Sir John Lubbock's 100 Books

Sir John Lubbock: The Pleasures of Life (1887)

One fateful evening in 1886, the Principal of the London Working-Men’s College, Sir John Lubbock, gave a speech to that institution. In it he outlined a list of 100 vital books which, if read attentively, might in themselves constitute a liberal education.

The idea took off with a vengeance, and after the list was reprinted in his essay-collection The Pleasures of Life, earnest self-improvers everywhere started to collect the various volumes.

Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913)

Lubbock himself never attended university, though he came from a privileged background, and had been educated at Eton by his wealthy family. A banker by profession, his real passions were archaeology and evolutionary biology, and he wrote extensively on both subjects.

Amongst other achievements, he was the the first to coin the terms "Neolithic" and "Palaeolithic" in one of his books about early man.

Antoine Galland: The Arabian Nights' Entertainments (London: Routledge, 1865)

The very first copy of the Arabian Nights I ever owned (rather similar to the one pictured above, but more battered and dogeared) proudly proclaimed itself as one of these "hundred books" - which gives some clue to the bonanza this must have constituted for enterprising publishers in the late nineteenth century.

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure (1894-95)

It's easy to see how this idea of self-betterment through focussed reading informs Hardy's last prose masterpiece Jude the Obscure, with its almost unbearably poignant account of rural autodidact Jude's attempts to enter the sheltered cloisters of Christminster University through sheer effort and application. All in vain, of course (it is, after all, a Thomas Hardy novel).

There's a particularly poignant scene where Jude is sitting miserably by the side of the road realising the folly of his grand ambitions, and longing for someone to come by and comfort him:

But nobody did come, because nobody does: and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

- Jude the Obscure (1895)

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18 of the 100 Books (London: Routledge, 1890)
[The Shi King of Confucius; The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer; Darwin's Journal of Discoveries; The Origin of Species; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I and II; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; Captain Cook's Voyages; Humboldt's Travels I-III; Scott's Ivanhoe; La Morte D'Arthur; Spinoza; The Arabian Nights' Entertainments; Bacon's Novum Organum; The Nibelungenleid; Thackeray's Pendennis]

Here, in any case, is a slightly tidied-up list of the original 100 books. It's rather hard to make the numbers fit consistently, given Lubbock's habit of listing multiple works under one author or, alternatively, listing separate works by a writer under different categories. He also published different versions of it at different times.

Each entry has been linked to a free online text wherever possible.

LIST OF 100 BOOKS
[Works by Living Authors are omitted]

1. The Holy Bible
2. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
3. Epictetus
4. Aristotle’s Ethics
5. The Analects of Confucius
6. St Hilaire’s Le Bouddha et sa religion
7. Wake’s Apostolic Fathers
8. Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ
9. Confessions of St. Augustine
10. The Koran
11. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
12. Comte’s Catechism of Positive Philosophy
13. Pascal’s Pensées
14. Butler’s Analogy of Religion
15. Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying
16. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
17. Keble’s Christian Year
18. Plato’s Apology, Phædo, & Republic
19. Xenophon’s Memorabilia
20. Aristotle’s Politics
21. The Public Orations of Demosthenes
22. Cicero’s Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
23. Plutarch’s Lives
24. Berkeley’s Human Knowledge
25. Descartes’ Discours sur la Méthode
26. Locke’s On the Conduct of the Understanding
27. Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey
28. Hesiod
29. Virgil
30. Lucretius [1]
31. The Mahabharata & The Ramayana [Epitomized in Talboy Wheeler’s History of India]
32. Firdausi’s Shahnameh [Included in Persian Literature]
33. The Nibelungenlied
34. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
35. The Shi King [or Book of Songs]
36. Kalidasa’s Sakuntala [or The Lost Ring]
37. Aeschylus’ Tragedies and Fragments & Trilogy
38. Sophocles’ Oedipus
39. Euripides’ Medea
40. Aristophanes’ The Knights & The Clouds [In Comedies]
41. Horace
42. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
43. Shakespeare
44. Milton’s Paradise Lost & minor poems
45. Dante’s Divina Commedia (Cary’s translation) (Longfellow’s translation)
46. Spenser’s Faerie Queene
47. Dryden’s Poems [vol 1 & vol 2]
48. Scott’s Poems [The Lady of the Lake & Marmion]
49. Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer & The Curse of Kehama [vol 1 & vol 2]
50. Selected Poems of William Wordsworth
51. Pope's Essay on Criticism; Essay on Man; Rape of the Lock and Other Poems
52. Burns
53. Byron’s Childe Harold
54. Gray [in The Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett]
55. Herodotus [vol 1 & vol 2]
56. Xenophon’s Anabasis
57. Thucydides
58. Tacitus’ Germania
59. Livy
60. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
61. Hume’s History of England
62. Grote’s History of Greece
63. Carlyle’s French Revolution
64. Green’s Short History of England
65. Lewes’ History of Philosophy [vol 1 & vol 2]
66. The Arabian Nights
67. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
68. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
69. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield
70. Cervantes’ Don Quixote
71. Boswell’s Life of Johnson
72. Molière
73. Schiller’s William Tell
74. Sheridan’s The Critic, School for Scandal, & The Rivals
75. Carlyle’s Past and Present
76. Bacon’s Novum Organum
77. Smith’s Wealth of Nations
78. Mill’s Political Economy
79. Cook’s Voyages
80. Humboldt’s Travels [vol 1, vol 2 & vol 3]
81. White’s Natural History of Selborne
82. Darwin's Origin of Species & Naturalist’s Voyage
83. Mill’s Logic
84. Bacon’s Essays
85. Montaigne’s Essays
86. Hume’s Essays
87. Macaulay’s Essays
88. Addison’s Essays
89. Emerson’s Essays
90. Burke’s Select Works
91. Smiles’ Self-Help
92. Voltaire's Zadig & Micromegas
93. Goethe’s Faust & Autobiography
94. Miss Austen’s Emma, or Pride and Prejudice [2]
95. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair & Pendennis
96. Dickens' Pickwick, David Copperfield
97. Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii
98. George Eliot’s Adam Bede
99. Kingsley’s Westward Ho!
100. Scott’s Waverley Novels

