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Summary
Summary
Throughout his life, James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might, he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Boswell's Enlightenment examines the conflicting credos of reason and faith, progress and tradition that pulled Boswell, like so many eighteenth-century Europeans, in opposing directions. In the end, the life of the man best known for writing Samuel Johnson's biography was something of a patchwork affair. As Johnson himself understood: "That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL."
Few periods in Boswell's life better crystallize this internal turmoil than 1763-1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky's thrilling intellectual adventure. From the moment Boswell sailed for Holland from the port of Harwich, leaving behind on the beach his newly made friend Dr. Johnson, to his return to Dover from Calais a year and a half later, the young Scot was intent on not just touring historic and religious sites but also canvassing the views of the greatest thinkers of the age. In his relentless quizzing of Voltaire and Rousseau, Hume and Johnson, Paoli and Wilkes on topics concerning faith, the soul, and death, he was not merely a celebrity-seeker but-for want of a better term-a truth-seeker. Zaretsky reveals a life more complex and compelling than suggested by the label "Johnson's biographer," and one that 250 years later registers our own variations of mind.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This sparkling work is a partial biography of one of the 18th century's most arresting figures-someone often taken to be emblematic of that intellectually critical era. Zaretsky (A Life Worth Living), professor of French history at the University of Houston, sees James Boswell-known for "his oddness, his youth, and his melancholy"-as embodying the Enlightenment's many conflicting currents and torn by them all. Seeking to escape from conflicts between the flesh and Protestant religiosity, and between the ancient and modern, the young Scot sought and gained the acquaintance and counsel, much of it unsettling to him, of some of the age's great figures-Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, John Wilkes, and Pascal Paoli-in a famous two-year tour of the Continent. Boswell's earnest search for answers to life's bewildering puzzles continues to fascinate. Zaretsky brilliantly, sometimes movingly, adds to that fascination. It's frustrating, however, that he leaves his protagonist in mid-life, before Boswell takes up his classic Life of Samuel Johnson. Also, though Zaretsky opens the book with a short, lively critique of Enlightenment scholarship, he doesn't indicate how, if at all, his portrait of Boswell alters our present knowledge of the era. So convincing are Zaretsky's observations, so sure his touch, that one wishes for more-a longer, fuller study of his subject. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A portrait of a Scottish diarist whose illiberal attitudes to love, death and religion were at odds with his admiration for the great 18th-century thinkers While studying in Utrecht in 1764, the trainee lawyer and diarist James Boswell met a young woman called Belle de Zuylen -- known as Zelide in Boswell's journal -- a novelist, religious doubter and amorous adventurer, with a lightning mind which "flashes with so much brilliance [it] may scorch". Boswell was in search of a wife, and Belle, he assumed, would be in need of a husband. Despite being rebuffed, he persisted in his attentions, finally applying, not to Belle herself, but to her father. The "terms of the treaty", as Robert Zaretsky puts it in Boswell's Enlightenment, were "as onerous as they were outlandish". As Mrs Boswell, Belle would swear never to see, or write to, another man, not to publish any literary works without her husband's approval and, in the words of the proposal, "never to speak against the established religion or customs of the country she might find herself in", which was most likely to be Scotland. It appears that Belle's father passed on the invitation because when Boswell tried again a year later, Belle herself replied that all she knew of Scotland was that it produced "decidedly despotic husbands and humble, simple wives who blushed and looked at their lords before opening their mouths". Belle and Boswell were both Protestants, but while he had been raised in the fearful mood of Ayrshire Calvinism, where the brightest rays were those cast by the fires of damnation, Holland's Protestantism was milder, "marked not by the harsh vision of Knox", as Zaretsky writes, "but instead by the humane spirit of Grotius, the 17th-century legal philosopher and statesman". There would be no danger of metaphysical debate between the pair, however. Had she accepted, Belle would have signed a document agreeing not to argue about religion with her husband. His views were settled. Speculation on the afterlife was "absurd in a man, but in a woman ... more absurd than I can express". Boswell was scarcely alone among contemporaries in his ways of thinking about love and belief, but his illiberalism seems paradoxical. Not only did he set down in writing the fullest portrait imaginable of a liberal