because it is too topical, too superficial, or too trivial to yield any new insights into Boswell or his work. There is some justification for this view. Our understanding of his writing or his authorial consciousness is not likely to be advanced much by reading his accounts of how he toasted a high sheriff at a dinner or paid a compliment to an enchanting comic actress, though articles like these may be significant in the aggregate. But, as this collection demonstrates, there is some wheat among this chaff—and there could well be more. We won’t know for certain until we have thoroughly sifted this body of work, and the authors collected here begin this sifting.

BOSWELL AND THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

In February 1768, Boswell capped a frenetic, decade-long pursuit of literary fame via newspapers and pamphlets with An Account of Corsica, a travel book recounting a five-week side trip he took in 1765 while visiting Italy on his Grand Tour. At the time he visited the island, a rebel force with nationalistic aspirations was fighting to free Corsica from the city-state of Genoa and establish a sovereign nation. The eyes of progressive Europe were on the rebellion, and its leader, General Pasquale Paoli, had become an international hero to the progressive-minded. Although British newspapers and magazines were publishing sporadic reports on the lopsided struggle, no one as yet had offered the public a personal account of the island, the rebels, or their illustrious leader. Boswell’s book offered readers a look at all three. The book was widely admired and made him an international literary celebrity virtually overnight. He became the toast of London’s elite, members of Parliament made it a point to introduce themselves to him, his friends praised him effusively, the reviews were positive if not raving, and he earned the sobriquet Corsica Boswell, which he wore proudly. Within the next year or so, the book would go through three editions and be translated into at least four languages. The success of Corsica realized a teenage fantasy of Boswell’s: to become a celebrated author like Joseph Addison. But in a turn somewhat surprising, he didn’t capitalize on this achievement and begin work on another book, though he had already proposed several to himself. Instead, he continued to devote his time, energy, and literary talents to publishing in periodicals and printing pamphlets. Given how badly he wanted to be recognized and admired as an author, it seems somewhat incongruous that he didn’t try to sustain his celebrity with another book. Part of the reason he didn’t has to do with the dynamics of publishing during his career.

The publishing industry in which Boswell worked was an amalgamation of the new and the old that offered writers like Boswell a myriad of publishing opportunities. The new, newspapers and magazines, were in fact new. The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702, and it was soon followed by a number of imitators—typically, sideline businesses for printers who often depended on government subsidies for financial survival—that emphasized foreign news, political diatribes, and what was generally known as domestic news: crimes, suicides, bizarre deaths, weird events, the activities of peers and the royal family. Despite these humble origins, the number of newspapers available to the London public increased steadily throughout the century. Hannah Barker reports that by mid-century, which would have been about the time Boswell began contributing to newspapers, London had eighteen papers: six weeklies, six tri-weeklies, and six dailies. By the 1780s, London readers could get their news from nine dailies, eight tri-weeklies, and nine weekly papers, and a decade or so later, in 1790, the metropolis boasted fourteen dailies, seven tri-weeklies, and two weeklies.³ Many of the more popular papers had daily circulations between 2,000 and 5,000, and the papers probably needed to sell at least 1,500 copies a day just to stay solvent.⁴

It seems reasonable to attribute the increase in the number of newspapers to the perceived demand for more news and information coming from a reading audience increasing in size and spreading out along the social scale. Barker’s research on newspaper sales indicates that sales were being made to a larger, and more socially mixed, proportion of the London population. How large this audience was at any given time is difficult to determine. Jeremy Black estimated twenty readers per copy for a total of 500,000 daily readers. One contemporary observer said there were 25,000 papers published daily in London, and he figured each had ten readers, which would have meant 250,000 readers, a figure Barker considers reasonable. The city had a population at the time of about 750,000, thus newspaper readers (which perhaps include those who had the papers read to them) constituted a little less than one-third of the population.⁵ However large it was, the audience was large enough to be conspicuous, for contemporary observers perceived newspaper readership to be wide spread.⁶

Magazines were even newer. The first, Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, was launched in 1731, and scores of imitators again soon followed. Although professing to adhere to the dictum that, like newspapers, their primary intent was to inform, the publishers and editors of the magazines emphasized entertainment, for they recognized that the periodical audience was comprised of middle- and working-class men, women—and perhaps even servants—whose interests and reading tastes differed from those of newspaper readers in the first half of the century. In addition to presenting readers with articles that would entertain as well as inform, they also published a great deal of fiction, and this emphasis on entertainment proved a formula for success. By the 1750s, Robert Mayo notes, magazines had become the most numerous class of periodicals. Between 1740 and 1815, at least 470 different magazines appeared, evidence that their readership was expanding as well.⁷ Some of the popular magazines are reputed to have had monthly circulations in the 12,000 range.

