Adam Sisman is the new President of the Johnson Society. A former publisher, he is now a full-time writer, like his wife, the novelist Robyn Sisman. His first book, a highly-praised biography of the historian A.J.P. Taylor, was published to considerable acclaim in 1994. His book Boswell’s Presumptuous Task was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2000 (Penguin edition, 2001). Described as a "biography of a book", Boswell’s great Life of Johnson, it has been very well received on both sides of the Atlantic, being praised as "a treat" (Hilary Spurling), "brilliant" (Michael Holroyd), "extraordinarily gripping" (Richard Holmes), "fabulously entertaining, deft and witty" (Philip Hensher), and "unputdownable" (Francis Wheen). It was chosen as "Book of the Year" by a number of reviewers, including Beryl Bainbridge and Roy Jenkins. The book has been shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the Duff Cooper Biography Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-fiction, and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In March 2002 it was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

Adam has also written articles and reviews for various publications, including The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Evening Standard, The Spectator, The Literary Review, The Irish Times, The Washington Post and The Independent on Sunday. He has done numerous broadcasts for BBC and foreign radio stations and appeared in several television programmes. He lives in Somerset near Bath.

Presidential Address given to the Johnson Society on September 21^st 2002 in the Guildhall, Lichfield

I must confess that I feel a bit of a fraud in accepting your very kind invitation to be President of the Johnson Society -- not least because my main claim, in fact my only claim to this honour, is that I have written a book – a book moreover not about Dr Johnson, but about his biographer James Boswell. To be entirely accurate, my book: Boswell’s Presumptuous Task is not even about Boswell; it’s a book about a book, Boswell’s masterpiece, his The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D (usually referred to as the Life of Johnson.)

It has become a truism that, as a result of Boswell’s extraordinary biography, Samuel Johnson is better known to us than any other man in history. But who is this "Samuel Johnson"? Everybody knows "Dr Johnson", or so we think. But is the man we know from the pages of Boswell's book the same Johnson that strode the streets of London and Lichfield two hundred and fifty years ago?

In the Life of Johnson, Boswell made a heroic attempt to display his friend "as he really was." He reconstructed Johnson's conversations from fragmentary records. He collected memorabilia of Johnson from every possible source, and then went to unprecedented lengths to verify the accuracy of the material he used. He insisted that "everything relevant to so great a man is worth observing", and though much ridiculed for it, he described the minute details of the way Johnson dressed, what he ate, and how he behaved.

Boswell's ambition was nothing less than to resuscitate his dead friend in print. Indeed (so Boswell claimed), had Johnson's other friends been as thorough in recording what he said and did, "he might have been almost entirely preserved." As it was, Boswell boasted that in his biography Johnson might be seen "more completely than any man who ever lived."

However, despite Boswell's determination to gather up every remaining scrap of information about his subject, there were aspects of Johnson's life that were forever hidden from him. On a practical level, the two men did not meet until Johnson was fifty-three, and though Boswell came to know Johnson very well indeed afterwards, his knowledge was inevitably circumscribed. Boswell was also limited by his own limitations: he could not imagine what he could not comprehend. Like all biographers, he could show only what he could see. The man we come to know in the pages of Boswell's book is, so far as we can tell, faithful to life, but only to the life that Boswell witnessed, or that he was able to view through someone else’s eyes. Boswell’s Johnson is not the whole man.

Moreover, there was another factor inhibiting Boswell’s understanding of his subject. Boswell was psychologically dependent on Johnson. He had what Johnson called "a very ticklish mind", one clouded by severe depression. For him, Johnson's powerful intellect was like sunshine, banishing the darkness that periodically threatened his very sanity.

This is a complicated subject, and one that I don’t propose to dwell on here. Those interested to know more can read more about it in my book.

It was this psychological dependence, I think, that drove Boswell to try and preserve as much as possible of Johnson in print. By the same token, it was important to establish his Johnson above all other versions. He stressed Johnson’s superiority, his dignity, his Toryism, his Christian conviction, above all his sanity. He rejected Johnsonian anecdotes that seemed to him uncharacteristic – even when they were undoubtedly true. In the wreckage of his disordered mind, he clung to his idea of Johnson as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a rock. The Life of Johnson became an apologia – not just for Johnson, but for Boswell too. In making Johnson a hero, Boswell made sense of his own life.

