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James
Boswell
 James Boswell (1740-1795) succeeded his father as the ninth Laird of Auchinleck (Ayrshire) in 1782. In the past he has been dismissed as a 'cultural schizophrenic' but it is now accepted that Scots of his generation had a very troubled identity. He began a letter to the
Public Advertiser by saying, "I am by birth a North Briton, as a Scotchman must now be called...".
Political Union a generation before Boswell's birth had meant that institutions and power had transferred to London and Westminster - if a person wanted fame and glory they would have to travel south.
The son of a respected Judge, Boswell studied for the law and began practising in Edinburgh
in 1766. He made frequent trips to London, and it was on one of these visits that he met
Samuel Johnson in 1763 in a bookshop.This was the year that he had made an extensive tour of Europe and had decided that
his ambitions lay in the direction of writing. He hoped to win Johnson's agreement to write his biography.
He persuaded Johnson to accompany him on a tour of Scotland: Johnson would write an account of the trip while Boswell would collect information for the biography. Boswell's own diaries turned into
A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and became more popular than Johnson's account. After Johnson's death, Boswell started work on the biography which he called simply,
The Life of Samuel Johnson; it was published in 1791.This was a new type of biography, filled with verbatim conversations that Johnson had held with Boswell and notable figures of the day. He brought Johnson to life and ensured literary immortality for them
both.
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