Boswell in Full

JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES --James Boswell--Viking ($5).

When he died in 1795, James Boswell left a reference in his will to his private papers stored in an ebony chest at the family seat of Auchinleck Castle, Scotland. For generations his descendants rebuffed enquiring scholars and collectors, claimed that the ebony chest had been destroyed. In 1927 Boswell's great-great-grandson, Lord Talbot de Malahide, permitted Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham, famed collector of items on Samuel Johnson, to examine the material, eventually sold it to him. An edition of Boswell's private papers, called the greatest literary discovery of a century, limited to 570 subscribers, running to 18 volumes and costing $900 a set, was completed in 1934 (TIME, March 9).

Nevertheless, undiscovered Boswell items were apparently so thickly scattered around his great-great-grandson's home that they all but got under the feet of guests. When Lady Talbot gave a house party in 1930, another mass of Boswell's papers was found in an old croquet box. This batch included the manuscript of the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, half again as long as the previously published work and the most valuable Boswell manuscript thus far discovered. Last week, 163 years after it was written, Boswell's full Journal was published in the U. S. for the first time. It made a handsome, leisurely, well-documented edition of one of the least stuffy of English classics, a pleasant book for casual readers, a superb one for admirers of the great doctor and his amiable biographer.

Boswell's deleted material was not sensational. Starting the Journal soon after Johnson's death, he sent his copy to the printer page by page, found before he reached the middle that his book was getting too long. He made some revisions and excisions and his friend Edmond Malone, famed Shakespearean scholar, made more in the interests of elegance, taste, discretion, brevity. Malone also rewrote so extensively that "hardly a paragraph was printed exactly as Boswell wrote it," and Boswell's repeated defense of the Journal, that Johnson himself had seen and approved it, was "gravely misleading." Although the high points of the previous Journal--the accounts of Johnson reproving Boswell for drunkenness, the celebrated orders to Mrs. MacLeod not to leave her family home, the great arguments on Ossian, on Burke, on Hume, Garrick, Goldsmith and Swift--remain the high points of the present edition, the new book is more intimate, less stilted, abounds in picturesque details of travelers' discomforts in the islands off Scotland in 1773. The Journal begins with its superb description of the Rambler at the age of 64: "His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency." It describes Johnson's arrival at Boswell's home, Boswell's delight at his dear wife's consideration for his friend, Johnson's unvaried conversational triumphs, the period from Aug. 14 to Nov. 22, when Johnson started back to England. Johnson's celebrated "bow-wow-way," as Lord Pembroke called it, without which his conversation would seem less extraordinary, appeared conspicuously in almost every one of the 101 days of his stay. Opinions on fornication ("I have much more reverence for a common prostitute than for a woman who conceals her guilt"), on gout, gunpowder, tanning, brewing, tragic acting, brought it out boldly. Much of the material deleted from the first published version of the Journal deals with the food the friends were served, with too-candid remarks on persons then alive. One strange excision describes a peculiar mood Johnson fell into while discussing linen with Boswell and other admirers. He said that linen showed dirt better than silk and "he had often thought" that if he had a harem he would dress his women in linen. The first published version of the Journal lets it go at that, with Boswell's comment that it was odd to hear Dr. Johnson discoursing in this fashion. But the manuscript shows that the situation was more painful. In the course of the talk about harems, Johnson said playfully that Boswell would make a good eunuch. But when Boswell replied in a similar spirit, Johnson got angry--"though he treats his friends with uncommon freedom, he does not like a return"--and began to expatiate on his impolite theme with "such fluency that it really hurt me."

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