In 1763, a young and insecure Scottish lawyer met the most famous writer in England.
Their unlikely friendship would produce The Life of Samuel Johnson, a book that changed how biographies were written by revealing not just greatness, but flaws, fears and sharp-tongued wit.
How did a flawed outsider manage to capture one of the century’s most brilliant and complicated minds?
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to talk about James Boswell and Samuel Johnson.
[00:00:28] It's a story about a strange friendship between two very different men, and about how one insecure young Scotsman changed the way we write about other people’s lives.
[00:00:42] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:48] It is November 1762. James Boswell is twenty-two years old, and he has just arrived in London.
[00:00:59] He is not yet famous for anything. He is the son of a Scottish lord, which gives him a name and a certain kind of introduction in polite company, but not much money and no particular prospects.
[00:01:15] He is charming, good-looking, and consumed by an ambition of a vague and restless kind.
[00:01:24] From the moment he arrives, he writes everything down. It's not a boring list of what he had for lunch or who he saw at the theatre, although he does go into plenty of those sorts of details. It is a frank and often funny account of what it felt like to be a young man trying to make his mark on a city he has dreamt about since he was a boy.
[00:01:50] He writes about parties, theatres, dinners, and the people he wants to impress.
[00:01:57] But he also writes about the things most men of his class would have carefully hidden: the intimate details of his encounters with prostitutes on Westminster Bridge, a conversation where he accuses a lover of having given him gonorrhoea.
[00:02:15] He writes about falling in love with women who do not love him back, about his recurrent bouts of low spirits, his deep sense of guilt about not being able to restrain his libido, and about his fear that he will never become the person he wants to be.
[00:02:34] His words were never intended for an external audience, and indeed his journals weren't discovered until the 1920s, 150 years later.
[00:02:45] But in those pages you can already see the gift that would later make him famous: the ability to watch life closely, remember speech, and turn personality into prose.
[00:03:02] Now, before we get more into Boswell the writer, we need to understand the world he has walked into.
[00:03:12] In 1762, we are bang in the middle of the Enlightenment.
[00:03:18] London is a city of roughly three quarters of a million people. It is the largest city in Europe, and it is loud, overcrowded, and seething with ideas.
[00:03:32] The coffee house is the engine of intellectual life. Merchants gossip about trade. Politicians argue about the American colonies. Writers read each other's work aloud and tear it apart.
[00:03:48] There are also clubs. Literary clubs, dining clubs, debating societies where men argue about philosophy for hours and then walk home through streets ankle-deep in mud.
[00:04:01] The professional writer is a new kind of creature. Before this, writers depended on wealthy patrons.
[00:04:09] Now, increasingly, they write for the public, which means they live and die by whether the public buys what they produce.
[00:04:19] Into this world, young Boswell walks, diary in hand.
[00:04:25] The man he most wants to meet is called Samuel Johnson.
[00:04:31] If this is ringing some bells and you are a particularly dedicated listener to this show, you may remember that back in March 2020 we made an episode about Johnson’s dictionary, the most famous early dictionary of the English language. It's episode number 39, if you'd like to listen to that one afterwards.
[00:04:54] But if you haven't, or as a reminder, here's the background on Johnson.
[00:05:01] He was born in 1709 in the English Midlands, so he is thirty-one years older than Boswell.
[00:05:09] He was an incredibly bright young boy, and won a place at Oxford, only to have to drop out after his first year because his parents could not afford the fees. He moved to London in his late twenties with almost nothing, and spent the next two decades writing for newspapers and magazines, but essentially living in poverty.
[00:05:35] Then, in 1755, he got his big break, with the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language. He had worked on it for nine years. It was not the first English dictionary, but it was far and away the most thorough, the most witty, and the most alive.
[00:05:59] And almost overnight, it made him famous, but not immediately rich. That came afterwards, it was only in 1762, seven years later, that he received a pension from the Crown, and for the first time in his adult life he did not have to worry about money.
[00:06:21] He is free to think, to talk, to be himself.
[00:06:26] And who is he, who is Samuel Johnson?
[00:06:31] Well, he is quite the character.
[00:06:34] Physically, he is immediately striking.
[00:06:37] He is large, tall and overweight, and his face is covered in scars from a childhood disease. He is partly blind and partly deaf. He rocks backwards and forwards when he thinks, makes odd noises under his breath, and has this superstition that makes him touch every wooden post he passes in the street.
[00:07:03] He is deeply melancholic, and were he around today, he might well be diagnosed with clinical depression or bipolar disorder.
[00:07:14] He got married at the age of twenty-five, to a widow of forty-six. It is an unusual match, but he remains dedicated to her, and even after her death, when he is only forty-two, he refuses to remarry and continues to mourn her for the rest of his life.
[00:07:36] He is, in other words, a man of extraordinary peculiarities.
[00:07:42] But he is incredibly intelligent, great company, and known as the finest conversationalist in England.
[00:07:51] In practice, this means he likes to debate, to argue a point.
[00:07:57] And when Johnson argues, he argues to win. He does not aim for nuance in conversation; he aims for total demolition. He will defend a position he does not privately hold simply because he finds it more interesting to argue that way.
[00:08:16] Now, this doesn't make him mean or nasty, unkind to those less fortunate than him. He is famously charitable, and there is one account of him giving his last coins to a beggar asleep in the street in the middle of the night, sitting beside the man until he woke up, and then giving him more.
[00:08:37] He is a walking bundle of contradictions.
[00:08:41] Which, as it turns out, makes him the ideal subject for a biography.
[00:08:47] Now, back to Boswell.