---

Notes:

1. Lubbock notes that this is “less generally suitable than most of the others in the list.”

2. Lubbock chose later to omit this entry, commenting that English novelists were “somewhat over-represented.”

A revised version of the list was published in 1930, after Lubbock's death, with the following substituted entries:

• Comte’s Catechism [no. 12] was replaced by Seneca
• Dryden’s Poems [no. 47] was replaced by Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
• Hume’s Essays [no. 86] was replaced by Ruskin’s Modern Painters

•

Mary Ann Evans ['George Eliot'] (1819-1880)

Even making due allowance for the era in which it was compiled, it remains a somewhat surprising selection. There are only two female authors - both English novelists - and Lubbock eventually chose to omit Jane Austen and retain only George Eliot. Even there, it's her first novel Adam Bede, rather than the more mature Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda, which makes the cut.

There's also what would now seem a disproportionate emphasis on Christian theology, ancient and modern. I count no fewer than ten such volumes, ranging from Saint Augustine to Keble's Christian Year. By contrast, there's one book on Buddhism, another on Confucianism, one on Hinduism, and another on Islam.

There are ten British novelists there, too. But who would now think to include Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley among their number? Cervantes, Goethe, and Voltaire are the only other fiction writers on the list. It's odd, moreover, to see the latter represented by Zadig and Micromegas rather than the more obvious Candide.

It's only to be expected, given Victorian ideas on education, that the Greek and Roman classics should make up a substantial part of the listings - Poets such as Homer, Hesiod, Horace, Lucretius & Virgil; Dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides & Aristophanes; Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius; Historians such as Herodotus, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Thucydides & Xenophon; Orators such as Demosthenes & Cicero ... In total, they make up almost a quarter of the readings.

To do him justice, Lubbock himself was the first to admit the limitations of his project:

It is one thing to own a library; it is quite another to use it wisely. I have often been astonished how little care people devote to the selection of what they read. Books, we know, are almost innumerable; our hours for reading are, alas! very few. And yet many people read almost by hazard. They will take any book they chance to find in a room at a friend's house; they will buy a novel at a railway-stall if it has an attractive title; indeed, I believe in some cases even the binding affects their choice.

The selection is, no doubt, far from easy. I have often wished some one would recommend a list of a hundred good books. If we had such lists drawn up by a few good guides they would be most useful. I have indeed sometimes heard it said that in reading every one must choose for himself, but this reminds me of the recommendation not to go into the water till you can swim.

In the absence of such lists I have picked out the books most frequently mentioned with approval by those who have referred directly or indirectly to the pleasure of reading, and have ventured to include some which, though less frequently mentioned, are especial favorites of my own. Every one who looks at the list will wish to suggest other books, as indeed I should myself, but in that case the number would soon run up.

- The Pleasures of Life (1887)

He goes on to specify:

I have abstained, for obvious reasons, from mentioning works by living authors, though from many of them — Tennyson, Ruskin, and others —I have myself derived the keenest enjoyment; and I have omitted works on science, with one or two exceptions, because the subject is so progressive.

I feel that the attempt is over bold, and I must beg for indulgence, while hoping for criticism; indeed one object which I have had in view is to stimulate others more competent far than I am to give us the advantage of their opinions.