Few Johnsonians will need reminding that Johnson was married to Elizabeth Porter (known affectionately as "Tetty"), and that after her death in 1752, he was left a widower for the remaining thirty-two years of his life. What is perhaps not so generally known is that Johnson planned to marry a second time. Until the middle years of the twentieth century, no biographer had even hinted at this possibility. Most seem to have assumed, if they thought about the subject at all, that Johnson's attitude towards second marriage was encapsulated by his aphorism: the triumph of hope over experience. But in 1936, a letter to The Times announced that a hoard of previously unseen Boswell papers had been found: among them two quarto sheets in Boswell's hand. These were entries copied from Johnson's diary: most likely on an occasion described in the Life of Johnson, when Boswell came across the diary "accidentally" during a visit to Johnson's lodgings in Bolt Court, and surreptitiously started reading it while Johnson’s attention was elsewhere. The diary entries were dated 1753, the year after Tetty's death; they show that on Easter Day Johnson made a special journey to the church in Bromley where Tetty was buried. One entry reads "I purpose on Monday to seek a new wife – without any derogation to dear Tetty’s memory." It provides no clue as to this new wife’s identity.

This was important evidence about Johnson. His strange marriage to a widow twenty years his senior, his ostentatious grief after her death -- which his first biographer Sir John Hawkins and many others since have felt to be exaggerated -- his apparent remorse for sins unspecified, and his relations with women generally are topics which have exercised biographers from Hawkins onwards (and not just biographers); this new clue has caused them to be reassessed. But as well as opening up a fresh perspective on Johnson, the discovery of these two quarto pages poses an intriguing question about the man who wrote them. Why is there no mention of Johnson's plan to take a second wife in Boswell's Life of Johnson?

There can be no doubt that Boswell regarded these diary entries, and the revelation they contained, as significant. That he chose to copy out these and not some other extracts from the diary in itself suggests that he thought them the most important of any that he was able to read there. One must remember the circumstances in which he copied them: at Johnson's lodgings, where he might be interrupted at any moment. The fact that he managed to copy down only a few entries suggests that he was hurried; and the fact that he did not tell Johnson what he had done (though he admitted to having read some of the diary) suggests that he was afraid of Johnson's reaction. But he was prepared to risk Johnson's displeasure, because he wanted his own record of this intriguing autobiographical fragment. Boswell was fascinated by every detail of Johnson's life; he must have been particularly excited by this disclosure, so unexpected that no one would even guess at it over the century and a half to follow. As Johnson's biographer, he knew that he was in possession of a scoop, information that perhaps nobody else alive (apart from Johnson himself) knew. So why did he suppress it?

One explanation for this omission can be dismissed: that Boswell had forgotten what he had learned in Johnson's diary when he came to write his biography a decade later. Apart from being implausible in itself, there is evidence to the contrary: in a letter to Boswell from his intimate friend William Temple written on the 11^th March 1792, a year after the publication of the first edition of the Life of Johnson, in response to a letter from Boswell now lost. Temple refers to Boswell’s own plans to marry again, following the death of Boswell’s wife Margaret from consumption, and then remarks that "the similar circumstance you mention of Johnson is curious, and as it serves still further to paint the man, and to shew the tender sensibility of his mind, ought to enrich your next edition."