[00:08:50] James Boswell is the eldest son of a Scottish judge with high expectations and very little patience for his son's enthusiasms. Their relationship is one of the great tensions of Boswell's life: his father wants him to be a respectable Scottish lawyer; Boswell wants to be a writer, a wit, a man about town.
[00:09:16] He wants to be taken seriously in London. He wants, if he is honest, to be famous.
[00:09:23] But he is deeply flawed, as he admits to himself in his diary. He is vain. He drinks too much. He is always visiting prostitutes, feeling terrible about what he has done and praying for forgiveness, and then doing the same thing all over again. He falls in love impulsively and unwisely.
[00:09:45] He is, by many measures, a mess.
[00:09:49] The extraordinary thing is that Boswell does not hide this from himself. He records his vanity and weakness almost as carefully as he records other people’s brilliance.
[00:10:02] But he has a unique talent, though at first he does not seem fully aware of it.
[00:10:09] He has an incredible ability to observe a situation, notice the smallest details that other people might miss, and then go home and write the entire thing down, reconstructing the conversation from memory, sometimes hours of talk, in extraordinary detail.
[00:10:31] And he is not sitting silently in the corner like a note-taker. He is in the conversation, laughing, flattering, interrupting, being insulted, and then going home to reconstruct it.
[00:10:45] This is the talent that will produce, eventually, the greatest biography in the English language. But first, he needs his subject.
[00:10:56] And you will win no prizes for guessing who it's going to be.
[00:11:01] The first meeting between Boswell and Johnson happens on the 16th of May, 1763. Boswell is in the back parlour of a bookshop in Covent Garden when Samuel Johnson walks through the door.
[00:11:17] Boswell has been trying to engineer this meeting for weeks. It's now eight years since the publication of the famous dictionary, and Johnson is the most celebrated literary figure in London.
[00:11:32] Boswell is a young Scotsman who has published nothing. He is nervous, not least because he knows that Johnson is famously rude about the Scots.
[00:11:43] The owner of the bookshop, Thomas Davies, makes the introduction. Boswell tries to be funny, confronting the Scottish elephant in the room head-on, saying "Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."
[00:12:01] Johnson looks at him, and says, deadpan: "That, Sir, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help."
[00:12:11] It is not an auspicious start, and Boswell is, in his own words, "much disconcerted."
[00:12:19] But this will be the start of one of the most improbable friendships in literary history.
[00:12:27] Johnson is fifty-three, Boswell is twenty-two.
[00:12:30] Johnson is English; Boswell is Scottish, which is a significant handicap in this particular relationship.
[00:12:38] Johnson is a man of deep religious conviction and apparent sexual abstinence after the death of his wife; Boswell is a regular among the prostitutes of Westminster Bridge, and seemingly incapable of changing his behaviour.
[00:12:56] Johnson is the city's most famous writer; Boswell is essentially a tourist and a nobody.
[00:13:04] And yet they form one of the most unlikely friendships in literary history.
[00:13:10] Much has been written as to why, and you can of course come to your own conclusion by reading the incredibly detailed accounts Boswell kept of their two-decade-long friendship.
[00:13:22] There is surely an element of father-son relationship to it. Johnson is thirty-one years older, with no family or children of his own. Boswell has a very difficult relationship with his own father, and is far happier in Johnson's company than he is in his father's.
[00:13:43] For Boswell, being around the incredibly witty Johnson is clearly very enjoyable. He takes great pride in recording how Johnson had ridiculed someone over dinner, and is even happy to record how Johnson insults him, as long as it is witty enough.
[00:14:03] And for Johnson, well, he can see that Boswell adores him, and who doesn't like to feel wanted?
[00:14:12] Now, the friendship was not always continuous. After their first meetings in London, Boswell spent long periods away: back in Scotland, completing the legal training his father demanded, as well as travelling in Europe.
[00:14:27] In Europe he pursued famous men with the same intensity with which he pursued Johnson, meeting Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he even found time for a brief affair with Rousseau’s lover.
[00:14:42] But whenever he could, Boswell would come to London, and there the primary attraction was Samuel Johnson. He takes notes. He records conversations. He writes down Johnson's views on everything from the American Revolutionary War to the existence of ghosts to the proper way to eat a peach.
[00:15:06] Johnson's feelings about Scotland and the Scots are a constant undercurrent in their friendship.
[00:15:13] To give you a few examples: "The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees," Johnson says, "is the high road that leads him to England." Or "Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young."
[00:15:30] Johnson is perennially rude about Scotland and the Scots, and it seems Boswell takes this as a challenge to bring Johnson to his home country and get him to see for himself.
[00:15:44] In the summer of 1773, he manages, and Johnson agrees to go on a tour through Scotland, with Boswell as his travelling partner.
[00:15:55] It is one of the more unlikely journeys in British literary history. Samuel Johnson is sixty-three, has spent most of his adult life in London and its immediate surroundings, and appears to have little interest in anything beyond the English border. He agrees to travel with Boswell through the Scottish Highlands and out to the Western Isles.
[00:16:19] They set off in August. They travel through Edinburgh, where Johnson is, to his slight surprise, received with enormous respect. They visit St Andrews and Aberdeen. They push north into the Highlands and then west, taking a boat to the Isle of Skye.
[00:16:37] The landscape does something to Johnson. He has never seen anything remotely like it. The vast, treeless mountains, the lochs, the sheer emptiness.
[00:16:50] He is also deeply moved by the poverty he sees, and the ruins of the old clan system, which is already being dismantled after the Jacobite rebellions.
[00:17:03] They make it out to the island of Iona, which is one of the most ancient Christian sites in Britain, where the abbey stands half-ruined among the graves of Scottish kings.
[00:17:15] Johnson, standing there, is quiet for a long time.
[00:17:21] "That man is little to be envied," he says eventually, "whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona."