The old, pamphlets and broadsides, print venues with long histories, survived into the latter half of the eighteenth century and appeared in booksellers’ shops alongside newspapers and magazines. Broadsides were still being hawked in the streets. Information on the publishing arrangements for these venues is difficult to come by, but it appears they were accessible to any author who could afford the cost of printing and distribution or who was willing to split the costs and profits with the printer. The only reason Boswell was able to publish The Cub, at New-market (1762) is that he agreed to assume the expense of it. In February, the London publishing firm of Robert Dodsley and William Strahan published it according to Boswell’s instructions: Let no expense be spar’d to make it genteel. Let it be done on large quarto and a good Type. Price one shilling.⁸ He earned a profit of thirteen shillings. Over the years, Boswell made extensive use of this venue.

In a manner of speaking, books straddled the line between the old and the new. They, too, had a lengthy history, but access to the press for middle-class men like Boswell with interesting subjects and a knack for writing but no special expertise in theological controversy, philosophy, history, or literature was relatively new. Accessibility to the press eased as the audience of new readers with new literary tastes and interests expanded, a development Pope and Swift both ridiculed early in the century. Fifty years earlier, Boswell probably would have had a difficult time getting his books into press.

The expanded readership and the competition with the magazines it engendered forced newspapers that wanted to stay in business to include content that would entertain as well as inform a wide range of readers. No longer sidelines for printers, newspapers were becoming businesses that depended for their financial health on sales and readership: the more readers a paper had, the more it could charge for advertising space. The drive to publish a newspaper that was both informative and entertaining led to the creation of a new kind of paper designed to appeal to all readers, the chronicle, which combined up-to-date news with the type of feature articles that were appearing in the magazines.⁹ The first of these was Dodsley’s and Strahan’s London Chronicle, which they launched in 1757. Their paper was the second newspaper to publish Boswell, and he published in it his entire career.¹⁰

Because of its disorderly nature, the periodical publishing industry was a perfect place for a writer with Boswell’s interests and proclivities. Until near the century’s end, publishers and editors assumed no responsibility for the veracity of what they published, and the business lacked industry-wide editorial standards defining what the relationship between newspapers and their readers should be, or what content was appropriate for a newspaper and what was not. About the only articles inappropriate for a newspaper during Boswell’s career were those that could attract a libel suit or the government’s attention. Despite this blurry relation between newspapers and readers, the papers, recognizing an increasing demand for news, developed a voracious appetite for articles on current events and related content. When Boswell was working on Corsica, his publisher, Edward Dilly, reminded him, Early Intelligence is the very Life of a News Paper.¹¹ But interesting reading was not limited to news. In addition to political topics and related discourse, newspapers were also interested in articles on historical and literary subjects, social commentary and opinion pieces addressing controversies (frequently presented as letters to the publisher or printer), essays on life and manners, poems, letters—any pieces that might attract new readers and retain current ones.

BOSWELL’S EPHEMERAL WRITING

Boswell’s psychological needs, the circumstances of his life, and the disorderliness of the periodical publishing industry together made writing for periodicals especially appealing to him. How these circumstances mutually influenced each other to create this appeal is strongly hinted at in Hypochondriack 1, the first essay in a series of seventy that ran in the London Magazine from 1777 to 1783. It is devoted to a discussion of periodicals, but the essay begins in a rather odd way, by explaining why some authors prefer writing periodical essays to writing books. What is odd about this is that since The Hypochondriack was to be anonymous, there was no one to question his authorial preferences except James Boswell, which suggests that his failure to follow up Corsica with another book might have been an issue for him. At least one friend thought that writing for periodicals was beneath him, and Johnson pointedly told him he found Boswell’s periodical publishing offensive and disgusting.¹² It is hard to escape the impression that he felt the need to justify to himself the direction his literary career had taken. His comments are generalized, but the explanation he offers for such a preference seem to mirror his psychological needs and personal circumstances at the time, which imbue his explanations with an autobiographical cast.

