Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Out of Johnson’s Shadow: James Boswell as Travel Writer Thesis How to cite: Griffin, Julian Marc (2017). Out of Johnson’s Shadow: James Boswell as Travel Writer. PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2017 The Author Version: Version of Record Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Out of Johnson’s Shadow: James Boswell as Travel Writer PhD (Literature) Julian Griffin MA (Cantab) English Literature Submitted: February 2017 1 ABSTRACT James Boswell has generally been regarded as a key figure in the evolution of the biography via his work on Samuel Johnson. Ranging over his public, published writing, his private-public unpublished journal writing (read by his friend John Johnston), and his private-private unpublished writing (his personal journals) this thesis sets out to address how he should also be seen as a travelogue writer of note. The most important contention is that the rise of Boswell as a travel writer is key to understanding his prowess as an auto/biographical writer – with the topography of the man-monument central. The principal aim is to stress that he was ‘Corsica Boswell’ long before he was ‘Johnson Boswell’. Key Words: Boswell, Johnson, travelogue, autobiography, Grand Tour, Scotland, Corsica, London 2 CONTENTS Introduction: The Plan of the Thesis 4 Chapter 1: James Boswell as Travel Writer - A Life Beyond the Life of 9 Johnson Chapter 2: Curious Reading - Boswell and Travelogue 36 Chapter 3: A Voyage Around the Self - the Discovery of ‘James Boswell’ in 59 the London Journal 1762-3 Chapter 4: “My mercury is again put in motion” - Boswell on the Grand 92 Tour 1763-6 Chapter 5: Corsica Boswell: From the Grand Tour to Fratriotism 117 Chapter 6: A Voyage Around My Father Figure - Travelogue on the Fellow- 141 Traveller in the published Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D Chapter 7: Conclusion - Travel Writing and the Boswellian Legacy 164 Bibliography 184 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go to my supervisors Lynda Prescott and Anthony Howell for their advice, suggestions, and understanding, and to Annette, my ideal proof-reader, who got me started. 4 Introduction: The Plan of the Thesis James Boswell is a writer who has been picked over for the last two hundred years, overwhelmingly so as the author of the Life of Johnson. Whilst there has been some attention paid to him as a writer of travelogue there is nothing that represents a unified portrait of a travel writer’s evolution, with a style developing which would later lend itself to very effective life writing. It is my contention that Boswell was neither a writer who travelled, nor a traveller who wrote (both familiar figures in the publishing world of the eighteenth century), but a hybrid of both. In many ways Boswell was always travelling, both metaphorically and literally, and in his collected travel writing (both published in his lifetime and in the aftermath of the discovery of his private papers in the early 1920s) the reader has a wide-ranging portrait of travel, tourism, and travelogue in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and a key marker in the evolution of travel writing. Throughout the thesis my emphasis is on seeing works which have been regarded as auto/biographical and leading inevitably to the Life of Johnson, and refocusing them as illustrations of Boswell as a skilled author of travel writing. The core argument is centred on the London Journal of 1762-3, the private journals of his travels on the continent for the study of Law, followed by the Grand Tour, and his two published travel works on Corsica and the Hebrides. In the first part of Chapter 1 I focus on eighteenth-century critical responses to Boswell’s published travel writing, largely positive in relation to the Corsican book, more muted in relation to the Tour to the Hebrides because of questions over his revelations of Johnson’s character and perceived breaches of decorum. I go on to look at the long nineteenth century responses to Boswell, and the general neglect that his travel writing faced until the discovery of his private papers at Malahide Castle, followed by the rise in Boswell studies, particularly via the Yale ‘factory’ of Frederick Pottle, through the move to studying Boswell from a 5 perspective of travel, politics and the Scotocentric. I finish by considering published responses by modern tourists to his travel works, those literary pilgrims who have trodden the path he beat for them. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the conventions for travel writing in the eighteenth century, taking as its starting point the travel reading available in the Boswell library, documented in the sale catalogue of 1825, and the presence of travellers’ tales in his published works and private journals, and I set out to establish the context of travelogue that Boswell was both familiar with and knowledgeable about. It is my contention that travel reading was a major part of Boswell’s library and consciousness, both of the fictional and literal kind. As with many readers in the eighteenth century, Boswell can be seen as reading, consuming, and consulting travel works that represent three key strands of movement and record in the eighteenth century: the Grand Tour, domestic travel, and Pacific exploration. It is my view that Boswell’s travel reading shows a man, much like his contemporaries, who had a taste for traversing frontiers, both literally and metaphorically. Chapter 3 focuses on the private-public journal that he wrote during his travels around the Lowlands of Scotland in 1762, but primarily addressing his London Journal of 1762-3 which he sent back to Scotland in written up form to his older university friend, John Johnston. I argue that this self-editing process illustrates a conscious effort to provide a shaped narrative for a known reader, and therefore the first real example of a methodology that would later be used for the published travel works, but also shows an experimentation with narrative form and the unreliable first-person narrator persona – indeed, the role-playing that Boswell indulges in an effort to discover who ‘James Boswell’ is. I go on to discuss how travel for Boswell becomes a trope for self-discovery, the journal a pocket-atlas of ‘civilised’ manners in the eighteenth century. 6 In Chapter 4 I chart Boswell’s transition from tourist (following his legal studies in Holland with the gentleman’s tourist route through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France) to traveller and travel writer of originality in Corsica (where he was the first Briton to go into the interior of the island). Boswell’s Grand Tour was as much a lion hunt for the great and the good of the European Enlightenment as an aesthetic and political experience, and his private journals show a definite tour of men as monuments (Frederick the Great, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Pascale Paoli), developing the Boswell persona into what would become ‘Corsica Boswell’ – long before he ever became ‘Johnson Boswell’. Chapter 5 picks up the idea of how Boswell was evolving as a writer of travelogue, but also the impact that his travelling had upon him as a person and the political end that his Corsican work had as a subtext to his written agenda, that in fratriotic feeling a Scot brought up in the atmosphere of the Scottish Enlightenment could develop a sense of cause. I also look at how the text moves beyond the conventional and faintly orientalist Grand Tour reflection on the journey through Catholic Italy (very commonplace in the Grand Tour narratives of the eighteenth century) to travelogue as political cause centred on the political lion of Paoli. I will also focus on the paratext of the published work, looking at how it presented itself to the general reader, evolving a style of writing and the representation of experience that would create a significant impact across Europe, and cement Boswell’s position as a man of letters. In my chapter on the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides I look at how Boswell’s final published travel work was as much a tour of Samuel Johnson as it was the islands and Highlands of Scotland. Whilst this does naturally lead many to see it as a precursor to the Life of Johnson (and it does, indeed, advertise itself as such to the reader), what Boswell actually wrote was a highly sophisticated piece of meta-travelogue. It successfully focuses on the third party fish-out-of-water in the act of travel, comments on travel writing precursors; and complements Johnson’s own account of the journey to the point of parallel narrative. The study 7 of the text and its construction reveals how Boswell was evolving as a collaborative writer, but also how Boswell the travel writer naturally evolved into the biographer. The metaphor of the biography as a voyage around the subject may be well-entrenched, but in this case it is a very apt one. My final chapter focuses on the various impacts and legacies of Boswell’s travel writing. It starts with the difficult aftermath of living as a published man of letters as Boswell started to tread his own beaten path, almost to become a tourist following his own trail. I then move to look at the ways in which Boswell’s impact and legacy as a travel writer transcends, or at least circumvents, the transitory nature of travel writing by revealing the human face of the traveller.