“It is fine to be sensible of all one’s various sentiments and to analyse them,” Boswell remarks, and surely the pleasures of awareness and analysis predominate in the latest volume of his journal. Ironically these pleasures belong more to the reader than to Boswell, who claimed them, for he was a man wonderfully prone to illusion. Boswell In Search of a Wife offers the additional pleasures of information, wit, conversation, love, and success—all the liveliness which raises the quotidian to comedy, and all in one of the best simple, graphic styles ever written. 

The editors have provided the necessary eighteenth-century “background” in a first-rate introduction and footnotes. The annotation, intended to be “of a popular cast,” succeeds so well that one is stunned by the sophistication that presents so much labor with so much finesse. 

Boswell himself is of great interest to modern times. He has many selves: he struggles to understand some and to choose appropriate stances and roles for them; other selves he wishes to gratify, subdue, and deny all at once. Add to this struggle the ironic coloring of the mock-heroic—the situation of a man considered by some and suspected by himself to be “almost, at times, the Fool”—and you have the modern relish. “This evening,” he writes, “I thought with astonishment, ‘Is it really true that a man of such variety of genius, who has seen so much, who is in constant friendship with General Paoli, is it possible that he was all last winter the slave of a woman without one elegant quality?’” The man, of course, is Boswell, aged twenty-seven. 

The acquisition of a wife provides the resolution of only one of the important themes of this journal. Boswell is in search of himself so intently that most of the women he considers as wives tend to emerge as types. The women he could not marry are much easier to realize vividly. One of his crucial conflicts is his continuing struggle to free himself from his father and at the same time establish himself as his father’s eldest son. Nor is he not certain what he should be. He tries various postures: the lawyer, the man of letters, the friend of great men, the paterfamilias with “old Gothic Salic male enthusiasm.” All these are acceptable. 

Other roles engage him, but are not acceptable except as diversions: the playhouse buck or the rake, “roaring” after girls. These interests have a tendency to get out of hand. Most of Boswell’s women merely reflect the roles he can play, and like them are classified as acceptable or not. Of course this judgment has nothing to do with whether he can love them or not, and this thickens the plot considerably. There is, in fact, a general ambiguity of feeling. He complains, for example, how his fiery temperament suffers among the “cold” Scots, but he confesses to Johnson, “I am uneasy that I do not feel enough.” 

Though he would like to believe himself an enthusiastic lover, he does not love any of the heiresses. The truth pops out in passages like this: “I must tell you that on Tuesday last, drinking Miss Blair’s health (for that is the name of my angelic princess), I got myself quite intoxicated, went to a bawdy-house, and passed a whole night…. I am abashed.”

But the rich heiresses frighten him. Their fortune, their brilliance, or even their youth and beauty are too much for him. The one good woman who is not a type is his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, a woman of sense, spirit, and real worth, who loves him (God help her), and triumphs over the heiresses. The “plot” would be trite if the reader did not know enough about Boswell to worry about whether he can choose his happiness. 

Altogether Boswell was in his best years. He wrote a “book of the hour” about Corsica, acted as a lawyer in the successful Douglas Cause, renewed his friendship with Johnson (one conversation is not in the Life), and married a good woman. It may be, however, as the account of the struggle of a young man to achieve maturity that this volume strikes one of the deepest veins of contemporary interest. 

Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769
Volume VI of The Private Papers of James Boswell
Edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle
McGraw-Hill
$6.00