James Boswell

Best remembered today as friend and biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, Boswell was an extraordinary figure of eighteenth-century society. Vain yet good-natured, foolish yet charming, he was also conceited and a hypochondriac with a drinking problem. He forced himself upon eminent people, and bragged about the great men he knew. David Hume thought him a bit crazy. Yet for years Boswell moved in the same circles as Sheridan, Goldsmith, Rousseau, Voltaire and Walpole. And he …

…in James's Court, Lawnmarket, in 1773 when the great man arrived in Edinburgh to begin their famous journey to the Hebrides. Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides was not published until 1786, a year after Johnson's death. His Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, was an immediate success. A perceptive observer blessed with a retentive memory, Boswell's narrative has dramatic power. These gifts and his industry have given us an incomparable picture of his times.