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James Boswell [ Art and Literature ]

… Abstract After a restricted childhood, Boswell as a young man broke out to become a hard-drinking womaniser and dedicated socialiser. He also devoted … a limit on his capacity for sociability. People > Art and Literature Keywords Edinburgh London alcohol Manners charm sex Boswell, who was born into a Scottish Presbyterian legal and landowning family in 1740, suffered all his life from what … was very much the authority in the family, insisting on both the religious and the career training of his eldest son. As Boswell moved into late adolescence he became increasingly prone to bouts of depression, not helped by this insistence …

Coffeehouses [ Institutions / Food & Drink venues ]

… Places > Institutions Places > Food & Drink venues Keywords Coffee Coffeehouse Public sphere Club Addison Johnson Boswell Habermas Macaulay Tavern Coffeehouses were key centres of sociability in eighteenth-century Britain. They played … would only be reinforced later in the eighteenth century by the Johnsonian ideal of manly conversation promoted by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791). 8 7 . Brian Cowan, ‘What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the … in Post-Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal (51, 2001), p. 127–157. 8 . Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2019). The gradual assimilation of the …

Samuel Johnson [ Art and Literature ]

… when one takes into account his lifetime of chronic depression, into which he was capable of falling at any time. James Boswell, in the Life of Samuel Johnson , LL.D. (first published in 1791, seven years after Johnson’s death), reports two … speaking of his fear of death, ‘that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it’ (19th October, 1769) (Boswell 416), indicative of the vital necessity for social activity of all kinds to help to preserve Johnson’s sanity – a fact of which he was very aware. 1 . James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 edn), p. 859. What …

Melancholy [ Feelings & Emotions ]

… to me a sterile promontory’ and man himself a ‘quintessence of dust’; 2  or as a later non-fictitious sufferer, James Boswell, more prosaically writes in an essay in the London Magazine in 1780, ‘All that is illustrious in publick life, … Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), Act II, scene ii, ll. p. 295-299, 308, p. 253-254. 3 . James Boswell, Boswell’s Column, ed. Margery Bailey (London: William Kimber, 1951), p. 209. Equally significant, though, were the …

White lies, polite lies [ Reading & Writing / Communication ]

… defined the ‘lie’ variously as either a ‘criminal falsehood’, a ‘charge of falsehood’ or simply ‘a fiction’. 3  If James Boswell is to be believed, Johnson himself generally used the term rather loosely in his own third sense in conversation, … Dictionnary, accessed on 15 December 2022. https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=lie.) 4 . James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript in Four Volumes, ed. Thomas F. Bonnell, 4 vol. … of working myself up into artificial Spirits: one Day […] when I was vexed & frighted out of my Wits [ … ] I remember Boswell dining here: we [Johnson and herself] talked, we rattled, we flashed, we made extempore Verses, we did so much …

Joseph Addison [ Art and Literature / Politics ]

… that others strived to emulate in the eighteenth century. He served as a role model. By the early 1760s, the young James Boswell could jest with his friends about their mutual desire to resemble Addison and Boswell confided to his journal that he ‘felt strong dispositions to be a Mr. Addison.’ 5  Addison extolled the virtues … friendship and conversation of a few select companions’, he declared ( The Spectator , n° 15, 17 March 1711). 5 . James Boswell, London Journal 1762-1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 22, 23; Lawrence Klein, ‘Addisonian …