There's a lot more detail about his specific choices in chapter 4 of The Pleasures of Life, which makes very interesting reading. His reservations about some of the inclusions are particularly revealing. For instance:

Nor must I omit to mention Sir T. Malory's Morte d'Arthur, though I confess I do so mainly in deference to the judgment of others.

Or, on the subject of which novelists to include:

Macaulay considered Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne the best novel in any language, but my number is so nearly complete that I must content myself with English: and will suggest Thackeray (Vanity Fair and Pendennis), Dickens (Pickwick and David Copperfield), G. Eliot (Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss), Kingsley (Westward Ho!), Lytton (Last Days of Pompeii), and last, not least, those of Scott, which indeed constitute a library in themselves, but which I must ask, in return for my trouble, to be allowed, as a special favor, to count as one.

Pierre de Marivaux: La Vie de Marianne (1731-45)

Strangely enough, I've actually read La Vie de Marianne. It's a surprisingly entertaining novel, given that its principal subject is the endless rehearsal of the sufferings and woes of the title character - whom I'd always assumed to have been suggested by Samuel Richardson's Pamela in his 1740 novel of that name. Now, however, I see that the dates don't fit, and that if there was influence, it must have been in the opposite direction.

I'm not sure that I'd put it in any lists of must-reads, mind you, but then that just illustrates the invidiousness of such choices. The moment you start to legislate about such things, you end up putting in bizarre tomes such as Samuel Smiles' Self-Help rather than, say, Marx's Das Kapital.

Would it do a modern reader any harm to sit down and start reading their way through Sir John Lubbock's hundred books? No, I don't think so. At the very least it would give you quite a good idea of the classical idea of the canon - as it stood in the late nineteenth century.

I'm not sure that it would do you all that much good, though. You'd have to substitute more reliable texts on the world's great religions, more up-to-date histories than Carlyle's or Grote's, and a greatly increased number of books on economics and science. In fact, you might end up with something like this:

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Britannica: Great Books of the Western World (1990)

The Britannica Great Books of the Western World series was first published, as a set of 54 volumes, in 1952:

The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series drawn from Western Civilization: the book must have been relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read repeatedly with respect to liberal education; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 "Great Ideas" as identified by the editor of the series's comprehensive index, ... dubbed the "Syntopicon".

- Wikipedia

A second edition, enlarged to 60 volumes, was published in 1990. Among other revisions, "Four women authors were included, where previously there were none."

You can look at the original lists in the Wikipedia article above. I suspect that most of us probably have a few odd volumes of the series kicking around. The double-columns of print and large format make them difficult to read, but they are a useful source for otherwise difficult to locate texts. I see that I myself own ten of them - marked below in bold - though I've never consciously collected them:

1. The Great Conversation
2. Syntopicon I
3. Syntopicon II
4. Volume 4: Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)
   • The Iliad
   • The Odyssey

   Homer. The Iliad & The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. 1898. Great Books of the Western World, 4. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. 1952. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1989.

5. Aeschylus / Sophocles / Euripides / Aristophanes
6. Herodotus / Thucydides
7. Plato
8. Volume 8: Aristotle I
   • Categories
   • On Interpretation
   • Prior Analytics
   • Posterior Analytics
   • Topics
   • Sophistical Refutations
   • Physics
   • On the Heavens
   • On Generation and Corruption
   • Meteorology
   • Metaphysics
   • On the Soul
   • Minor biological works

   Aristotle. The Works, Volume 1. Ed. W. D. Ross. Great Books of the Western World, 8. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

9. Volume 9: Aristotle II
   • History of Animals
   • Parts of Animals
   • On the Motion of Animals
   • On the Gait of Animals
   • On the Generation of Animals
   • Nicomachean Ethics
   • Politics
   • The Athenian Constitution
   • Rhetoric
   • Poetics

   Aristotle. The Works, Volume 2. Ed. W. D. Ross. Great Books of the Western World, 9. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

10. Hippocrates / Galen
11. Volume 11:
    • Euclid
      • The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements
    • Archimedes
      • On the Sphere and Cylinder
      • Measurement of a Circle
      • On Conoids and Spheroids
      • On Spirals
      • On the Equilibrium of Planes
      • The Sand Reckoner
      • The Quadrature of the Parabola
      • On Floating Bodies
      • Book of Lemmas
      • The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems
    • Apollonius of Perga
      • On Conic Sections
    • Nicomachus of Gerasa
      • Introduction to Arithmetic

    Euclid. The Thirteen Books of the Elements / Archimedes. The Works, Including the Method / Apollonius of Perga. On Conic Sections / Nichomachus of Gerga. Introduction to Arithmetic. Trans. Thomas L. Heath, R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Martin L. D’Ooge. 1926 & 1939. Great Books of the Western World, 11. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

