James Boswell's Urban Experience in Eighteenth-Century London

JAMES BOSWELL’S URBAN EXPERIENCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON MARKKU KEKÄLÄINEN Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by due permission ofthe Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki in lecture room U 40 1,on the 9th of June, 2012 at 10 o’clock. JAMES BOSWELL’S URBAN EXPERIENCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON MARKKU KEKÄLÄINEN ISBN 978-952-10-7951-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-952-10-7952-8 (PDF) Unigrafia Helsinki 2012 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 INTRODUCTION 4 A Romantic Mondain 8 The Contingency of the City 12 The Spectacular City 16 Politeness and Impoliteness 19 The Play with Selves 24 I PERMANENCE AND TRANSITORINESS 31 The Nostalgic Landscape 32 Feudal Fancies 36 The Polite Garden 41 The Scottish Narrowness 47 The Freedom of Solitude 52 Moving in the City 55 The City of Whim 59 Melancholy and the City 67 II OBSERVATION AND ECSTASY 72 Observing the City 73 The Pleasures of the Imagination 78 Variety of the Metropolis 80 III LUXURY AND SPECTACLE 85 Fashionable Vanities 85 The Magnificence of Courts 88 Splendid Appearance 99 Architectural Distinctions 107 1 Sacral Beauty 114 Sublime Horror 123 IV AUTHENTICITY AND THEATRICALITY 125 The Court and the City 128 The Honest Gentleman 133 The Delights of Civilization 138 ‘A calm mastery of myself’ 144 Ambiguous Flattery 150 Double Feeling 153 V MASQUERADE AND LIBERTINAGE 161 The Labyrinth of Vice 163 Low Practices 165 The Play with Masks 169 EPILOGUE 174 BIBLIOGRAPHY 176 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a great pleasure, so it is a real delight to express my gratitude to the institutions and individuals who have assisted me in completing this thesis. First of all, I am profoundly obliged to Erkki Kouri for his staunch support and kind encouragement during this long process. My greatest debt is to my advisor Markku Peltonen. From the very beginning, he has focused my attention to the argumentative approach and contextualizing attitude in my research. Markku’s detailed, analytical and exceedingly professional comments as well as our highly instructive discussions have offered an invaluable guidance in every phase of my work. During these years I have received intellectual support from several friends and scholars; in fact, too numerous to mention here. I am indebted to Peter Clark, Timo Joutsivuo, Samu Niskanen, Antti Ruotsala, Kari Saastamoinen and Sami-Juhani Savonius-Wroth for their helpful comments on my papers and articles. I would also like to thank Annette Forsén, Johanna Ilmakunnas, Mirkka Lappalainen, Jouko Nurmiainen, Stefan Nygård, Peter Stadius and Charlotta Wolff for our enlightening discussions on eighteenth-century history, intellectual history as well as on history in general. I am greatly thankful to Sisko Haikala and Lawrence Klein for their scholarly and valuable reports. I am deeply grateful to Niilo Helanderin Säätiö, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse and Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation for funding my doctoral studies as well as to Kordelinin Säätiö and the University of Helsinki Funds whose grants have helped me to finish the manuscript. Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to those closest to me. This project would not have been possible without the generosity and moral support of my parents, Marjatta and Veijo, and without the wholehearted backing of Marja. 3 INTRODUCTION James Boswell wrote to his friend William Johnson Temple on May 1, 1761: I grant you, that my behaviour has not been entirely what it ought to be. But, consider my particular situation. A young fellow whose happiness was allways centered in London. Who had at last got there; and who had begun to taste it’s delights – Who had got his mind filled with the most gay ideas – getting into the Guards being about Court – enjoying the happiness of the Beau Monde & the Company of men of Genius: in short, every thing that he could wish.1 London was the passion, fate and fulfilment of Boswell’s life; the British metropolis was the centre of his social life, intellectual activity and literary imagination. This dissertation aims to reconstruct Boswell’s urban experience according to five central themes. First, the distinction between country and city; secondly, the reception of the city as the imaginative reflection of multiplicities; thirdly, the city as a source of spectacular pleasure; fourthly, the metropolis as a scene of theatrical politeness; and finally the metropolis as a locale of libertine eroticism. My central argument is that Boswell’s urban experience included two culturally quite distant main elements: the romantic sensibility on the one hand and the early modern, strongly aristocratic set of values and predilections on the other. Boswell’s immediate and fervently emotional reception of the urban world was both “sentimental” and “romantic” but the content of his experience was something very foreign to the early romantic mainstream: the object of his ‘Byronic’ longing was the city and the crowd, court and the fashionable society, not wilderness, archaic periphery