James Boswell (1740-1795)
One of Scotland’s immortal names, Boswell’s life and works represent some of the most venerable collections of sketches of Britain in the eighteenth century. His legacy is forever intermingled with Samuel Johnson, with Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) being the foundation for modern biography.
Born in Edinburgh, Boswell was heir to the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, which belonged to his family since 1504. Following his education in Edinburgh, he was sent to Glasgow University at nineteen years-old by his father in an attempt to curb young Boswell’s social proclivities. At Glasgow, he was a student of Adam Smith, taking in his lectures of rhetoric and belles-lettres. Despite the brevity of his spell at Glasgow, Boswell’s Account of a Tour of Corsica (1768) is often said to contain sentiments of Smith’s Moral Philosophy, and was published by the Foulis brothers. In 1760 Boswell ran off to London and was converted to Catholicism, much to the dismay of his family.
In 1763 Boswell met Samuel Johnson for the first time. In Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), a tale is recounted involving a dinner party including the Foulis brothers and Professors Thomas Reid and John Anderson; during which the publishers allegedly poked fun at Johnson until he had to flee their company and ask Boswell, who had retired to write some letters, to re-join the company.
Better known for his time in the Highlands and London, Boswell is not often connected with Glasgow. It may be that his ties with the city are overshadowed by his productivity in London and Edinburgh. One of the most unusual aspects of Boswell's life is his radical shift in abolition discourse. Originally against slavery, Boswell made an apology for it in his poem No Abolition of Slavery; or, The Universal Empire of Love (1791) which also served as a platform from which he could blast his political opponents in England.