12. Lucretius / Epictetus / Marcus Aurelius
13. Virgil
14. Volume 14: Plutarch
    • The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by John Dryden)

    Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (The Dryden Translation). Great Books of the Western World, 14. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

15. Tacitus
16. Volume 16:
    • Ptolemy
      • Almagest, (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)
    • Nicolaus Copernicus
      • On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
    • Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
      • Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V)
      • The Harmonies of the World (Book V)

    Ptolemy. The Almagest / Copernicus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres / Kepler. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy: IV & V; The Harmonies of the World: V. Trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Charles Glenn Wallis. Great Books of the Western World, 16. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

17. Plotinus
18. St. Augustine
19. Volume 19: Thomas Aquinas
    • Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)

    Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica, 1. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1941. Rev. Daniel J. Sullivan. Great Books of the Western World, 19. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

20. Volume 20: Thomas Aquinas
    • Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)

    Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica, 2. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1941. Rev. Daniel J. Sullivan. Great Books of the Western World, 20. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

21. Dante
22. Chaucer
23. Machiavelli / Hobbes
24. Rabelais
25. Montaigne
26. Shakespeare I
27. Shakespeare II
28. Gilbert / Galileo / Harvey
29. Cervantes: Don Quixote
30. Sir Francis Bacon
31. Descartes / Spinoza
32. Milton
33. Pascal
34. Newton / Huygens
35. Locke/ Berkeley / Hume
36. Swift: Gulliver's Travels / Sterne: Tristram Shandy
37. Fielding: Tom Jones
38. Montesquieu / Rousseau
39. Adam Smith
40. Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I
41. Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire II
42. Kant
43. American State Papers / Hamilton, Madison, Jay: The Federalist / John Stuart Mill
44. Boswell: Life of Johnson
45. Lavoisier / Fourier / Faraday
46. Hegel
47. Goethe: Faust
48. Melville: Moby Dick
49. Darwin
50. Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels
51. Tolstoy: War and Peace
52. Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
53. Volume 53: William James
    • The Principles of Psychology

    James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Great Books of the Western World, 53. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

54. Volume 54: Sigmund Freud
    • The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
    • Selected Papers on Hysteria
    • The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
    • The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
    • Observations on "Wild" Psycho-Analysis
    • The Interpretation of Dreams
    • On Narcissism
    • Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
    • Repression
    • The Unconscious
    • A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
    • Beyond the Pleasure Principle
    • Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
    • The Ego and the Id
    • Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
    • Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
    • Civilization and Its Discontents
    • New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

    Freud, Sigmund. The Major Works. Great Books of the Western World, 54. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

•

Again it seems, in retrospect, 70 years on, quite an odd list. It's very anglocentric, for a start: Boswell's Life of Johnson, a whole slew of novels and other literary works easily available elsewhere ... but it does represent a certain advance on Lubbock, insofar (at least) that it admits upfront its 'Western' orientation - if you'll forgive the pun.

The editors were well aware of this, however, so when they revised it in 1990, they added six new volumes of more contemporary material: one on Philosophy, one on Science, one on Economics, one on Anthropology, and two on Modernist Literature (you can see further details here).

Like all such grand intellectual enterprises, however, it looks now more like an index of the blind-spots in the late twentieth-century mind than a truly satisfactory summary of the best of Western thought.

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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

So what's my conclusion? "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes," as Henry Thoreau put it so succinctly (or, as in this case, new book-bindings). But he went on to say: "and not rather a new wearer of clothes" - which is perhaps the nub of the matter.

No set list of readings will produce an original, free-thinking intellect, whether it be Sir John Lubbocks's 100 books, the Britannica Great Books, the Harvard Classics, or The Sacred Books of the East. That's not to say that such collections of books have no abiding usefulness, however - it's probably better to take them as a series of local guides than as a grand, overarching index to the nature of the universe, however.

And, in the meantime, it can be useful - and salutary - to skim through such lists and remind yourself of just how far you've fallen short of the minimum knowledge expected of either a nineteenth-century or a more contemporary 'common reader'!

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David Morrell & Hank Wagner: Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (2010)

Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences

Deborah Blum: Ghost Hunters (2006)

Among the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882 were psychologist Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and classicist Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901).

It was hoped, not unreasonably, that these learned and dedicated pioneers in the field of parapsychology might make some concerted attempt to "come through" after their deaths, given their sustained interest in the question of some kind of survival of bodily dissolution.

Frederic Myers: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903)

Myers' immense tome Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published posthumously, in 1903. He certainly believed that he had provided in its pages both strong evidence for survival and for the existence of a soul.

The strange phenomenon of the "cross-correspondences" (so-called) which unfolded over two decades, beginning with some automatic writing scripts by Cambridge Classics lecturer Margaret Verrall in 1901, is therefore either the strongest - albeit, also, one of the strangest - chains of evidence for human survival of bodily death, or else a colossal piece of delusion and self-deception afflicting some of the acutest minds of the time.

