Boswell's Enlightenment

by Robert Zaretsky

Overview

Throughout his life, James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might, he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Boswell’s Enlightenment examines the conflicting credos of reason and faith, progress and tradition that pulled Boswell, like so many eighteenth-century Europeans, in opposing directions. In the end, the life of the man best known for writing Samuel Johnson’s biography was something of a patchwork affair. As Johnson himself understood: “That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.”

Few periods in Boswell’s life better crystallize this internal turmoil than 1763–1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky’s thrilling intellectual adventure. From the moment Boswell sailed for Holland from the port of Harwich, leaving behind on the beach his newly made friend Dr. Johnson, to his return to Dover from Calais a year and a half later, the young Scot was intent on not just touring historic and religious sites but also canvassing the views of the greatest thinkers of the age. In his relentless quizzing of Voltaire and Rousseau, Hume and Johnson, Paoli and Wilkes on topics concerning faith, the soul, and death, he was not merely a celebrity-seeker but—for want of a better term—a truth-seeker. Zaretsky reveals a life more complex and compelling than suggested by the label “Johnson’s biographer,” and one that 250 years later registers our own variations of mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674368231
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/23/2015
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Robert Zaretsky is a literary biographer and historian of France. He is Professor of Humanities at the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author of many books, including A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning and Boswell’s Enlightenment. Zaretsky is the history editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a regular columnist for The Forward, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and Chronicle of Higher Education.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The View from Arthur's Seat 1

1 In the Kirk's Shadow 19

2 At Home with Home 43

3 A Journal Is Born 54

4 Enter Johnson 70

5 Derelict in Utrecht 93

6 Belle de Zuylen 117

7 Waiting for Frederick 128

8 The Distance between Môtiers and Ferney 148

9 On Libertines and Liberty 183

10 After Corsica, before Futurity 220

Notes 245

Acknowledgments 271

Index 273

Editorial Reviews

Zaretsky’s buoyant and rigorous ‘intellectual adventure’ is a successful attempt to place the writer within the broad tapestry of the European Enlightenment…In Zaretsky’s book, we see the effect of one great mind upon another, again and again, and thus we see the evolution of Boswell’s dazzling prose style.

New York Review of Books - Andrew O’Hagan

Entertaining…[Zaretsky] put[s] Boswell forward as, among other things, a harbinger of our own day, a living symbol of a transition from the high-minded ideals of a more pure intellectual world to the self-centered obsessions of day-to-day reality.

Christian Science Monitor - Steven Donoghue

Enthralling…Boswell’s Enlightenment proves that the world’s greatest biographer makes a fascinating subject in his own right.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Josh Emmons

The key theme of Robert Zaretsky’s splendid new book on James Boswell is that his life was a roaming drama of self-discovery…Boswell’s Enlightenment is thus about the art of living. Boswell’s interest for the historian lies not with the originality of his thought—there was none—but as an example of someone who struggled, Zaretsky shows, ‘to bend his person to certain philosophical ends.’ Hume, Johnson, Rousseau and Voltaire were asked to help him divine what those ends might be. Zaretsky’s elegantly written book, then, stands alongside a growing literature—including the works of Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life) and Alexander Nehemas (The Art of Living)—that renders the history of philosophy not as an academic pursuit, but as something wrought in pursuit of the common good.

Times Literary Supplement - Gavin Jacobson

James Boswell, best known as Samuel Johnson’s biographer, was a lifelong seeker of truth. He struggled to put together his Calvinist religious heritage with the insights and perspectives of the Enlightenment. From 1763 to 1765 he toured Europe not just to see the historic sites but to encounter some of its greatest living thinkers, among them Rousseau and Voltaire. Zaretsky adroitly chronicles Boswell’s intellectual journey and introduces the reader to the varieties of 18th-century Enlightenment. Boswell’s struggles remain with us—over the relationship between faith and reason, the nature of human liberty and equality, the duties of citizenship, the role and limits of the state, and what constitutes the good life.

Christian Century

Robert Zaretsky’s excellent book provides a wealth of information about Enlightenment thought, all of it brought to life in the mind and imagination of that irrepressible Scot, James Boswell…Boswell’s Enlightenment is also the reader’s enlightenment. The book surveys the major ideas of this period’s thinkers, from luminaries like Johnson and Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, to somewhat lesser lights like Adam Smith and Hugh Blair, Montesquieu and Diderot…The book deserves the highest praise.