As we know, Boswell did not take up his friend’s suggestion to thus enrich the second edition of his Life of Johnson, which appeared in July 1793. It seems unlikely that Boswell was restrained from doing so simply out of fastidiousness. For one thing, Boswell's inclination was always to publish facts that he knew to be true, even if others often considered it inappropriate to do so; but anyway, this was not news that most people would consider inappropriate to publish, as the reaction from Temple (a cautious country clergyman) shows. When Johnson became a widower, he was still in his early forties (seven years younger than Boswell would be when the same fate befell him.) He had no children of his own, and no other dependants, his stepdaughter being a mere six years younger than he was. Of his two stepsons, one had become a prosperous merchant, the other a naval officer. There was no reason, moral or legal, why he should not marry again. There was certainly no eighteenth-century bar against doing so. Tetty herself had been a widow, and had married Johnson within only a few months of the death of her first husband, Harry Porter. Because in those days so many wives died young, particularly in childbirth, it was common for widowers to marry for a second or even a third time. Given that Johnson remained a widower for more than thirty years, it would seem natural to ask whether he had ever contemplated remarriage, even if there was no evidence for it. The more one thinks about the subject, the more surprising it seems that the possibility of Johnson's marrying again is never mentioned in Boswell's otherwise exhaustive biography. The fact that Boswell himself was thinking of marrying a second time while he was finishing the Life of Johnson makes it more surprising still. And if we consider that Boswell had no need to speculate, that he knew Johnson had planned to remarry, the omission of this subject becomes more than merely surprising; one is forced to conclude that he must have had some strong reason for omitting it.

One possible reason is that it would have undermined his case against his rival Mrs Piozzi, the former Mrs Thrale. He had benefited from the revulsion felt by many of Johnson's friends and admirers towards her second marriage. Though some of this sprang from a widespread feeling that she had abandoned Johnson, much of it had been based on a double standard, the idea that it was somehow indecent for a fashionable woman in her forties to marry. This was not a prejudice that would stand up to scrutiny. The indignation against Mrs Piozzi would lose much of its force if it were generally known that Johnson too had planned to marry for a second time, at a similar age.

Another explanation for Boswell's reticence on this subject, a theory advanced by the most famous of all Boswell scholars, Frederick A. Pottle, is that Boswell felt he could not cite the source of his information. Both Boswell and Hawkins had dipped into Johnson's diaries without his permission; no doubt each felt somewhat ashamed of such sneaky behaviour. Both were sensitive to the charge that they had abused their friendships with Johnson. Both subsequently confessed what they had done to Johnson, and would eventually admit this to the world in their books. Nevertheless Pottle argues that each may have felt constrained from using anything to Johnson's detriment that he had found in the diaries. To have exploited material obtained in this way, Pottle argues, would have been an abuse of Johnson's trust -- especially as Johnson had indicated, by the act of burning many of his papers, including "two quarto volumes" of the diaries, that he wanted their content suppressed.

As executor to Johnson’s will, Hawkins had exclusive access to Johnson’s surviving papers, including at least one further volume of diaries. Six months after Johnson’s death in December 1784, Boswell found himself in a corner with Hawkins during a dinner-party. In a circumspect manner the rival biographers discussed their subject. Hawkins hinted that he had found evidence of "strong amorous passions" in Johnson's diaries. "But he did not indulge them?" enquired Boswell. "I have said enough," replied Hawkins, having whetted Boswell's curiosity, no doubt deliberately, without giving anything away.

More than a year afterwards, on the 8^th July 1786, Boswell took tea with his rival biographer at the house of a mutual friend, Bennet Langton. They met to discuss "a delicate question", not specified in Boswell’s journal. Afterwards Langton assured Boswell that they had weighed and decided upon this question as well as he could suppose it to be done. What was this "delicate question"? It can only have been an issue which concerned both biographers, and one can infer from their discussion the previous May that the question the two men were now addressing was of how much could be revealed of Johnson's sexual behaviour. Both men were aware that Johnson had felt remorse for some offence, though neither man was entirely sure how much more the other knew. In such circumstances both were reluctant to give anything away. Neither biographer wanted to be seen to be muckraking, but each feared being scooped by the other. Hawkins was in the more vulnerable position, since his book was now certain to be published first.

In his biography of Johnson Hawkins would hint that Johnson might have succumbed to sexual temptation while living apart from his wife in the late 1730s, when he came under the influence of the buccaneering Richard Savage. In due course Boswell would suggest the same, somewhat more explicitly than Hawkins. The agreement brokered by Langton on this occasion may therefore have been to confine any discussion of Johnson's sexual irregularities to this period in his life.