Essentially, by choosing your authority, you choose the view you will be encouraged to take of the story. If, for instance, you read Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (2006), you will be left with a lingering sense of mystery and doubt surrounding the whole business.

Ruth Brandon: The Spiritualists (1983)

If, however, you read Ruth Brandon's trenchant The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983), you may be left wondering why anyone could ever take seriously so bizarre a congerie of frauds and misfits?

The essence of the cross-correspondences was that it involved different mediums, on different continents, who separately received obscure and apparently nonsensical scripts which - when pieced together - produced more-or-less complete statements from (allegedly) specific individuals on "the other side."

l-to-r: Alice Kipling Fleming, Margaret Verrall, Helen Verrall and Leonora Piper

The three principal conduits for these scripts were Mrs. Verrall (mentioned above), together with her daughter Helen; Mrs. Winifred Tennant (disguised under her professional name "Mrs. Willett"); and Mrs Alice Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling (who practised under the name of "Mrs Holland", thanks mainly to family disapproval).

As well as these, there was also some involvement from William James's favourite medium Leonora Piper in America. This geographical range from the United States to India has undoubtedly contributed something to the continuing fascination that still surrounds this psychic cause célèbre. And yet, what do these supposed "correspondences" actually amount to?

One of the earliest instances was noted by Alice Johnson, research officer of the Society for Psychical Research. While sorting through some of the papers held at their office in London, she noted some strange similarities between them:

in one case, Mrs. Forbes' script, purporting to come from her son, Talbot, stated that he must now leave her, since he was looking for a sensitive who wrote automatically, in order that he might obtain corroboration of her own writing. Mrs. Verrall, on the same day, wrote of a fir-tree planted in a garden, and the script was signed with a sword and a suspended bugle. The latter was part of the badge of the regiment to which Talbot Forbes had belonged, and Mrs. Forbes had in her garden some fir-trees, grown from seed sent to her by her son. These facts were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.

Taken alone, this might easily pass for coincidence, especially since, as she went on to say: "We have reason to believe that the idea of making a statement in one script complementary of a statement in another had not occurred to Mr. Myers in his lifetime — for there is no reference to it in any of his written utterances on the subject that I have been able to discover." However, in aggregate, she found the phenomenon less easy to dismiss:

Neither did those who have been investigating automatic script since his death invent this plan, if plan it be. It was not the automatists themselves that detected it, but a student of their scripts; it has every appearance of being an element imported from outside; it suggests an independent invention, an active intelligence constantly at work in the present, not a mere echo or remnant of individualities of the past.

Robert Browning: Abt Vogler (1864)

Another frequently mentioned example was the famous (or infamous) “Hope, Star, and Browning” correspondence. In this case three mediums made independent allusions to the poetry of Robert Browning. As Jill Galvan describes it:

First, Margaret Verrall wrote a script mentioning “anagram” and containing the phrases “rats star stars” and “tears stare,” along with a second script with the word “Aster,” which is both Greek for star and another anagram for tears and stare. Additionally, this second script contained a phrase beginning with the Greek word for passion and continuing, “the hope that leaves the earth for sky — Abt Vogler for earth too hard that found itself or lost itself — in the sky.” The investigators took the phrase to be an allusion to Browning’s “Abt Vogler” (1864), specifically to line 78, “The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky”; the script substitutes Browning’s original skyward “passion” with “hope.” Then, a couple of weeks later, a script by Piper asked if Margaret Verrall had gotten the message about “Hope Star and Browning.” Around the same time, Helen Verrall received a couple of scripts that each mentioned “star” and featured a drawing of one, as well as [alluding] to Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” (1842), and one of these scripts also offered anagrams for star in “arts” and “rats.”

This is the case which so impressed occult investigator Colin Wilson. And it does, on the face of it, seem difficult to interpret except as a series of allusions to essentially the same matter. Though precisely what was meant to be conveyed remains unclear.

Alice Houdini tries to communicate with her dead husband

One explanation for this, however, may be supplied by the sheer difficulty of transmission of ideas when one has left the earthly plain. Or so the defunct Frederic Myers explained at a séance with fellow psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge:

Lodge, it is not as easy as I thought in my impatience ... Gurney says I am getting on first rate. But I am short of breath ... I am more stupid than some of those I deal with ... It is funny to hear myself talking when it is not myself talking. It is not my whole self talking. When I am awake I know where I am.

He stated further:

We communicate an impression through the inner mind of the medium. It receives the impression in a curious way. It has to contribute to the body of the message; we furnish the spirit of it ... In other words, we send the thoughts and the words usually in which they must be framed, but the actual letters or spelling of the words is drawn from the medium’s memory. Sometimes we only send the thoughts and the medium’s unconscious mind clothes them in words.