The Key Reporter - D. T. Siebert

Zaretsky believes Boswell was an exceptional talent, notwithstanding his weaknesses, and certainly worthy of our attention. Glossing several periods of Boswell’s life but closely examining his grand tour of the Continent (1763–1765), Zaretsky elevates Boswell’s station, repairs Boswell’s literary reputation, and corrects a longstanding underestimation, calling attention to his complicated and curious relationship to the Enlightenment, a movement or milieu that engulfed him without necessarily defining him…Bristling with the animated, ambulatory prose of the old style of literary and historical criticism, the kind that English professors disdain but educated readers enjoy and appreciate.

Liberty Unbound - Allen Mendenhall

During his life, Boswell was known more for his associations than for his accomplishments, but it’s time, historian Robert Zaretsky thinks, to give him his moment in the spotlight…Zaretsky’s telling is as much an intellectual history as it is a coming-of-age tale, though one gets the sense that Boswell never quite came of age…Zaretsky’s account of this conflicted man is a sympathetic, fluid, and very enjoyable read. We see a man in search not so much of wisdom as of seekers of wisdom. As much as he tried, Boswell never became an intellectual equal with the great thinkers of his day, but as an observer of them (and of himself) he had no peer.

First Things - David Nolan

In this beautifully written account, Robert Zaretsky plays Boswell to Boswell, as the young Scot goes in search of Europe’s great thinkers—and in the process discovers his own calling. Part biography, part history of ideas, it makes for a thrilling intellectual journey.

James Shapiro

With the flair of an accomplished novelist, Zaretsky creates a vivid portrait…Drawing on an impressive array of firsthand sources and writing with a keen eye for the dramatic, Zaretsky has done students and scholars alike a timely favor.

1650–1850 - Paul J. deGategno

Engaging…Boswell’s Enlightenment is a readable, smart, accessible introduction to a self-absorbed but likable young man who reminds us the Age of Enlightenment was also the Age of Exuberance.

Houston Chronicle - Fritz Lanham

Zaretsky has written an engrossing study of James Boswell, the renowned biographer of Samuel Johnson and the equally famous diarist…There must have been something irresistible about Boswell’s personality for such a young man to have been able to secure the attentions of these men, not to mention the close friendship of literary titan Samuel Johnson. A fascinating character study, Boswell’s Enlightenment helps readers understand what that something was. It is also the story of Boswell’s struggle to reconcile his strict Calvinist upbringing with the ideas of the Enlightenment and with his tempestuous impulses and literary ambition.

Choice - J. Hoffman

Zaretsky’s buoyant and rigorous ‘intellectual adventure’ is a successful attempt to place the writer within the broad tapestry of the European Enlightenment…In Zaretsky’s book, we see the effect of one great mind upon another, again and again, and thus we see the evolution of Boswell’s dazzling prose style.

New York Review of Books - Andrew O’Hagan

★ 2014-12-11
James Boswell (1740-1795) comes to life in Zaretsky's (French History/Univ. of Houston; A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, 2013) recounting of his European grand tour in the mid-18th-century.Boswell's search for the answers of the Enlightenment began in his Edinburgh school days. On a short holiday in southern Scotland, he began to keep a journal, a habit that scholars have benefited from ever since. Raised in the strict Calvinist religion, for a period he considered Catholicism, until his father threatened to disown him. He had the greatest minds of the time to help him search for answers: David Hume, Adam Smith, Knox, Hobbes and Francis Hutcheson. A year in London brought him to a chance meeting with Samuel Johnson, who became a lifelong friend in addition to Boswell's biographical subject. Zaretsky follows Boswell's travels through Europe as he honed his tactic of throwing himself at the Enlightenment thinkers he wished to meet. He became great friends with Rousseau and his nemesis, Voltaire. Perfecting the art of being easygoing and chatty, he picked the brains of the great minds of his time. The English exile John Wilkes and Corsican rebel general Pasquale Paoli showed him the meaning of freedom and changed his outlook on life. Boswell also suffered from lifelong depression—an affliction shared by Johnson—and wrote dozens of essays on the subject. Without deep, confusing discussion of philosophical issues, Zaretsky introduces the Enlightenment greats who taught and molded Boswell. The vast store of knowledge our traveler absorbed in so few years makes for truly enlightening reading. "Boswell matters not because his mind was as original or creative as the men and women he pursued," writes the author, "but because his struggle to make sense of his life…appeals to our own needs and sensibilities." This wonderful rendering of Boswell digs deep into his probing, enquiring life and the fast friends he made at every turn.

Kirkus Reviews