[00:17:36] In other words, being physically in a place changes you, makes you see and feel things differently.
[00:17:45] And this is quite some admission from a man who had previously said the best thing a Scotsman could see was the road to England.
[00:17:55] Now, this was in late 1773. Johnson would live for another 11 years, but the end of his life was characterised by ill health and depression.
[00:18:08] Johnson knew that his young friend had been keeping notes, and was planning to publish an account of his life, but he would have had no idea on quite how important it would be, and that it would come to be regarded as one of the greatest biographies ever written.
[00:18:27] Johnson died in 1784, and it wasn't until 1791, seven years after his death, that Boswell published his account of his friend's life.
[00:18:40] It wasn't the first biography of Samuel Johnson — several others have been rushed out to capitalise on the public interest in the immediate aftermath of his death. But it is certainly the best, and it became the blueprint for the modern biography.
[00:19:00] Before Boswell, and before The Life of Samuel Johnson, biography often had a fairly clear purpose.
[00:19:09] You wrote about what a great person did: their battles, their political achievements, their public acts.
[00:19:17] You presented them as an example to admire or a warning to others.
[00:19:23] You did not typically record the moment they were rude to someone at dinner, or the odd things they said when they were only half-paying attention, or the way their voice changed when they were defending something they privately doubted.
[00:19:38] Boswell records all of this.
[00:19:42] His account runs to more than twelve hundred pages. It's built on twenty years of notes, letters, and reconstructed conversations. You can hear the words coming off the page, the very words Samuel Johnson spoke, not summarised, not paraphrased, but actually spoken.
[00:20:04] You learn that Johnson believed there was no point eating boiled mutton unless it fell from the bone.
[00:20:11] You learn that he was terrified of death, that he prayed in private with intense fervour, that he was capable of cruelty towards people he found dull and extraordinary generosity towards strangers.
[00:20:28] You learn that his opinions were delivered with complete confidence and often deliberate provocation.
[00:20:36] "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
[00:20:40] "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life."
[00:20:45] Judged by modern standards, Johnson can seem both shockingly bigoted and strikingly enlightened.
[00:20:54] On the Americans seeking independence, he was firmly against it.
[00:20:58] On slavery, he was fiercely opposed.
[00:21:02] On the possibility of a woman preaching as well as a man: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
[00:21:16] Hinder legs, by the way, is an old way of saying "hind" legs, or back legs.
[00:21:23] In other words, Johnson is saying that a woman preacher is like a dog walking on its back legs: not good, not natural, but surprising enough to make people look.
[00:21:35] It is cruel, sexist and offensive, certainly. But it is also pure Johnson: compressed, comic, brutal, and impossible to forget.
[00:21:47] And this is what Boswell understood: A biography should not simply record events. It should reveal character. You should come away feeling not only that you know what a person did, but that you know what it was like to sit in a room with them.
[00:22:06] And in Johnson's case, that you had been insulted by him, been irritated by him, laughed at his jokes, watched him defend something he was privately not sure about simply because no one in the room had yet managed to defeat him.
[00:22:22] Johnson himself was, in theory, opposed to this kind of biography. He thought private life should remain private. He thought biographers intruded too far. He did not, perhaps, fully understand what Boswell was doing, even as Boswell was doing it right in front of him.
[00:22:45] So, to wrap up, Johnson lives today, more vividly than almost any other figure of his century, because of exactly that intrusion. Because Boswell refused to treat greatness as something smooth and respectable. He showed the contradictions. He showed the vanity, the fear, the tenderness, the cruelty, the jokes, the odd habits, and the flashes of genius.
[00:23:13] And we know all of this because, in November 1762, a young, anxious, ambitious, somewhat dissolute Scotsman arrived in London with a notebook, a hunger for fame, and a rare gift for paying attention.
[00:23:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, and the strange friendship behind one of the greatest biographies ever written.
[00:23:42] Whether or not you’ve listened to that old episode from 2020, I hope this gave you a new way to think about Johnson, Boswell, and the strange friendship between these two peculiar men.
[00:23:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to talk about James Boswell and Samuel Johnson.
[00:00:28] It's a story about a strange friendship between two very different men, and about how one insecure young Scotsman changed the way we write about other people’s lives.
[00:00:42] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:48] It is November 1762. James Boswell is twenty-two years old, and he has just arrived in London.
[00:00:59] He is not yet famous for anything. He is the son of a Scottish lord, which gives him a name and a certain kind of introduction in polite company, but not much money and no particular prospects.
[00:01:15] He is charming, good-looking, and consumed by an ambition of a vague and restless kind.
[00:01:24] From the moment he arrives, he writes everything down. It's not a boring list of what he had for lunch or who he saw at the theatre, although he does go into plenty of those sorts of details. It is a frank and often funny account of what it felt like to be a young man trying to make his mark on a city he has dreamt about since he was a boy.
[00:01:50] He writes about parties, theatres, dinners, and the people he wants to impress.
[00:01:57] But he also writes about the things most men of his class would have carefully hidden: the intimate details of his encounters with prostitutes on Westminster Bridge, a conversation where he accuses a lover of having given him gonorrhoea.
[00:02:15] He writes about falling in love with women who do not love him back, about his recurrent bouts of low spirits, his deep sense of guilt about not being able to restrain his libido, and about his fear that he will never become the person he wants to be.
[00:02:34] His words were never intended for an external audience, and indeed his journals weren't discovered until the 1920s, 150 years later.
[00:02:45] But in those pages you can already see the gift that would later make him famous: the ability to watch life closely, remember speech, and turn personality into prose.
[00:03:02] Now, before we get more into Boswell the writer, we need to understand the world he has walked into.
[00:03:12] In 1762, we are bang in the middle of the Enlightenment.