The evidence for Johnson's feelings of remorse lay in the posthumously published Prayers and Meditations. This was a collection of private and personal prayers, compiled in Johnson's last few months. Many of Johnson's contemporaries thought that these should not have been published; Horace Walpole told Boswell that to do so had been cruel. Some of Johnson's prayers seemed to indicate remorse for past transgressions, and Boswell cited a number of these in support of his suggestion that Johnson had been "overcome" by amorous desires during the time when he associated with Savage. Johnson had made no secret of the fact that he used to take women of the town to taverns, to hear them relate their history, and to persuade them to repent. Boswell conjectured that sometimes Johnson had been persuaded to sin.

However, both biographers may have misjudged their subject. Johnson was a man of extreme moral scrupulousness; his notion of depravity was different from most men's. Boswell already knew, from a late-night conversation in 1783 at Johnson’s house in Bolt Court, after his host had retired to bed, how Johnson had struggled to control his inclinations. Mrs Desmoulins was a long-established member of Johnson’s household, one of the several strays whom he accommodated and supported, to the incredulity of his less generous friends. As a young widow, she had lodged with Tetty in Hampstead, where she had moved in the hope that the clean air might benefit her ailing health. It seems that Johnson himself was an intermittent visitor at this time. More than thirty years later, Mrs Desmoulins confided in Boswell that on occasions when Tetty had refused to allow Johnson to share her bed, Mrs Desmoulins would sometimes join the spurned husband in his bedroom, laying her head on his pillow and allowing him to kiss and fondle her until obviously excited. Then he would cry, "Get you gone." To Boswell, there was nothing criminal in such behaviour. Mrs Desmoulins herself said that Johnson never did anything that went beyond the limits of decency. But Johnson may have seen it differently. Lust, rather than adultery, may have been the sin for which he felt remorse. Indeed, on the very day that Johnson decided to seek a new wife, he composed a prayer "against unchastity, idleness and neglect of public worship." It is worth noting in parenthesis that he composed this prayer during a church sermon.

If this is indeed the true meaning of Johnson’s prayers, then in attempting to be discreet, both biographers had exaggerated Johnson's sexual peccadilloes. Perhaps Hawkins, detecting that Boswell knew something that he did not, assumed it to be more than it was, and formed his account on this assumption; while Boswell, believing Hawkins to have had access to parts of Johnson's diary that he had not seen, assumed that Hawkins's hints of sexual impropriety were based on evidence he had found there.

Professor Pottle believed that the concordat agreed over tea between Boswell and Hawkins extended to all "delicate" matter from the diaries. Obviously, Johnson’s decision to seek a new wife could not be relegated to the 1730s with the rest. This, then, is the explanation for the otherwise curious omission of Johnson's plans to take a second wife from Boswell's Life of Johnson, and perhaps from Hawkins's too – though there is no evidence that Hawkins was ever aware of Johnson’s intention.

Pottle's argument is more convincing if we believe that the volumes of diaries each perused were the ones Johnson wanted destroyed at his death. In fact, while we may assume this to be true for Boswell, the evidence for Hawkins points the other way. Hawkins pocketed a volume of Johnson’s diaries as Johnson was dying, and was obliged to return it when Johnson’s distress and indignation became apparent. He would have needed pretty big pockets to accommodate one of the "two quarto volumes" that Boswell had described dipping into eight years earlier and that, as he tells us, Johnson now destroyed. It seems, therefore, that the volume Hawkins pocketed was not one of these – unless Boswell, who was not present at Johnson’s deathbed, muddled them up. But he did not often make mistakes of this kind. Another weakness in Pottle’s argument is that both Boswell and Hawkins describe Johnson's reaction on discovering that each had looked into his diaries: neither description suggests that he was particularly concerned. Indeed, he seems to have received the news "placidly" (though he did say that had Boswell filched the diaries, as was his inclination, "I believe I should have gone mad.") He does not seem to have enjoined either man from mentioning or publishing anything that he might have read there.

