Robert Zaretsky. Boswell’s Enlightenment

James Boswell is best known as an observer of his contemporaries. He was not a deep or original thinker, but he possessed a rare talent for befriending famous literary minds and painting them in vivid colors. This is the usual view of Boswell, and readers looking for a challenge to this received wisdom will come out disappointed. Instead, Robert Zaretsky’s book offers a thoughtful intellectual portrait of a man who was all too conscious of his own limitations, but whose intensely personal experience of the Enlightenment has come down to us through his unusually honest and colorful prose. Boswell’s Enlightenment focuses on a relatively short period in Boswell’s life: the Grand Tour of Europe that he undertook between 1763 and 1765, in his early twenties, long before he wrote the biography of Samuel Johnson that made him famous. Zaretsky introduces Boswell’s quest for truth and celebrity encounters with an early chapter outlining a bleak Edinburgh, where a young Boswell finds himself torn between the Calvinistic gloom inherited from his mother and the skeptical, enlightened outlooks of David Hume and Henry Home, Lord Kames. It is this tension between Boswell’s deeply ingrained Christian fears and his fascination with skeptical and atheistic thought that provides the overriding theme of the book: Boswell traveled Europe in search of truth, seeking atheists but repulsed by what they had to say. His journey started when he was sent by his displeased father to study law at the University of Utrecht, and he went on to visit Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, and France. Along the way he befriended Belle de Zuylen, John Wilkes, and the Corsican general Pasquale Paoli, met Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, and failed to meet Frederick the Great (but not for lack of trying)

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