The life-writer

IT IS 200 years since the death of James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson, diarist, "traveller, lawyer, laird, bon viveur and would- be diplomat". And for 200 years his ghost has endured a reputation as a "drunken lecher, stumbling after the great men of his time with a pen and a tablet clutched in his shaking hands".

Roger Hutchinson offers the latest attempt to erase this caricature, or at least shade it in. He has written a manageable summary of Boswell's history, without footnotes or references, for those who cannot face the more scholarly two-volume job by Frederick Pottle and Frank Brady. We see Boswell growing up in Edinburgh and Auchinleck, chatting up Johnson, Voltaire and Rousseau, gaining literary fame with An Account of Corsica, facing married life as a lawyer tormented by the lure of London, and finally completing his incandescent Life of Johnson.

Boswell's own journals are Hutchinson's main source, but, perhaps in order to disguise this, he distances himself from his protagonist's sparkling prose by replacing minutiae with third person vagueness. Boswell's encounter with Laurence Sterne is dispatched in a sentence, his relationship with Thomas Sheridan, elocutionist and father of Richard Brinsley, is shrugged off. We catch glimpses of fascinating incidents as they rush past. "[Boswell] fell in love with a married actress," says Hutchinson, "made little secret of his unanswered passion, and got carted off on an improving tour of the Northern Court Circuit..." Which actress? What happened? We're never told. When he quotes from Boswell's diaries directly, the page lights up - for instance, in this exchange which the young man overhears in London:

1 Citizen: Pray, Doctor, what became of that patient of yours? Was not her skull fractured?

Physician: Yes. To pieces. However, I got her cured.

1 Citizen: Good Lord.

Hutchinson shows a shrewd appreciation of Boswell's writing ("The London journal is guile dressed as artlessness..."). His own has plenty of glimmers, too, although he is overly fond of double adverbs - "deferentially, coyly", "wearily, wonderingly" - and of sentences which, as they progress, pile up new clauses, each one more distant from the initial subject, until the sentences have, like this one, too many.

None of this should put you off, however, a solid and readable work. If there are no revelations about Boswell's life, there is a helpful overview of his times. Hutchinson is thorough in his depiction of Britain in the late 1700s, from Anglo-Scottish relations (not good) to the smell of the Edinburgh wynds (worse). But no one writes about Boswell's life better than Boswell. Find a library with his journals in it. All the Sweets of Being will serve as a useful companion, and after a few hours of reading, you may have the same affection and respect for him that Hutchinson obviously has.