Boswell and the Romantics

Literary history too often stops with a first edition. Were it to pursue the subsequent career of a book, it would sometimes find barriers between centuries dissolving and neat images of autonomous epochs shattered. It is satisfied, for example, to see the 1791 publication of Boswell's monument to a past halfcentury merely as a terminus ad quem. Of course, historians of biography stress (and overstress) the novelty of the Boswell Formula. But his immediate influence seems to have been at once more general and more complex than they imply. Indeed, to analyze the early popularity of the Life of Johnson is to inquire into significant features of historiographical theory and literary taste during the epoch called Romantic. To realize the mere fact of popularity, one need only count editions-a new one approximately every four years for the first forty years. To define the period of our concern, we can cite the climactic edition which, Professor Pottle has said, opened an entirely new era in the history of Boswell's book. 1 Malone and and Chalmers, editing the Life between 1799 and 1822, had been Boswell's friends and contemporaries. But after forty years, an historically-minded age had grown anxious over the fading monuments of its immediate past. Seeking to remedy Boswell's lack of notes on the manners of the time, the state of society, or the character of persons, John Wilson Croker produced the remarkable edition of 1831, and in so doing, says one reviewer, arrested the progress of one of the most entertaining memoirs in our language toward obscurity.2 His successors in Boswelliana have willingly paid tribute to his contributions. Austin Dobson's is a characteristic later assessment

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• Contesting Literary Biography in the Romantic Period

  Open Access•Jane Darcy•Literature Compass•2008

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