It appears from what he says that Boswell simply didn’t relish the labor of writing another book. Perhaps he was looking back on his previous book-writing experience when he justifies his preference by explaining that writing a large book is a long and difficult journey, in the course of which, much fatigue and uneasiness must be undergone, while at the same time one is uncertain of reaching the end of it.¹³ This uncertainty hints at a vague fear of failure. It also suggests that Boswell might have had some early doubts about the success of Corsica, for several men he respected advised him against publishing it. None of these concerns were significant then, however. The research was an exciting adventure, the support he did receive was encouraging, and he was highly motivated by an intense desire to help his new friend, General Pasquale Paoli, the leader of Corsican rebels, and Paoli’s countrymen.

Writing short, light essays, on the other hand, was enjoyable, for writing these was like taking a pleasant airing, especially because the design is gratified in its completion (Bailey, 21). Writing for periodicals doesn’t require prolonged, unpleasant labor. No doubt part of what made publishing in them pleasant was that they offered writers a ready opportunity of indulging their genius without exhausting it (Bailey, 21). Unlike a book that immerses writers in a single subject, prompts continual fretting about the possibility of failure, and leaves them destitute of subjects for conversation when finished, an unhappy prospect for a social man like Boswell, periodicals offer writers variety, an inexhaustible fund of subjects to write about, the most interesting of which are life and manners. That periodicals provided ready opportunities for indulging his genius, an endless variety of subjects to write on, and an array of publications in which he could place his work suggests that Boswell felt he could publish an article or essay on any subject anytime and anywhere he wished. This attitude was not so much a self-assessment of his superior talents as it was a feeling based on the recognition of the expanded opportunities a plethora of periodicals in need of competent freelance writers offered authors like him.

Even if they wanted to write books, Boswell explains, many writers simply lack the time to do so. He seems to be including himself among the ingenious men who lack the leisure to write more than a short essay (Bailey, 21). This situation certainly fits Boswell’s circumstances. Time hadn’t been a problem when he worked on his Corsica book, either. He was unmarried and his only professional responsibilities were completing his law studies and afterward setting up a law practice, a task probably eased by having a father sitting on the benches of the nation’s two highest courts. But by 1777, Boswell had a wife, three young children, a burgeoning if not lucrative law practice, and a commitment to produce an essay every month for the London Magazine. The implication is that these responsibilities limited the time he had available for protracted literary work. But because the periodical publishing industry was so malleable, his personal and professional responsibilities did not interfere with publishing in newspapers and magazines. It would have been much easier and less stressful for a busy lawyer and family man to carve out time in a loaded schedule to write an occasional essay or poem than it would have been to batten down in a study for the close, prolonged work of researching and writing a book.

But, Boswell takes pains to point out, the failure to write books does not make writers of short essays lesser authors or any less valuable to society. The literary abilities of these authors, he says, are perhaps not extensive and robust, evidently qualities for book authorship he perhaps feels he lacks, but their work is not deficient in quickness and grace. Though these authors may not always increase society’s fund of knowledge, they do serve a wide range of readers, often ones too busy to read more than a few pages at a time or who "can never fix their attention on any thing [sic] more than short essays, by treating them to a wonderfully pleasing" variety of reading material (Bailey, 22).

It appears also that publishing essays might well have been a psychic defense against feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and worthlessness that could be dredged up by indolence, perhaps a threat posed by the resistance to writing another book. These feelings are the bane of the hypochondriack, and the pain they inflicted on Boswell is pathetically detailed in Hypochondriack 39. Unconscious fear of these feelings seems to have motivated him to think of writing pleasant essays as self-improvement, a need responding to the long-term psychological effects of early and sustained criticism from his father. Thinking of writing essays this way barred these feelings from consciousness. When writing them, he was not being indolent; he was employing time that would otherwise be wasted and preparing himself for the execution of more important works. He was no doubt here thinking about his planned works about Johnson. Moreover, writing periodical essays was simply a relief from his legal research and writing, which he enjoyed only on rare occasions. Memorials, legal case documents that today are called briefs, were labor intensive and required much research, unlike writing essays for newspapers, which he could do without much reading.¹⁴

Most of Boswell’s periodical writing appeared in newspapers. Although from the late 1760s Boswell’s articles also appeared in magazines other than the Scots Magazine, the magazine that first published him, he clearly favored writing for the papers, which he considered one of the happiest inventions of modern times (Bailey, 21). Pottle reports that Boswell published in nineteen of them, but the number of papers to which he contributed regularly was a small group. In Scotland, he contributed almost exclusively to the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Advertiser, the latter published by his friend Alexander Donaldson. In London, he published most often in the Public Advertiser, one of the most sober and respected publications of the era, which saw its circulation jump from 2,500 copies daily to 5,000 in 1769 when the letters of Junius (1769–1772) began appearing in its pages.¹⁵ By 1781, almost all members of Parliament subscribed to it, including the king.¹⁶ He also submitted frequently to the London Chronicle, less frequently to the St. James’s Chronicle, and occasionally to the Morning Post.