[00:03:18] London is a city of roughly three quarters of a million people. It is the largest city in Europe, and it is loud, overcrowded, and seething with ideas.
[00:03:32] The coffee house is the engine of intellectual life. Merchants gossip about trade. Politicians argue about the American colonies. Writers read each other's work aloud and tear it apart.
[00:03:48] There are also clubs. Literary clubs, dining clubs, debating societies where men argue about philosophy for hours and then walk home through streets ankle-deep in mud.
[00:04:01] The professional writer is a new kind of creature. Before this, writers depended on wealthy patrons.
[00:04:09] Now, increasingly, they write for the public, which means they live and die by whether the public buys what they produce.
[00:04:19] Into this world, young Boswell walks, diary in hand.
[00:04:25] The man he most wants to meet is called Samuel Johnson.
[00:04:31] If this is ringing some bells and you are a particularly dedicated listener to this show, you may remember that back in March 2020 we made an episode about Johnson’s dictionary, the most famous early dictionary of the English language. It's episode number 39, if you'd like to listen to that one afterwards.
[00:04:54] But if you haven't, or as a reminder, here's the background on Johnson.
[00:05:01] He was born in 1709 in the English Midlands, so he is thirty-one years older than Boswell.
[00:05:09] He was an incredibly bright young boy, and won a place at Oxford, only to have to drop out after his first year because his parents could not afford the fees. He moved to London in his late twenties with almost nothing, and spent the next two decades writing for newspapers and magazines, but essentially living in poverty.
[00:05:35] Then, in 1755, he got his big break, with the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language. He had worked on it for nine years. It was not the first English dictionary, but it was far and away the most thorough, the most witty, and the most alive.
[00:05:59] And almost overnight, it made him famous, but not immediately rich. That came afterwards, it was only in 1762, seven years later, that he received a pension from the Crown, and for the first time in his adult life he did not have to worry about money.
[00:06:21] He is free to think, to talk, to be himself.
[00:06:26] And who is he, who is Samuel Johnson?
[00:06:31] Well, he is quite the character.
[00:06:34] Physically, he is immediately striking.
[00:06:37] He is large, tall and overweight, and his face is covered in scars from a childhood disease. He is partly blind and partly deaf. He rocks backwards and forwards when he thinks, makes odd noises under his breath, and has this superstition that makes him touch every wooden post he passes in the street.
[00:07:03] He is deeply melancholic, and were he around today, he might well be diagnosed with clinical depression or bipolar disorder.
[00:07:14] He got married at the age of twenty-five, to a widow of forty-six. It is an unusual match, but he remains dedicated to her, and even after her death, when he is only forty-two, he refuses to remarry and continues to mourn her for the rest of his life.
[00:07:36] He is, in other words, a man of extraordinary peculiarities.
[00:07:42] But he is incredibly intelligent, great company, and known as the finest conversationalist in England.
[00:07:51] In practice, this means he likes to debate, to argue a point.
[00:07:57] And when Johnson argues, he argues to win. He does not aim for nuance in conversation; he aims for total demolition. He will defend a position he does not privately hold simply because he finds it more interesting to argue that way.
[00:08:16] Now, this doesn't make him mean or nasty, unkind to those less fortunate than him. He is famously charitable, and there is one account of him giving his last coins to a beggar asleep in the street in the middle of the night, sitting beside the man until he woke up, and then giving him more.
[00:08:37] He is a walking bundle of contradictions.
[00:08:41] Which, as it turns out, makes him the ideal subject for a biography.
[00:08:47] Now, back to Boswell.
[00:08:50] James Boswell is the eldest son of a Scottish judge with high expectations and very little patience for his son's enthusiasms. Their relationship is one of the great tensions of Boswell's life: his father wants him to be a respectable Scottish lawyer; Boswell wants to be a writer, a wit, a man about town.
[00:09:16] He wants to be taken seriously in London. He wants, if he is honest, to be famous.
[00:09:23] But he is deeply flawed, as he admits to himself in his diary. He is vain. He drinks too much. He is always visiting prostitutes, feeling terrible about what he has done and praying for forgiveness, and then doing the same thing all over again. He falls in love impulsively and unwisely.
[00:09:45] He is, by many measures, a mess.
[00:09:49] The extraordinary thing is that Boswell does not hide this from himself. He records his vanity and weakness almost as carefully as he records other people’s brilliance.
[00:10:02] But he has a unique talent, though at first he does not seem fully aware of it.
[00:10:09] He has an incredible ability to observe a situation, notice the smallest details that other people might miss, and then go home and write the entire thing down, reconstructing the conversation from memory, sometimes hours of talk, in extraordinary detail.
[00:10:31] And he is not sitting silently in the corner like a note-taker. He is in the conversation, laughing, flattering, interrupting, being insulted, and then going home to reconstruct it.
[00:10:45] This is the talent that will produce, eventually, the greatest biography in the English language. But first, he needs his subject.
[00:10:56] And you will win no prizes for guessing who it's going to be.
[00:11:01] The first meeting between Boswell and Johnson happens on the 16th of May, 1763. Boswell is in the back parlour of a bookshop in Covent Garden when Samuel Johnson walks through the door.
[00:11:17] Boswell has been trying to engineer this meeting for weeks. It's now eight years since the publication of the famous dictionary, and Johnson is the most celebrated literary figure in London.
[00:11:32] Boswell is a young Scotsman who has published nothing. He is nervous, not least because he knows that Johnson is famously rude about the Scots.
[00:11:43] The owner of the bookshop, Thomas Davies, makes the introduction. Boswell tries to be funny, confronting the Scottish elephant in the room head-on, saying "Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."
[00:12:01] Johnson looks at him, and says, deadpan: "That, Sir, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help."