Another explanation of the process came from another psychic researcher, Dr. Richard Hodgson, via American medium Leonora Piper:

I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat, and I am not wholly conscious of my own utterances because they come out automatically, impressed upon the machine [the medium’s body] … I impress my thoughts on the machine which registers them at random, and which are at times doubtless difficult to understand. I understand so much better the modus operandi than I did when I was in your world.

The last word, though, must remain with Myers:

Oh, if I could only leave you the proof that I continue. Yet another attempt to run the blockade - to strive to get a message through. How can I make your hand docile enough - how can I convince them? I am trying, amid unspeakable difficulties. It is impossible for me to know how much of what I send reaches you. I feel as if I had presented my credentials - reiterated the proofs of my identity in a wearisomely repetitive manner. The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulty of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass, which blurs sight and deadens sound, dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary. A feeling of terrible impotence burdens me. Oh it is a dark road.

•

Alice Fleming (née Kipling) (1868-1948)

On April 24, 1907, while in trance in the United States, ... Mrs [Leonora] Piper three times uttered the word Thanatos, a Greek word meaning "death," despite the fact that she had no knowledge of Greek. Such repetitions were often a signal that cross-correspondences were about to begin. But it had begun already. About a week earlier, in India, Mrs Holland [ie: Alice Kipling] had done some automatic writing, and in that script the following enigmatic communication had appeared: "Mors [Latin for death]. And with that the shadow of death fell upon his limbs." On April 29th, in England, Mrs Verrall, writing automatically, produced the words: "Warmed both hands before the fire of life. It fades and I am ready to depart." This is a quotation from a poem by nineteenth-century English poet, Walter [Savage] Landor. Mrs Verrall next drew a triangle. This could be Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. She had always considered it a symbol of death. She then wrote: "Manibus date lilia plenis" [give lilies with full hands]. This is a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, in which an early death is foretold. This was followed by the statement: "Come away, come away, Pallida mors [Latin for pale death]," and, finally, an explicit statement from the communicator: "You have got the word plainly written all along in your writing. Look back." The "word," or "theme," was quite obvious when these fragments, given in the same month to three mediums thousands of miles apart, were put together and scrutinized. And in view of the lifelong interest of the communicator, it was certainly an appropriate theme. Death.

- Trans4mind

Rudyard and John Lockwood Kipling (c.1880)

When asked whether there was any basis to spiritualism,
Kipling replied “There is; I know. Have nothing to do with it.”
- George M. Johnson. Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Kipling's famous poem "En-dor" (1919) warns sternly of the dangers of false comfort from spirits - or, rather, their dubious lieutenants, mediums:

The road to En-dor is easy to tread
For Mother or yearning Wife.
There, it is sure, we shall meet our Dead
As they were even in life.
Earth has not dreamed of the blessing in store
For desolate hearts on the road to En-dor.

He was himself no stranger to the subject. The death of his son John in combat at the Battle of Loos in 1915 was a blow he never really recovered from. It was made worse by the fact that he had had to exert all his special influence to ensure that John would be allowed to serve. He had already been rejected for active service due to his poor eyesight.

His poem "My Boy Jack," though ostensibly about the drowned dead of the Battle of Jutland, seems to refer obliquely to his own grief, also:

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind —
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

There's an almost Modernist fragmentedness about the gradual breakdown of the ballad form in this poem: a grief too great for the traditional forms Kipling had hitherto been sedulous in preserving.

Charles Sturridge, dir.: FairyTale (1997)

If you want some sense of the contemporary atmosphere of a kind of half-life lived in the shadow of these immense crowds of thronging war dead, Charles Sturridge's 1997 film FairyTale - about the strange saga of the Cottingley Fairies - does a wonderful job of conveying it. Virtually all the literature of the time, the immediate post-war era - not simply such obvious examples as Eliot's Waste Land or Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" - should be read with this in mind.

Kipling's own short stories and poems chart his own steadily less unavailing attempts to come to term with his own intolerable loss. From the harsh "Mary Postgate" (1915) he moved through the healing mechanisms of "A Madonna of the Trenches" and "The Janeites" (both 1924) to his most emotional and heartbreaking story of all, "The Gardener" (1925).

John Radcliffe & John McGivering's 2011 notes on “En-dor” (on the Kipling Society website) record the history of Kipling's engagements with spiritualism and the occult in general:

This ranges from his early story "The Sending of Dana Da" (Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888) - inspired by his father's scepticism about the claims of Madame Blavatsky, one of whose séances he attended in 1880 - to "They" (1904), whose unnamed narrator suggests that the company of the dead may be permitted to those who have not known them in life, but not to those who (like himself) are searching for a particular dead child. This story appears to have been inspired by the death from pneumonia of his elder daughter Josephine, or "Josie" (1892-1899).