It is unclear why, but Boswell wasn’t interested in submitting to a variety of magazines, despite the opportunities they offered. Perhaps the fact that they emphasized entertainment made them seem unfit venues for an author who considered himself a serious writer on serious topics. He published in only four: the Scots Magazine; the London Magazine, to which he contributed regularly after he became a one-sixth partner in 1769; the staid Gentleman’s Magazine; and the European Magazine, another no-nonsense publication to which he began contributing late in his career. His most significant contribution to that magazine was a two-part memoir he wrote following publication of the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which presented information on Boswell as though written by someone close to him.

Given that most periodicals were trying to attract readers from the lower rungs of the social ladder and that the reading public was becoming ever hungrier for news, the difference between Boswell’s hard-news articles and his essays would seem to suggest that Boswell might have been writing for two audiences, one comprised of the lower classes that would have had difficulty comprehending articles studded with learned references, historical allusions, and untranslated Latin quotations, and a second comprised of men like himself: classically educated; well-read; knowledgeable about politics and foreign affairs; and interested in literature (ancient and modern), science, life and manners, and other subjects not directly relevant to the daily life of the laboring classes.

But Boswell wrote for only one audience, men like himself. The prose discrepancy in his work is more likely due to available generic forms than to an interest in reaching two classes of readers. While the essay form was well established, there were no generic forms for news and news features, so Boswell had to rely on available forms. Two he used frequently were the letter extract and the letter, both of which were particularly suited to witness accounts. The letter extract, ostensibly lifted from a longer letter and lacking conventional paratextual elements, enabled an author to provide an objective, detailed narrative recounting a sharply defined event he witnessed, such as an execution, and being an extract, it could be understood by all readers and listeners, for these were written in an unadorned prose and did not easily accommodate material extraneous to the narrative such as historical allusions and learned references. Letter extract usually signified hard news, but that signification did not vouch for the veracity of the account. The letter was commonly utilized by periodical writers for longer, less sharply focused narratives. The letter, typically addressed to the printer of … or Sir and often signed with a pseudonym, implied that the author was writing from personal knowledge about the subject but was not necessarily a witness, and it enabled the easy incorporation of allusions, learned references, Latin quotations, and ruminations on what was being reported. This was a flexible form that was also employed to present essays on life and manners as well as arguments and opinions. Then there was the account. Historically, this form was employed when the author was relying on research and/or scholarly expertise, and it was usually titled an account of … some historical event or personage. Boswell often employed the term account for interview-based narratives; thus, in a way they relied on research, though these articles were often studded with his learning and reading. Boswell employed the traditional essay form for much of his social commentary and his Hypochondriack essays. And then there was what we could call the squib, a short article of a paragraph or two in straightforward prose merely informing readers what had transpired. Many of Boswell’s inventions were squibs. Boswell employs all these forms; hence, the differences in his prose depended on the form he chose.

There is something a bit incongruous about this body of work coming from the pen of a man whose literary ambitions burned in his veins like a fever: he signed hardly any of his periodical writings and only selected pamphlets. Elsewhere in this volume Paul Tankard notes that he counts signatures on only thirty-four of hundreds of pieces in the newspapers, and pseudonyms on at least 165. Boswell’s authorship of The Hypochondriack was not known until four years after his death, and that he was author of The Rampager, Tankard reminds us, was unknown until the discovery of his papers early in the twentieth century.

Logically, it seems that anonymous publication would be contraindicated for a man seeking to become famous as an author, but in the periodical press of the eighteenth century, anonymous publication and the use of pseudonyms were the norm and signed works the exception. The eighteenth century believed that anonymity encouraged candor and identification of the author restrained it, an opinion Boswell subscribed to. Anonymity, he wrote in Hypochondriack 27, is a veil sufficient for concealment, the timid apprehension of discovery deters many from throwing out their lubrications (Bailey, 158). He did sign his books and several of his political pamphlets, however, and it is easy to explain why he did: he expected his political pamphlets to earn him public and political recognition of his civic role as a zealous guardian of citizens’ rights and civil liberties, which played into his political ambitions, and he expected his books to earn a fame that would survive him. But for most of his career, it wasn’t important to him that his signature appear on what he published in