But in any case, why should the subject have been thought "delicate"? If Johnson himself had been prepared to marry again, surely there was no reason for his biographers not to mention the fact after his death? If both Boswell and Hawkins felt constrained by loyalty to the memory of their friend, why should they have been prepared to speculate about sexual transgressions, for which (so far as we know) no direct evidence existed? Why deal with Johnson's alleged adultery, but stop short of his planned second marriage?

Another theory as to why Boswell omitted any mention of Johnson's second marriage has been advanced by the Johnsonian collectors, Donald and Mary Hyde (now Lady Eccles). They argue that Johnson's plans to remarry did not fit with Boswell's conception of Johnson – a conception which, as I have tried to show, was vital to him. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell was critical of the unflattering portrait Hawkins had painted of Johnson's marriage; his own portrayal was much more favourable. Hawkins had portrayed Tetty as an embarrassment, drunken and grotesque, and had suggested that Johnson's feelings towards her were "dissembled", hinting that his real motive in marrying her was to get his hands on her dowry; in contrast, Boswell emphasised Johnson's feelings of loyalty and tenderness towards her. Johnson's love for Tetty, Boswell insisted, was "of the most ardent kind".

Why Sir John Hawkins should unwarrantably take upon him even to suppose that Johnson's fondness for her was dissembled (meaning simulated or assumed), and to assert, that if it was not the case, 'it was a lesson he had "learned by rote," I cannot conceive; unless it proceeded from a want of similar feelings in his own breast.

 

This was a clever strike at Hawkins, the son of a carpenter, who had married a very wealthy woman. But in his attempt to right what he believed to be the wrongs perpetrated by Hawkins, Boswell – who never knew Tetty and who met Johnson for the first time ten years after her death -- went to the other extreme. Many of his contemporaries thought that he had sentimentalized the relations between Johnson and Tetty.

Perhaps he had. He could scarcely consider Johnson's feelings for his wife without considering his own; as he sketched his picture of Johnson's marriage, Boswell could hear Margaret coughing up blood in the next room. For more than ten years, Boswell had been aware that Margaret was afflicted with a fatal condition, one that had already carried off most of her family. Watching his own wife wasting away, it was natural for Boswell to identify with Johnson, tenderly caring for Tetty in her final illness. And now that he was a widower himself, his grief led him to idealise his dead wife, to wish that he had been a better husband, and to insist on his enduring love for her. Being the man he was, he naturally projected these feelings onto the man he was writing about.

The passage in which Boswell takes Hawkins to task for suggesting that Johnson's fondness for Tetty was dissembled continues as follows:

To argue from her being much older than Johnson, or any other circumstances, that he could not really love her, is absurd; for love is not the subject of reasoning, but of feeling, and therefore there are no common principles upon which one can persuade another concerning it. Every man feels for himself, and knows how he is affected by particular qualities in the person he admires, the impressions of which are too minute and delicate to be substantiated in language.

"Every man feels for himself": who can doubt that Boswell was thinking of Margaret when he wrote these lines?

The Hydes identified Hill Boothby as most likely to have been the woman Johnson intended to marry after Tetty’s death. Johnson had known Miss Boothby since meeting her on a visit to Ashbourne in 1739, and he had corresponded with her regularly since. He had not concealed his admiration for this attractive and witty woman. If indeed it was her that Johnson intended to marry, then subsequent events explain why nothing came of it. Just as Johnson might have felt able to begin overtures to Miss Boothby, her dear friend, Mary Meynell, wife of Sir William Fitzherbert, died. Miss Boothby had pledged herself to look after Sir William and his six children in the event of the death of her friend; as a result, she was no longer free to marry. Two years later she too became seriously ill, and Johnson wrote to her almost daily, letters steeped in tender affection -- he addressed her as "My Sweet Angel" and "My Dearest Dear" -- and anxious solicitude. When she died on the 16^th of January 1756, he was almost overcome by grief.