[00:12:11] It is not an auspicious start, and Boswell is, in his own words, "much disconcerted."
[00:12:19] But this will be the start of one of the most improbable friendships in literary history.
[00:12:27] Johnson is fifty-three, Boswell is twenty-two.
[00:12:30] Johnson is English; Boswell is Scottish, which is a significant handicap in this particular relationship.
[00:12:38] Johnson is a man of deep religious conviction and apparent sexual abstinence after the death of his wife; Boswell is a regular among the prostitutes of Westminster Bridge, and seemingly incapable of changing his behaviour.
[00:12:56] Johnson is the city's most famous writer; Boswell is essentially a tourist and a nobody.
[00:13:04] And yet they form one of the most unlikely friendships in literary history.
[00:13:10] Much has been written as to why, and you can of course come to your own conclusion by reading the incredibly detailed accounts Boswell kept of their two-decade-long friendship.
[00:13:22] There is surely an element of father-son relationship to it. Johnson is thirty-one years older, with no family or children of his own. Boswell has a very difficult relationship with his own father, and is far happier in Johnson's company than he is in his father's.
[00:13:43] For Boswell, being around the incredibly witty Johnson is clearly very enjoyable. He takes great pride in recording how Johnson had ridiculed someone over dinner, and is even happy to record how Johnson insults him, as long as it is witty enough.
[00:14:03] And for Johnson, well, he can see that Boswell adores him, and who doesn't like to feel wanted?
[00:14:12] Now, the friendship was not always continuous. After their first meetings in London, Boswell spent long periods away: back in Scotland, completing the legal training his father demanded, as well as travelling in Europe.
[00:14:27] In Europe he pursued famous men with the same intensity with which he pursued Johnson, meeting Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he even found time for a brief affair with Rousseau’s lover.
[00:14:42] But whenever he could, Boswell would come to London, and there the primary attraction was Samuel Johnson. He takes notes. He records conversations. He writes down Johnson's views on everything from the American Revolutionary War to the existence of ghosts to the proper way to eat a peach.
[00:15:06] Johnson's feelings about Scotland and the Scots are a constant undercurrent in their friendship.
[00:15:13] To give you a few examples: "The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees," Johnson says, "is the high road that leads him to England." Or "Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young."
[00:15:30] Johnson is perennially rude about Scotland and the Scots, and it seems Boswell takes this as a challenge to bring Johnson to his home country and get him to see for himself.
[00:15:44] In the summer of 1773, he manages, and Johnson agrees to go on a tour through Scotland, with Boswell as his travelling partner.
[00:15:55] It is one of the more unlikely journeys in British literary history. Samuel Johnson is sixty-three, has spent most of his adult life in London and its immediate surroundings, and appears to have little interest in anything beyond the English border. He agrees to travel with Boswell through the Scottish Highlands and out to the Western Isles.
[00:16:19] They set off in August. They travel through Edinburgh, where Johnson is, to his slight surprise, received with enormous respect. They visit St Andrews and Aberdeen. They push north into the Highlands and then west, taking a boat to the Isle of Skye.
[00:16:37] The landscape does something to Johnson. He has never seen anything remotely like it. The vast, treeless mountains, the lochs, the sheer emptiness.
[00:16:50] He is also deeply moved by the poverty he sees, and the ruins of the old clan system, which is already being dismantled after the Jacobite rebellions.
[00:17:03] They make it out to the island of Iona, which is one of the most ancient Christian sites in Britain, where the abbey stands half-ruined among the graves of Scottish kings.
[00:17:15] Johnson, standing there, is quiet for a long time.
[00:17:21] "That man is little to be envied," he says eventually, "whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona."
[00:17:36] In other words, being physically in a place changes you, makes you see and feel things differently.
[00:17:45] And this is quite some admission from a man who had previously said the best thing a Scotsman could see was the road to England.
[00:17:55] Now, this was in late 1773. Johnson would live for another 11 years, but the end of his life was characterised by ill health and depression.
[00:18:08] Johnson knew that his young friend had been keeping notes, and was planning to publish an account of his life, but he would have had no idea on quite how important it would be, and that it would come to be regarded as one of the greatest biographies ever written.
[00:18:27] Johnson died in 1784, and it wasn't until 1791, seven years after his death, that Boswell published his account of his friend's life.
[00:18:40] It wasn't the first biography of Samuel Johnson — several others have been rushed out to capitalise on the public interest in the immediate aftermath of his death. But it is certainly the best, and it became the blueprint for the modern biography.
[00:19:00] Before Boswell, and before The Life of Samuel Johnson, biography often had a fairly clear purpose.
[00:19:09] You wrote about what a great person did: their battles, their political achievements, their public acts.
[00:19:17] You presented them as an example to admire or a warning to others.
[00:19:23] You did not typically record the moment they were rude to someone at dinner, or the odd things they said when they were only half-paying attention, or the way their voice changed when they were defending something they privately doubted.
[00:19:38] Boswell records all of this.
[00:19:42] His account runs to more than twelve hundred pages. It's built on twenty years of notes, letters, and reconstructed conversations. You can hear the words coming off the page, the very words Samuel Johnson spoke, not summarised, not paraphrased, but actually spoken.
[00:20:04] You learn that Johnson believed there was no point eating boiled mutton unless it fell from the bone.
[00:20:11] You learn that he was terrified of death, that he prayed in private with intense fervour, that he was capable of cruelty towards people he found dull and extraordinary generosity towards strangers.
[00:20:28] You learn that his opinions were delivered with complete confidence and often deliberate provocation.
[00:20:36] "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
[00:20:40] "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life."
[00:20:45] Judged by modern standards, Johnson can seem both shockingly bigoted and strikingly enlightened.