and free-thinking man, Samuel Johnson, but in his journal he left behind a unique record of the daily activities, doubts and dreads, vanities and self-vauntings, of another man: himself. His attraction to unconventional, forward-looking types was not due to any philosophical affinity, but rather sprang from temperament. Zaretsky opens his book with a scene of Boswell and his friend Temple climbing to the top of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh and shouting "with all the abandon of their 16 years: 'Voltaire, Rousseau, immortal names!'" Shortly afterwards, he fell under the spell of David Hume, a great name in European philosophy. It was the high point of the Scottish Enlightenment, the time of Hume, Adam Smith and others, paving the way for Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Henry Cockburn. In 1694, a young man had been hanged for blasphemy in Scotland's capital. Now, just over half a century later, students climbed to the highest point in the city to bawl out the names of free thinkers, the way their modern descendants might celebrate famous sportsmen. Boswell offers the perfect specimen for an old-and-new experiment of the kind that Zaretsky performs: a man at home in the salons of the age of Enlightenment, but one who was scarcely an enlightened thinker. His title is two-sided: while the bulk of the narrative is devoted to placing Boswell in his historical and cultural context during the period of what is now recognised as the European Enlightenment (the Scottish dimension takes a disappointing second place), he is also concerned with Boswell's personal development. The evidence of the journal suggests that, despite Boswell's acquaintance with some of the most forward-thinking people of his time -- including Voltaire and Rousseau, both of whom he sought out -- there was to be no redemption from the established customs of a life largely guided by the markers of class, money and religion. Boswell never conquered his ample faculty of self-deception, not least when it came to matters of the heart and libido, nor his overwhelming fear of God -- or, perhaps more accurately, of death: what Boswell sought from religion was not so much a guide to living but a form of reassurance against the possibility of oblivion. Whereas others, such as Hume, insisted that belief in the afterlife was tantamount to wishful thinking, Boswell lived in hope of hearing the unbelievers say that they had got it wrong -- this in itself would prove something. His final visit to Hume, to see the great infidel on his deathbed, was driven primarily not by compassion or even duty. Just as Boswell attended public executions in order to observe the behaviour of the condemned in the instant before being whisked off to an infernal hereafter, so he wanted to see if Hume would be driven by cowardice back to the religious faith of his early years. "Did not the thought of annihilation, he demanded, make Hume uneasy? ... Hume responded that it made him no less easy than the thought that he had never been. Once again, Boswell sought to hear the cry of anguish and declaration of faith, but he instead heard only the urbane reassurance that neither was necessary." When asked if he was not seduced by the thought of seeing his friends again in eternity, Hume pointed out that his enemies were likely to be there, too. It was a polite way of trying to shake Boswell out of his childlike notions of heaven and hell. Boswell remained unenlightened in other ways, too, and not only as judged by today's standards. While he clung to and recorded Johnson's every word, he brushed aside an equally great figure who happened to be his neighbour in Ayrshire, but one with barely a pick and shovel to his name: Burns. When he wrote to Boswell in 1788, Burns was, as the biographer Peter Martin writes in his Life of James Boswell (1999), "no obscure poet". But he was poor. Zaretsky doesn't mention Burns, but Martin points out that Boswell, the ninth Laird of Auchinleck, "felt that literary distinction was the privilege of the educated and aristocratic. Burns did not qualify". Though only 288 pages long, Boswell's Enlightenment has the feeling of being padded out. Zaretsky's academic background obliges him to insert references to colleagues in the field, as if to give scholarly backing to assertions verging on the obvious. "As the historian Linda Colley argues, Great Britain in the mid-18th century simmered with debates over the nature and extent of liberty" -- as if no one had argued it before. His animadversions on Frederick the Great, the libertine Scotophobe John Wilkes, the Corsican freedom fighter Pasquale di Paoli, the appealing Belle and others are amusing and instructive, but readers might ask themselves why they are not reading Boswell's journal instead. What captivates us in his own writing is not the philosophical reaction to his age, but the vivid and startling picture he paints of it. He was not an original thinker, but as he himself put it: "I am in reality an original character. Let me moderate & cultivate my Originality. God would not have formed such a diversity of men if he had intended that they should all come up to a certain standard ... Let me then be Boswell and render him as fine a fellow as possible." - James Campbel.