Kipling and his wife Carrie with their first child Josephine

Kipling was, it seems, only too aware of the presence in himself of something resembling the "second sight" common among the MacDonalds, on his mother's side of the family. He wrote sceptically of this ability in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), but is careful - if one reads between the lines - not so much to deny its existence as to disavow its usefulness to the living:

... there is a type of mind that dives after what it calls ‘psychical experiences.’ And I am in no way ‘psychic.’ Dealing as I have done with large, superficial areas of incident and occasion, one is bound to make a few lucky hits or happy deductions. But there is no need to drag in the ‘clairvoyance,’ or the rest of the modern jargon. I have seen too much evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to Endor to take one step along that perilous track.

Any unbiassed reader of his work will find it difficult to ignore the obvious fascination with telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal gifts which lies behind such stories as "Wireless" (1902), "The Wish House" (1924) and (perhaps most autobiographical of all) "The House Surgeon" (1909).

Nor would it be true to say that the perils of the "Road to En-dor" were more apparent to him after the First World War than before it. His simultaneous attraction-repulsion towards the occult seems to date from all stages of his career as a writer.

There are no reliable accounts of his own return from beyond the grave to answer any of the many questions raised by his works. His own comment on that is unequivocal. His late poem "The Appeal" - first published in 1939 - reads as follows:

It I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for the little, little, span
The dead are born in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

•


Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself (1937)

The fear of such "unknown forces" was certainly great in Rudyard Kipling, but the temptation to write about them was evidently greater.

His younger sister Alice, known to the family as "Trix," who shared with him the appalling experiences of child-abuse and neglect - recorded in his classic story "Baa Baa Black Sheep" (1888) - which occurred when they were sent "home" to England from India in 1870, and who showed almost equal literary promise in her youth, took a rather different approach.

On her return to India at the age of 16, she married British army officer John Fleming, and, in 1893, "initially experimented with automatic writing." Her biography in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology remarks somewhat euphemistically:

After a long illness she returned to England in 1902 and in the following year read the classic study Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, by F. W. H. Myers. As a result she contacted the secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), London, regarding her own automatic writing.

This "long illness" is presumably the "recurrent mental illness" referred to in Radcliffe & McGivering's notes on her brother's poem "En-dor" (quoted above), which overtook her in "her thirtieth year":

Trix's family linked her madness with her psychic interests. When asked whether he thought there was anything in spiritualism, Rudyard Kipling replied "with a shudder": "There is; I know. Have nothing to do with it." He is presumed to have been thinking of his sister.

The Society for Psychical Research appears to have treated her abilities equally seriously, but rather more analytically, as is evidenced by a series of papers on the "cross-correspondences" controversy published by their research officer Alice Johnson in the Society's Proceedings:

• "On the Automatic Writing of Mrs. Holland." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 21 (1908).
• "Second Report on Mrs. Holland's Script." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 24 (1910).
• "Supplementary Notes on Mrs. Holland's Scripts." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 22 (1909).
• "Third Report on Mrs. Holland's Scripts." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 25 (1911).

Then (as now) we are left with a stark choice: either to follow the hints, the half-stated truths "known to nobody else", and the endlessly frustrating lack of definitive, convincing evidence of "survival" - or else to reject the whole business as cruel deception on the part of "sensitives" together with wish-fulfilment on the part of the client. Dr Johnson perhaps summed it up best, when remarking of ghosts:

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

- Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)

James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)

And yet, and yet ... thirty years before, in Rasselas (1759) he had commented with almost equal cogency:

That the dead are seen no more ... I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.

"Some who deny it with their tongues, confess it by their fears." Kipling was very afraid of mental disturbances in the late 1890s, in the middle of a devastating quarrel with one of his wife's brothers (the "unstable" Beatty Balestier) which threatened to undermine his and Carrie's experiment of living in the United States.

His sister's mental illness, followed swiftly by the death of the Kiplings' daughter Josie, must have constituted a great temptation to give in to what Sigmund Freud, in 1910, referred to as "the black tide of mud of occultism." That temptation is already achingly strong in the story "They," and after John's avoidable death ten years later at the Battle of Loos, it may have seemed almost overwhelming.

The poem "En-Dor," then, is simply one instalment in that ongoing struggle with himself and with circumstances. For all the cogency of its description of spiritualism, one can't avoid the fact that - unlike Robert Browning, whose "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium'" (1864) comes from a place of total non-belief - Kipling's resistance to communication with the dead seems to arise more from his conviction of its dangers to the living than from any inherent improbability in its claims:

Dmitry Nikiforovich Martynov: The Witch of Endor (1857)

Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark —
Hands — ah, God! — that we knew!
Visions and voices — look and hark! —
Shall prove that the tale is true,
And that those who have passed to the further shore
May be hailed — at a price — on the road to En-dor.

