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Show me a Sign: an Eighteenth Century Bridge
Day 6 (Monday 24 July) I’ve driven across this bridge a few times, and always remember the twin ‘needles’ at both ends. Then I noticed a sign on the south side of the bridge, reading: “Hyndford Bridge 1773”. (That year’s featured a lot in this blog lately…it being the year…
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Close to Boswell and Johnson’s Hotel Room
Day 4 (Tuesday 22 July) Kudos to Montrose! You helpfully added an information plaque just inside a passageway indicating a James Boswell and Samuel Johnson hotspot. Here we have the location of the accommodation used by James Boswell and Samuel Johnson on their tour of Scotland in 1773. In his…
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Searching for The Professors’ Monument
Day 3 (Monday 21 July) It’s difficult to find the Professors’ Monument among all the tombs, mausoleums, stelae, headstones and statues of Glasgow Necropolis. The monument contains the remains of Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796) – founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense. He was originally buried at the…
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Hamilton Old Parish Church. 18th Century
The Eighteenth century is all around us. All history is, of course, and usually the further back in time you go the harder you have to look for evidence of any particular period. So, what Eighteenth century things, books, people etc could I see over the course of a week’s…
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Dr Beattie, Boswell and Johnson. Friends.
Discovering Scottish Philosopher Dr James Beattie. Often, in these little blog posts I’m trying to understand the pleasure I get in reading about historical figures. In this one I got a surprise in spotting a familiar name in an unexpected place and then a sense of connection, of completion, when…
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Sketching an 18th Century Man’s Leg
Drawing a gentleman’s leg is one of the many challenges to illustrating scenes from the Eighteenth century. And it’s something to get right – a ‘good leg’ was something for men to show off. The Third Earl of Bute (1713-1792), British Prime Minister from 1762-63, was known for having legs…
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Le Voyage de Boswell et Johnson aux Hébrides
I have a French language version of the combined accounts of Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 tour of Scotland, it’s called Voyage dans les Hébrides. My French isn’t good enough to fluently read this book (yet), but I’ve read the Boswell and Johnson accounts in English so I know the story…
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Scholar Donald Greene, Johnson Defender
I wrote a post a few months ago (Pick a Book, Any Book…) about the serendipity in making a casual selection from one’s bookcase. This post is a similar process, but focused on the outcome – the discovery of an important scholar: Donald Greene. I was dashing out the room…
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Boswell’s Complaint, Portnoy’s Complaint
In 1969, American writer Philip Roth published his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s a tough read for a man who’s almost sixty (that’s me), but for a young man of nineteen (that was me back in 1984) – it was…awesome. It’s a psychiatrist’s chair-account of Alexander Portnoy’s struggle as a…
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Artillery Salvos, Then Some Johnson Studies
When you read books about the Eighteenth century, the lives of their authors are often equally fascinating. Usually the interest comes from their time spent during one of the world wars. Robert William Chapman (1881-1960) is one such scholar-author – of literary history. If you read about James Boswell and…
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Laurence Sterne’s Mind Boggling Achievement
There are so many clever ways to start a blog post about Laurence Sterne. Here’s the Genius Fan method: “Never heard of Laurence Sterne? Stop what you’re doing RIGHT NOW, run – sprint if your knees will bear it – to the nearest book shop and buy a copy of…
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Rev Joseph Spence, a Bit Boswell-like
When you’re a James Boswell nut, like I am, you’re always looking for references to him in any book that covers his period – the second half of the Eighteenth century. I’ve got a copy of Arthur H Cash’s Laurence Sterne: The Later Years…wait now, turn to the index…yep, there…
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Suddenly I’m interested in the American Indians
Suddenly I’m interested in the Indians, the native Americans. How did that happen, when I’ve never been interested in them before? Why are we interested in anything? Why this topic and not that? I’m not at all interested in football or cars and I’m not particularly interested in technology or…
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He found Boswell’s ‘lost’ London Journal 1762-63
This is the story of how Claude Colleer Abbott discovered James Boswell’s ‘lost’ London Journal. The year was 1930. Essex-born Abbot was lecturing in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen, and looking for a new research subject. Following up on the university Librarian’s suggestion to consider Dr…
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The Mighty Hume! Great Bloke. Decent Tomb.