or “authentic” countryside. Aestheticism is the concept which connects these two dimensions; aestheticism as a mode of experience and aestheticism as a way to value people, things and phenomena. The cultural historical frames of the interpretation of Boswell’s urban experience are exceptionally wide because it both owed much to the seventeenth-century aristocratic culture and had conspicuous similarities with the nineteenth-century dandyism and flânerie. *** Eighteenth-century London with its various facets has been under intense examination during the recent decades. This dissertation intends to contribute to this discussion from 1 James Boswell, The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple 1756—1795, Vol. I: 1756—1777 (ed. Thomas Crawford). Edinburgh, New Haven and London, 1997, 33. 4 the subjective perspective of a highly original and sensitive writer; Boswell's remarks and reflections are an exceptional source material for an urban historian because of their detailed observations, subtle analysis and novel viewpoints. My aim is to examine Boswell’s relationship to the city in a wider cultural historical context and draw a unified picture of his urban experience. The central question is what kind of cultural currents interweaved in Boswell’s urban experience on the one hand, and how he identified himself as an urban gentleman in the intersection of discrepant civilizing forces on the other. The term ‘experience’ does not refer to any kind of psychological or social psychological conceptualization. Instead it denotes literary, often autobiographical, representations of the self’s reflective attitudes towards urban sociability in its multi- faceted nature. Furthermore, experience in this sense includes the textual representations of the active attitude towards the self in the urban context, the fashioning of the self according to polyphonic metropolitan milieu. I would like to emphasize that I do not claim that autobiographical texts could be any kind of window to the authors “real” self or his “real” experience. In this dissertation, ‘urban experience’ is a purely textual construction and should be analyzed as such. I have received some preliminary ideas for this work from some authors in the field of sociology, philosophy and literature. The notion of the city as a theatrical spectacle has an important place in my overall account. I have here an obvious debt to the work of two authors. First, Lewis Mumford has described city life as a collective drama and, according to him the representative ‘social parade’ of the early-modern city was a modification of this basic conception.2 Secondly, Richard Sennett has argued that the public life in eighteenth-century London and Paris was based on theatrical principles; the social intercourse was recognized as a play with social masks without any reference to the performer’s personal qualities. However, according to Sennett, this theatrical sociability began to decline by the end of the century.3 The argument is without doubt an over-generalization, but it illuminates some important trends in eighteenth-century urbanity: the theatrical element, that is to say the play with social identities on the urban scene, was found highly problematic in the contemporary debates. It can be argued that in the second half of the eighteenth century, the theatrical attitude towards sociability was a kind of counter-current. I am going to connect Boswell to this theatrical orientation; he found his public figure as a fundamentally malleable entity and the public self was, for him, an artefact, an outcome of the conscious self-fashioning. The artistic fashioning of the self is an ancient idea but it had a specific meaning in the early-modern context. The secular forms self-fashioning dates back to the Italian 2 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York and London. 1961. 3 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man. New York, 1978. 5 Renaissance, especially to Baldessare Castiglione, whose neo-Platonic ideas of the perfection of the self and the pursuit of beautiful life had an enormous impact on the early-modern culture of politeness. In Renaissance Europe, according to Stephen Greenblatt, there emerged an increased consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as an artful process. He has connected this artistic activity on the self to literary production.4 Michel Foucault has used the term ‘techniques of the self’ when he has written about the Greek and Roman procedures of the cultivation of the self. Remarking had an important role in this basically aesthetic activity.5 Autobiographical writing has also in early-modern and modern Europe been an important medium of self-scrutinizing and self-fashioning, and in Boswell’s self-fashioning project, his journals had a crucial role. Boswell’s autobiographical writing has been examined by several scholars. Most of them have emphasized the plurality of Boswell’s literary identities and the central role of imagination in his autobiographical writing.6 Imagination and plurality of identity are crucial concepts also in my approach to discover Boswell’s attitudes towards his public self.

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