Customer Reviews

The Journals of James Boswell: 1762-1795

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James Boswell has been called everything from an engaging gentleman to a vicious scoundrel. A true man of his times, Boswell combined naivete with crudity, tenderness with violence, courtesy with thoughtlessness, enthusiasm with snobbery, true religious feeling with wanton depravity.

But how can so many contradictory traits exist alongside each other in the same man? And how does that man see himself? This selection of Boswell's journals attempts to answer that question. Editor John Wain tells Boswell's story in Boswell's words, through excerpts from his journals, letters, legal pleadings, and published writings. We learn about his love life (in some detail), his marriage, his career, his impossible relationship with his domineering Whig father, and his emotional struggles in writing the _Life of Johnson_. We also get a concrete feeling for Boswell's emotional instability, his sense that he would never be good enough for his father (and he was right, unfortunately), and his tremendous guilt over his infidelity.

This book is an excellent introduction to James Boswell. I definitely recommend it.

John Wain condenced 17 volumes of autobiography into this taught, energetic, flowing narrative. I was captivated!

I know John Wain is a credible Boswell scholar, but I do not have this edition of the Journals. I do have a complete run of the journals, a dozen or so volumes, of which I have read every word. In my mind, Boswell is easily the most astonishing diarist of all time. The clarity of his self-analysis is almost startling, I truly feel more acquanted with him than almost any person I know in person. Additionally, if you have any interest in history, sociology, or philosophy...Boswell knew and acosted almost everybody you've heard of from the 18th Cent. Got drunk with Hume while Dave was on his deathbed, screwed Voltaire's wife...his adventures, drunk or sober, are unending. I picked up the London Journal twenty years ago in a used book store and from then on it was like eating peanuts. This collection seems like a good idea for those who want a taste of the whole.