[00:20:54] On the Americans seeking independence, he was firmly against it.
[00:20:58] On slavery, he was fiercely opposed.
[00:21:02] On the possibility of a woman preaching as well as a man: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
[00:21:16] Hinder legs, by the way, is an old way of saying "hind" legs, or back legs.
[00:21:23] In other words, Johnson is saying that a woman preacher is like a dog walking on its back legs: not good, not natural, but surprising enough to make people look.
[00:21:35] It is cruel, sexist and offensive, certainly. But it is also pure Johnson: compressed, comic, brutal, and impossible to forget.
[00:21:47] And this is what Boswell understood: A biography should not simply record events. It should reveal character. You should come away feeling not only that you know what a person did, but that you know what it was like to sit in a room with them.
[00:22:06] And in Johnson's case, that you had been insulted by him, been irritated by him, laughed at his jokes, watched him defend something he was privately not sure about simply because no one in the room had yet managed to defeat him.
[00:22:22] Johnson himself was, in theory, opposed to this kind of biography. He thought private life should remain private. He thought biographers intruded too far. He did not, perhaps, fully understand what Boswell was doing, even as Boswell was doing it right in front of him.
[00:22:45] So, to wrap up, Johnson lives today, more vividly than almost any other figure of his century, because of exactly that intrusion. Because Boswell refused to treat greatness as something smooth and respectable. He showed the contradictions. He showed the vanity, the fear, the tenderness, the cruelty, the jokes, the odd habits, and the flashes of genius.
[00:23:13] And we know all of this because, in November 1762, a young, anxious, ambitious, somewhat dissolute Scotsman arrived in London with a notebook, a hunger for fame, and a rare gift for paying attention.
[00:23:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, and the strange friendship behind one of the greatest biographies ever written.
[00:23:42] Whether or not you’ve listened to that old episode from 2020, I hope this gave you a new way to think about Johnson, Boswell, and the strange friendship between these two peculiar men.
[00:23:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to talk about James Boswell and Samuel Johnson.
[00:00:28] It's a story about a strange friendship between two very different men, and about how one insecure young Scotsman changed the way we write about other people’s lives.
[00:00:42] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:48] It is November 1762. James Boswell is twenty-two years old, and he has just arrived in London.
[00:00:59] He is not yet famous for anything. He is the son of a Scottish lord, which gives him a name and a certain kind of introduction in polite company, but not much money and no particular prospects.
[00:01:15] He is charming, good-looking, and consumed by an ambition of a vague and restless kind.
[00:01:24] From the moment he arrives, he writes everything down. It's not a boring list of what he had for lunch or who he saw at the theatre, although he does go into plenty of those sorts of details. It is a frank and often funny account of what it felt like to be a young man trying to make his mark on a city he has dreamt about since he was a boy.
[00:01:50] He writes about parties, theatres, dinners, and the people he wants to impress.
[00:01:57] But he also writes about the things most men of his class would have carefully hidden: the intimate details of his encounters with prostitutes on Westminster Bridge, a conversation where he accuses a lover of having given him gonorrhoea.
[00:02:15] He writes about falling in love with women who do not love him back, about his recurrent bouts of low spirits, his deep sense of guilt about not being able to restrain his libido, and about his fear that he will never become the person he wants to be.
[00:02:34] His words were never intended for an external audience, and indeed his journals weren't discovered until the 1920s, 150 years later.
[00:02:45] But in those pages you can already see the gift that would later make him famous: the ability to watch life closely, remember speech, and turn personality into prose.
[00:03:02] Now, before we get more into Boswell the writer, we need to understand the world he has walked into.
[00:03:12] In 1762, we are bang in the middle of the Enlightenment.
[00:03:18] London is a city of roughly three quarters of a million people. It is the largest city in Europe, and it is loud, overcrowded, and seething with ideas.
[00:03:32] The coffee house is the engine of intellectual life. Merchants gossip about trade. Politicians argue about the American colonies. Writers read each other's work aloud and tear it apart.
[00:03:48] There are also clubs. Literary clubs, dining clubs, debating societies where men argue about philosophy for hours and then walk home through streets ankle-deep in mud.
[00:04:01] The professional writer is a new kind of creature. Before this, writers depended on wealthy patrons.
[00:04:09] Now, increasingly, they write for the public, which means they live and die by whether the public buys what they produce.
[00:04:19] Into this world, young Boswell walks, diary in hand.
[00:04:25] The man he most wants to meet is called Samuel Johnson.
[00:04:31] If this is ringing some bells and you are a particularly dedicated listener to this show, you may remember that back in March 2020 we made an episode about Johnson’s dictionary, the most famous early dictionary of the English language. It's episode number 39, if you'd like to listen to that one afterwards.
[00:04:54] But if you haven't, or as a reminder, here's the background on Johnson.
[00:05:01] He was born in 1709 in the English Midlands, so he is thirty-one years older than Boswell.
[00:05:09] He was an incredibly bright young boy, and won a place at Oxford, only to have to drop out after his first year because his parents could not afford the fees. He moved to London in his late twenties with almost nothing, and spent the next two decades writing for newspapers and magazines, but essentially living in poverty.
[00:05:35] Then, in 1755, he got his big break, with the publication of his Dictionary of the English Language. He had worked on it for nine years. It was not the first English dictionary, but it was far and away the most thorough, the most witty, and the most alive.
[00:05:59] And almost overnight, it made him famous, but not immediately rich. That came afterwards, it was only in 1762, seven years later, that he received a pension from the Crown, and for the first time in his adult life he did not have to worry about money.
[00:06:21] He is free to think, to talk, to be himself.
[00:06:26] And who is he, who is Samuel Johnson?