No-one knows who David Hume is these days. He’s only the greatest philosopher ever to have written in English, that’s who. His mausoleum can be found in the Old Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh, and I went there recently to see his burial place; a man who I think was absolutely AMAZING.…
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Finding Boswell in the Mitchell Library
This afternoon’s mission for an Eighteenth century experience ended in disappointment. And then satisfaction. I went to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow to see the collection known as the Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt. Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham. (This privately funded and…
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If the Temple Bar was a Time / Space Portal
If you sit at a table on the terrace outside Paul, the French cafe behind St Paul’s Cathedral, London, you can easily daydream away thirty minutes gazing into the relocated Temple Bar monument. The two storey stone…edifice (I’m trying not to repeat the word ‘monument’), was London’s principal entrance from…
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Bookshelf variety over calf leather uniformity
Stand back, take in the view, row upon row of books on the shelves of Sir Walter Scott’s library. I was at his home in the Scottish Borders recently and I can tell you the library is at once breathtaking, stirring and impressive. Its true fascination lies in the individual…
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Boswell met EVERYONE, but not Robert Burns
Have you read any of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels? They’re about the grown-up bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays who rogers his way through the political flashpoints of the Victorian age. Bedroom antics aside, the cowardly Harry Flashman rubbed shoulders with famous men and women of his age…not unlike my…
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The Edinburgh Tomb of Economist Adam Smith
Go to Edinburgh. Go to the Canongate. Make your way downhill. Look out for the Canongate Kirk on your left. Enter the Kirk gates – they should be open during the day. Turn left inside the gates. Follow the path. Keep walking round to the left. You will see a…
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4 Hour Boswell-Johnson London Walking Tour
Last week I found myself in London with time on my hands, so I devised a short tour of points-of-interest related to that venerable concatenation of Boswell and Johnson. I started early at Paternoster Square in the City and walked it in four hours, but you could do it less…
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Cinema in the Eighteenth Century
Picture this: the year is 1772, you work as a farrier’s apprentice at a Darlington coaching inn, a lucky appointment because the owner of the inn allows you to read books from his little collection. That’s the year the innkeeper takes ownership of an edition of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem…
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A Quite Pointless Post About Book Heft
It’s a trivial pleasure, but discovering that a book you just bought has ‘next level’ heft is very satisfying…Look, I’ll keep this short. This post has been sitting in my drafts for weeks. I’ve rewritten the intro more than a dozen times. Why? Because: Who cares about the heft of…
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You Lookin’ At Me? Portraits On My Wall
When office workers were sent home for the Covid lockdown of April 2020 we quickly adapted to video meetings using Teams, Zoom and Skype. We saw inside colleagues’ homes – what was behind them (the decor, wall art, bookcases etc), but we never saw what was in front of them.…
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Bookcase For You, Bookcase For Me
We’ve been discussing buying a second bookcase, but where to put it is vexing us. The most obvious place for a new bookcase is the spot currently occupied by the exercise bike (which we use as a clothes drier) bought during Covid lockdown. There’s no direct sunlight and its away…
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Pick a Book, Any Book. Now Tell Me What It Is.
Let me tell you one of the great pleasures to be had in owning your own library (“It’s a bookcase for crying out loud! Not a library.”): I can pick a book off the shelves and, having forgotten that I had bought that volume, flick through its pages while stirring…
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Library Fantasists! Visit Sir Walter Scott’s Home
The world’s largest personal library – still intact – consists of more than 9,000 volumes and fills two rooms in Abbotsford House, near Melrose, Scotland. That’s the former home of the amazing best-selling Victorian author of the Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott. It’s delightful to approach the building, with its…
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By Foot, Hoof or Wheel: Scotland to London
There were only three ways to travel between Scotland and London in the Eighteenth century: by foot, on horseback or by wheeled carriage. (Actually, you could take a boat, from Leith for example, but it wasn’t until the 1850s when a person could travel by rail out of Scotland and…
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Coveting Two Eighteenth Century Best Sellers
If a bolt of lightning should strike me, leaving me dead, the person who discovers my smoking corpse (it’s always a dog walker) may notice the faintest smile on my blackened lips. If they’re perceptive they’ll read that smile as ‘satisfaction’ – and they’d be right for I now own…
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The ‘Foosteps Principle’ of Richard Holmes
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…
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I Bought a Famous Book Printed in 1785
Yes, this site is about the Eighteenth century, but it’s also about book collecting…that is, books relevant to the, you guessed it, Eighteenth century. And it is to this hallowed conjunction of interests that I now turn my keyboard. On the dining room table where I write sits a package…
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The Amazing Benjamin Franklin
If someone was to ask me the best way to ‘get into’ the Eighteenth century, I would say: Learn about Benjamin Franklin. His life story is amazing and I shall now use the twelve commonest synonyms for the word ‘amazing’ to demonstrate. Observe… Franklin (1706-1790), an American born in Boston,…
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Family and Friends Boswell Left Behind
It’s easy to lose sight of the family picture when you dig into the mountains of words, essays and books written about James Boswell. If you want to add another dimension as you read about his life, then take a moment to think about the others in his family and…
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Starting my James Boswell Collecting Habit
In summer 2021 I bought a set of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell. That was how my hobby of studying the Eighteenth century and book collecting kicked off. We didn’t have a bookcase back then, and the 14 volumes I collected sat stacked up on…
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Eighteenth Century as Seen by its Inhabitants
Our imaginations are rendering machines of infinite capacity. We can conjure anything we want in our mind’s eye and, for the moment anyway, only we can tap into them. But don’t rely just on the text in your favourite book to fuel your Eighteenth century day dreams, get creative and…
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Never Mind the History, They’re My Friends
In a previous post I mentioned the pleasure of ‘discovery’ when learning about a subject. It’s an interest-driven process unhindered by formality or academic structure (at least for me it is), and that’s one of the reasons it’s so enjoyable to learn through discovery. I’ve been learning about the 18th…
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‘Discovery’: The Best Way to Learn History
One of the many pleasures in learning about history and times past is ‘discovery’. By this I mean the process by which a person follows their interest and simply finds things out. I expect everyone has experienced that process. You can accumulate a great deal of knowledge on a subject…
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Goldsmith, Madeira and the Rent
One morning in 1762, the soon-to-be-famous Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, was woken by an urgent rapping at the door of his London lodgings. “Knock, knock!” Upon opening up, there was his landlady, threatening to bring the bailiffs unless he settle his many weeks of unpaid rent. Goldsmith was not good…
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Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West
Let me direct you to a book illustration that transports me back in time to the Eighteenth century in a way few others do. Go to Bernard Bailyn’s 1986 book “Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution”.
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Samuel Johnson’s Tour of Scotland – Anniversary
It’s 250 years ago this year that the Eighteenth century’s literary celebrity Samuel Johnson published his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, an account of a three-month tour he made there in 1773 with his great friend James Boswell. It was actually published on 18 January 1775, and that…
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A Fan of Genius
Genius Fan is a portal to the Age of Genius: that’s 1700-1799, the Mighty Eighteenth century, the Enlightenment. Bow down before its accomplishments and tremble at the potency of its ideas…hiding under the table will not protect you from its impact. You will only benefit. This was an age when…
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