Kirkus Review
James Boswell (1740-1795) comes to life in Zaretsky's (French History/Univ. of Houston; A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, 2013) recounting of his European grand tour in the mid-18th-century.Boswell's search for the answers of the Enlightenment began in his Edinburgh school days. On a short holiday in southern Scotland, he began to keep a journal, a habit that scholars have benefited from ever since. Raised in the strict Calvinist religion, for a period he considered Catholicism, until his father threatened to disown him. He had the greatest minds of the time to help him search for answers: David Hume, Adam Smith, Knox, Hobbes and Francis Hutcheson. A year in London brought him to a chance meeting with Samuel Johnson, who became a lifelong friend in addition to Boswell's biographical subject. Zaretsky follows Boswell's travels through Europe as he honed his tactic of throwing himself at the Enlightenment thinkers he wished to meet. He became great friends with Rousseau and his nemesis, Voltaire. Perfecting the art of being easygoing and chatty, he picked the brains of the great minds of his time. The English exile John Wilkes and Corsican rebel general Pasquale Paoli showed him the meaning of freedom and changed his outlook on life. Boswell also suffered from lifelong depressionan affliction shared by Johnsonand wrote dozens of essays on the subject. Without deep, confusing discussion of philosophical issues, Zaretsky introduces the Enlightenment greats who taught and molded Boswell. The vast store of knowledge our traveler absorbed in so few years makes for truly enlightening reading. "Boswell matters not because his mind was as original or creative as the men and women he pursued," writes the author, "but because his struggle to make sense of his lifeappeals to our own needs and sensibilities." This wonderful rendering of Boswell digs deep into his probing, enquiring life and the fast friends he made at every turn. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
Zaretsky (French history, Univ. of Houston) has written an engrossing study of James Boswell, the renowned biographer of Samuel Johnson and the equally famous diarist. In particular, Boswell's Enlightenment is a study of the years 1763-65, when Boswell, a young man of 23 when he embarked, toured Western Europe. During this tour, he managed to interview, and often to befriend, a number of Europe's leading thinkers, writers, and political figures, including Voltaire, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Wilkes, and Paoli Pasquale. Boswell kept a diary in which he recorded his conversations with his famous interlocutors, and Zaretsky makes good use of it in telling his tale. There must have been something irresistible about Boswell's personality for such a young man to have been able to secure the attentions of these men, not to mention the close friendship of literary titan Samuel Johnson. A fascinating character study, Boswell's Enlightenment helps readers understand what that something was. It is also the story of Boswell's struggle to reconcile his strict Calvinist upbringing with the ideas of the Enlightenment and with his tempestuous impulses and literary ambition. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Joshua Hoffman, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Table of Contents
| Prologue: The View from Arthur's Seat | p. 1 |
| 1 In the Kirk's Shadow | p. 19 |
| 2 At Home with Home | p. 43 |
| 3 A Journal Is Born | p. 54 |
| 4 Enter Johnson | p. 70 |
| 5 Derelict in Utrecht | p. 93 |
| 6 Belle de Zuylen | p. 117 |
| 7 Waiting for Frederick | p. 128 |
| 8 The Distance between Môtiers and Ferney | p. 148 |
| 9 On Libertines and Liberty | p. 183 |
| 10 After Corsica, before Futurity | p. 220 |
| Notes | p. 245 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 271 |
| Index | p. 273 |