The evidence in favour of Miss Boothby as the object of Johnson's affection is powerful, if not absolutely conclusive. It is remarkable, however, that none of Johnson's contemporaries suspected his intention to marry her, not even after Johnson's fervent letters to her were published in Mrs Piozzi's collection of Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson LL.D in March 1788. Boswell himself does not seem to have guessed that she was the one he intended to marry. He must have wondered whom Johnson had in mind. Perhaps he reached a conclusion about the mystery woman's identity which he disliked, and which he thought did no credit to the memory of his friend, so that it was better suppressed?

One of the possibilities considered and rejected by the Hydes is that Johnson may have intended to marry Anna Williams, a woman whom Boswell describes as being "of more than ordinary talents and literature". Miss Williams moved in with Johnson soon after Tetty's death and remained with him (almost uninterrupted) until her death in 1783, only a year before his. In Johnson's lifetime, some of his friends speculated that he had formed a "criminal connection" with her, as an explanation of why he tolerated her scolding. Boswell tended to dismiss the idea, maybe because he found it repellent. Her appearance was plain, but Johnson was shortsighted; she was a few years older than Johnson, but much younger than Tetty. Miss Williams had come to London in the hope that an operation on the cataracts in her eyes might lead to a cure; in fact she became totally blind. If Johnson had planned to marry her, this tragedy would have been reason enough to call off the marriage.

Perhaps Boswell thought that Johnson had intended to marry Anna Williams; perhaps not. What is clear is that Johnson's plan to marry for a second time was a minefield for a biographer. For Boswell in particular, it raised all the questions which he would prefer not to have to answer. He had formed his conception of Johnson's character before he chanced upon Johnson's diaries, and he preferred to stick to what he thought he knew.

Though Boswell was energetic in his pursuit of biographical material, he was capable of ignoring facts that seemed irreconcilable with a wider truth, or even of inventing facts to suit his purpose when the psychological need to do so was strong enough. In 1776, for example, he had conducted a long interview with the dying philosopher David Hume, whose biography he was hoping to write. Boswell was distressed by Hume's consistent atheism, and earnestly tried to persuade Hume to recant. When Hume died, having steadfastly refused to so, Boswell was very disturbed. That such a powerful intellect could contemplate oblivion composedly was upsetting; for years Boswell read and re-read Hume's works, and practised arguments to refute them. At last, nearly eight years later, he dreamed that he had found Hume's diary, "and read some beautiful passages in it", revealing that Hume had indeed been "a Christian and a very pious man". This dream reassured him, and afterwards he was tranquil again.

The Hydes contend that it suited Boswell to show Johnson as a heartbroken widower, so overcome by grief that he devoted himself entirely to his wife’s memory. This is consistent with the idealised portrait Boswell gives us of Johnson’s marriage, and indeed the heroic portrait he paints of Johnson himself. For Boswell, Johnson was a moral giant, capable of human weakness, susceptible to temptation, but triumphing over both by the force of his intellect and still more, by the strength of his character. The Johnson that Boswell held up as an exemplar to the world was incapable of ignoble or unworthy action. It was important to Boswell to explain his hero's transgressions, to mitigate his faults, and to conceal behaviour that could not be explained.

As I suggested at the beginning of this talk, the Johnson familiar to us is to a large extent Boswell’s Johnson. In the last chapter of my book, I show how over the past two hundred years his Life of Johnson has swelled through successive editions, until it has encompassed almost everything ever written about Johnson, eclipsing even Johnson’s own writings. Boswell’s extraordinary achievement is to have created a character so lifelike that he has, in some respects, obscured the real man. Boswell’s Johnson is a fictional character – based on the real Johnson, but differing from him in some important details. The real man would have married again if the woman he wanted had been free.

"I had now resolved Life into my own feelings." This remark, in Boswell's journal for the 7^th December 1789 – five months after the death of his wife Margaret -- remains obscure. The context suggests that Boswell had overcome his fears that he might not be able to finish the book. But another way to interpret Boswell's meaning is as an expression of a fundamental truth, that in order to understand the experience of another, we must relate it to our own. Boswell's Johnson is an heroic expression of Boswell himself.