Genius Fan

A daydream of mine is to go to the Netherlands and visit the places James Boswell inhabited when he was at Utrecht University (1763-64). Ahhh the Eighteenth century. The challenges are not insurmountable: the second-most being to find the time to do it, and the first being to persuade my wife that seven days zigzagging around Netherlands is time well spent. When I need to, I’ll fall back on biographer Richard Holmes’s ‘Footsteps Principle’: “I had come to believe that the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past,” he wrote. Then she’ll respond: “A ‘biographer’? But you work in financial services.” Then I’ll explain it’s about seeing all the places the 23-year-old trainee lawyer visited when he was studying: the town, the buildings, the canals, the homes of acquaintances, the surrounding villages and so on.

Not being a fool, my wife will say,”That’s all very well, but maybe we spend half our time visiting the most important places of this Boswell fellow and the other half doing stuff we both want to do.” One can’t argue with reason. Holmes had no-one else to factor in when, aged 18, he followed in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and his personal French tour, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). He applied the same dedication to sniffing out unknown facts and trying to see through the eyes of his subject with other characters from history, most notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We all know the sensation available when we visit an historical place which we know a little about. The process of imagination is palpable, but it’s subjective. Remember, as much as we think we’re seeing where say, Samuel Johnson sat writing in his London Gough Square home, the more-than-two centuries of time separating now and then is a fast-flowing gulf irretrievable of memories. No amount of footsteps can ever get you beyond imagination.

Notes
Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764, (ed) Frederick Pottle (1952)
This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes (2016)