[00:06:31] Well, he is quite the character.
[00:06:34] Physically, he is immediately striking.
[00:06:37] He is large, tall and overweight, and his face is covered in scars from a childhood disease. He is partly blind and partly deaf. He rocks backwards and forwards when he thinks, makes odd noises under his breath, and has this superstition that makes him touch every wooden post he passes in the street.
[00:07:03] He is deeply melancholic, and were he around today, he might well be diagnosed with clinical depression or bipolar disorder.
[00:07:14] He got married at the age of twenty-five, to a widow of forty-six. It is an unusual match, but he remains dedicated to her, and even after her death, when he is only forty-two, he refuses to remarry and continues to mourn her for the rest of his life.
[00:07:36] He is, in other words, a man of extraordinary peculiarities.
[00:07:42] But he is incredibly intelligent, great company, and known as the finest conversationalist in England.
[00:07:51] In practice, this means he likes to debate, to argue a point.
[00:07:57] And when Johnson argues, he argues to win. He does not aim for nuance in conversation; he aims for total demolition. He will defend a position he does not privately hold simply because he finds it more interesting to argue that way.
[00:08:16] Now, this doesn't make him mean or nasty, unkind to those less fortunate than him. He is famously charitable, and there is one account of him giving his last coins to a beggar asleep in the street in the middle of the night, sitting beside the man until he woke up, and then giving him more.
[00:08:37] He is a walking bundle of contradictions.
[00:08:41] Which, as it turns out, makes him the ideal subject for a biography.
[00:08:47] Now, back to Boswell.
[00:08:50] James Boswell is the eldest son of a Scottish judge with high expectations and very little patience for his son's enthusiasms. Their relationship is one of the great tensions of Boswell's life: his father wants him to be a respectable Scottish lawyer; Boswell wants to be a writer, a wit, a man about town.
[00:09:16] He wants to be taken seriously in London. He wants, if he is honest, to be famous.
[00:09:23] But he is deeply flawed, as he admits to himself in his diary. He is vain. He drinks too much. He is always visiting prostitutes, feeling terrible about what he has done and praying for forgiveness, and then doing the same thing all over again. He falls in love impulsively and unwisely.
[00:09:45] He is, by many measures, a mess.
[00:09:49] The extraordinary thing is that Boswell does not hide this from himself. He records his vanity and weakness almost as carefully as he records other people’s brilliance.
[00:10:02] But he has a unique talent, though at first he does not seem fully aware of it.
[00:10:09] He has an incredible ability to observe a situation, notice the smallest details that other people might miss, and then go home and write the entire thing down, reconstructing the conversation from memory, sometimes hours of talk, in extraordinary detail.
[00:10:31] And he is not sitting silently in the corner like a note-taker. He is in the conversation, laughing, flattering, interrupting, being insulted, and then going home to reconstruct it.
[00:10:45] This is the talent that will produce, eventually, the greatest biography in the English language. But first, he needs his subject.
[00:10:56] And you will win no prizes for guessing who it's going to be.
[00:11:01] The first meeting between Boswell and Johnson happens on the 16th of May, 1763. Boswell is in the back parlour of a bookshop in Covent Garden when Samuel Johnson walks through the door.
[00:11:17] Boswell has been trying to engineer this meeting for weeks. It's now eight years since the publication of the famous dictionary, and Johnson is the most celebrated literary figure in London.
[00:11:32] Boswell is a young Scotsman who has published nothing. He is nervous, not least because he knows that Johnson is famously rude about the Scots.
[00:11:43] The owner of the bookshop, Thomas Davies, makes the introduction. Boswell tries to be funny, confronting the Scottish elephant in the room head-on, saying "Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."
[00:12:01] Johnson looks at him, and says, deadpan: "That, Sir, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help."
[00:12:11] It is not an auspicious start, and Boswell is, in his own words, "much disconcerted."
[00:12:19] But this will be the start of one of the most improbable friendships in literary history.
[00:12:27] Johnson is fifty-three, Boswell is twenty-two.
[00:12:30] Johnson is English; Boswell is Scottish, which is a significant handicap in this particular relationship.
[00:12:38] Johnson is a man of deep religious conviction and apparent sexual abstinence after the death of his wife; Boswell is a regular among the prostitutes of Westminster Bridge, and seemingly incapable of changing his behaviour.
[00:12:56] Johnson is the city's most famous writer; Boswell is essentially a tourist and a nobody.
[00:13:04] And yet they form one of the most unlikely friendships in literary history.
[00:13:10] Much has been written as to why, and you can of course come to your own conclusion by reading the incredibly detailed accounts Boswell kept of their two-decade-long friendship.
[00:13:22] There is surely an element of father-son relationship to it. Johnson is thirty-one years older, with no family or children of his own. Boswell has a very difficult relationship with his own father, and is far happier in Johnson's company than he is in his father's.
[00:13:43] For Boswell, being around the incredibly witty Johnson is clearly very enjoyable. He takes great pride in recording how Johnson had ridiculed someone over dinner, and is even happy to record how Johnson insults him, as long as it is witty enough.
[00:14:03] And for Johnson, well, he can see that Boswell adores him, and who doesn't like to feel wanted?
[00:14:12] Now, the friendship was not always continuous. After their first meetings in London, Boswell spent long periods away: back in Scotland, completing the legal training his father demanded, as well as travelling in Europe.
[00:14:27] In Europe he pursued famous men with the same intensity with which he pursued Johnson, meeting Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he even found time for a brief affair with Rousseau’s lover.
[00:14:42] But whenever he could, Boswell would come to London, and there the primary attraction was Samuel Johnson. He takes notes. He records conversations. He writes down Johnson's views on everything from the American Revolutionary War to the existence of ghosts to the proper way to eat a peach.
[00:15:06] Johnson's feelings about Scotland and the Scots are a constant undercurrent in their friendship.
[00:15:13] To give you a few examples: "The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees," Johnson says, "is the high road that leads him to England." Or "Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young."
[00:15:30] Johnson is perennially rude about Scotland and the Scots, and it seems Boswell takes this as a challenge to bring Johnson to his home country and get him to see for himself.
[00:15:44] In the summer of 1773, he manages, and Johnson agrees to go on a tour through Scotland, with Boswell as his travelling partner.
[00:15:55] It is one of the more unlikely journeys in British literary history. Samuel Johnson is sixty-three, has spent most of his adult life in London and its immediate surroundings, and appears to have little interest in anything beyond the English border. He agrees to travel with Boswell through the Scottish Highlands and out to the Western Isles.
[00:16:19] They set off in August. They travel through Edinburgh, where Johnson is, to his slight surprise, received with enormous respect. They visit St Andrews and Aberdeen. They push north into the Highlands and then west, taking a boat to the Isle of Skye.
[00:16:37] The landscape does something to Johnson. He has never seen anything remotely like it. The vast, treeless mountains, the lochs, the sheer emptiness.
[00:16:50] He is also deeply moved by the poverty he sees, and the ruins of the old clan system, which is already being dismantled after the Jacobite rebellions.
[00:17:03] They make it out to the island of Iona, which is one of the most ancient Christian sites in Britain, where the abbey stands half-ruined among the graves of Scottish kings.
[00:17:15] Johnson, standing there, is quiet for a long time.
[00:17:21] "That man is little to be envied," he says eventually, "whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona."
[00:17:36] In other words, being physically in a place changes you, makes you see and feel things differently.
[00:17:45] And this is quite some admission from a man who had previously said the best thing a Scotsman could see was the road to England.
[00:17:55] Now, this was in late 1773. Johnson would live for another 11 years, but the end of his life was characterised by ill health and depression.
[00:18:08] Johnson knew that his young friend had been keeping notes, and was planning to publish an account of his life, but he would have had no idea on quite how important it would be, and that it would come to be regarded as one of the greatest biographies ever written.
[00:18:27] Johnson died in 1784, and it wasn't until 1791, seven years after his death, that Boswell published his account of his friend's life.
[00:18:40] It wasn't the first biography of Samuel Johnson — several others have been rushed out to capitalise on the public interest in the immediate aftermath of his death. But it is certainly the best, and it became the blueprint for the modern biography.
[00:19:00] Before Boswell, and before The Life of Samuel Johnson, biography often had a fairly clear purpose.
[00:19:09] You wrote about what a great person did: their battles, their political achievements, their public acts.
[00:19:17] You presented them as an example to admire or a warning to others.
[00:19:23] You did not typically record the moment they were rude to someone at dinner, or the odd things they said when they were only half-paying attention, or the way their voice changed when they were defending something they privately doubted.
[00:19:38] Boswell records all of this.
[00:19:42] His account runs to more than twelve hundred pages. It's built on twenty years of notes, letters, and reconstructed conversations. You can hear the words coming off the page, the very words Samuel Johnson spoke, not summarised, not paraphrased, but actually spoken.
[00:20:04] You learn that Johnson believed there was no point eating boiled mutton unless it fell from the bone.
[00:20:11] You learn that he was terrified of death, that he prayed in private with intense fervour, that he was capable of cruelty towards people he found dull and extraordinary generosity towards strangers.
[00:20:28] You learn that his opinions were delivered with complete confidence and often deliberate provocation.
[00:20:36] "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
[00:20:40] "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life."
[00:20:45] Judged by modern standards, Johnson can seem both shockingly bigoted and strikingly enlightened.
[00:20:54] On the Americans seeking independence, he was firmly against it.
[00:20:58] On slavery, he was fiercely opposed.
[00:21:02] On the possibility of a woman preaching as well as a man: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
[00:21:16] Hinder legs, by the way, is an old way of saying "hind" legs, or back legs.
[00:21:23] In other words, Johnson is saying that a woman preacher is like a dog walking on its back legs: not good, not natural, but surprising enough to make people look.
[00:21:35] It is cruel, sexist and offensive, certainly. But it is also pure Johnson: compressed, comic, brutal, and impossible to forget.
[00:21:47] And this is what Boswell understood: A biography should not simply record events. It should reveal character. You should come away feeling not only that you know what a person did, but that you know what it was like to sit in a room with them.
[00:22:06] And in Johnson's case, that you had been insulted by him, been irritated by him, laughed at his jokes, watched him defend something he was privately not sure about simply because no one in the room had yet managed to defeat him.
[00:22:22] Johnson himself was, in theory, opposed to this kind of biography. He thought private life should remain private. He thought biographers intruded too far. He did not, perhaps, fully understand what Boswell was doing, even as Boswell was doing it right in front of him.
[00:22:45] So, to wrap up, Johnson lives today, more vividly than almost any other figure of his century, because of exactly that intrusion. Because Boswell refused to treat greatness as something smooth and respectable. He showed the contradictions. He showed the vanity, the fear, the tenderness, the cruelty, the jokes, the odd habits, and the flashes of genius.
[00:23:13] And we know all of this because, in November 1762, a young, anxious, ambitious, somewhat dissolute Scotsman arrived in London with a notebook, a hunger for fame, and a rare gift for paying attention.
[00:23:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, and the strange friendship behind one of the greatest biographies ever written.
[00:23:42] Whether or not you’ve listened to that old episode from 2020, I hope this gave you a new way to think about Johnson, Boswell, and the strange friendship between these two peculiar men.
[00:23:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