But they are so deep in their new eclipse
Nothing they say can reach,
Unless it be uttered by alien lips
And framed in a stranger's speech.
The son must send word to the mother that bore,
Through an hireling's mouth. 'Tis the rule of En-dor.

And what better summary of the cross-correspondences themselves can be found than the one contained in the following stanza?

Even so, we have need of faith
And patience to follow the clue.
Often, at first, what the dear one saith
Is babble, or jest, or untrue.
(Lying spirits perplex us sore
Till our loves — and their lives — are well-known at En-dor)....

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

"All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." Quite so. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying has it. It's not that the question is - or, it seems, ever can be - definitively settled. But I think Ursula Le Guin was right to say, in the third book of her "Earthsea" series, The Farthest Shore:

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Rudyard Kipling, I suspect, would have agreed with her wholeheartedly.

Ursula Le Guin: The Farthest Shore (1972)

'I Am Lost Without My Boswell'

Sir Joshua Reynolds: James Boswell of Auchinleck (1785)

The 1944 poem "Reading in Wartime" by Scottish poet (and pioneering translator of Kafka) Edwin Muir begins with the lines: "Boswell by my bed, / Tolstoy on my table":

Boswell's turbulent friend
And his deafening verbal strife,
Ivan Ilych's death
Tell me more about life,
The meaning and the end
Of our familiar breath,
Both being personal,
Than all the carnage can,
Retrieve the shape of man,
Lost and anonymous,
Tell me wherever I look
That not one soul can die
Of this or any clan
Who is not one of us
And has a personal tie
Perhaps to someone now
Searching an ancient book,
Folk-tale or country song
In many and many a tongue,
To find the original face,
The individual soul,
The eye, the lip, the brow
For ever gone from their place,
And gather an image whole.

If I understand him correctly, he seems to be saying that no-one can really die - no-one, that is, who leaves behind some kind of memory with the living.

If that is the case, then it's hard to imagine anyone who's left behind a more comprehensive record of himself than James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (1740-1795).

Sir Joshua Reynolds: Samuel Johnson (1775)

Most important of all, of course, is his massive (and still well worth reading) Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). But it's worth remembering that he was known in his lifetime as 'Corsica Boswell,' for his account of that little-known island in the throes of its struggle for freedom against the Genoese.

James Boswell: Journal of a Tour to Corsica; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli (1768)

Here's a short list of his works (or most of the ones published in his lifetime, at any rate):

1. Boswell, James. Journal of a Tour to Corsica; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli. 1768. Ed. Morchard Bishop. London: Williams & Norgate Ltd., 1951.


2. Boswell, James. Boswell’s Column: Being his Seventy Contributions to the London Magazine under the pseudonym The Hypochondriack from 1777 to 1783 Here First printed In Book Form in England. Ed. Margery Bailey. London: William Kimber, 1951.


3. Boswell, James. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. 1785. Introduction by T. C. Livingstone. Collins Classics. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1955.


4. Johnson, Dr. Samuel & James Boswell. Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland & Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LL.D. 1775 & 1785. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 1924. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.


5. Boswell, James, Esq. The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. 1791. Introduction by Herbert Askwith. The Modern Library of the World’s Best Books. New York: Random House Inc., n.d.


6. Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. 1791. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford Standard Authors. 1904. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege / Oxford University Press, 1953.

Johnson & Boswell: Journey to the Western Islands & A Tour to the Hebrides (1775 & 1785)

•

George Willison: James Boswell in Rome (1765)

Funnily enough, the real story started long after his death. After a memorable slagging off by Macaulay, Boswell's stock sank pretty low during most of the nineteenth century. He was seen as a kind of glorified shorthand reporter, whose sole claim to fame was that he happened to be present during some memorable events.

His undoubted skill in submerging himself in the moment worked very much against him, strangely enough. People continued to read the Life of Johnson, but Boswell's part in creating it was depreciated to the point of invisibility: as if a great book could somehow come into being despite its author.

It was thought, also, that the extensive archives of letters and journals he drew on to create the book had all perished in a 'fire in Scotland.' A few attempts were made to investigate this, but the family rebuffed them for various reasons - mostly to do with the very complicated state of their finances, partially due to the early deaths of both of Boswell's sons: James of illness, and Alexander, his direct heir, in a duel.

David Buchanan: The Treasure of Auchinleck (1974)

Until, that is, Colonel Isham came to tea. The tea party in question was in Malahide Castle near Dublin, the home of the direct heir to the line of Auchinleck, the time the 1920s, and the result of this fishing expedition by a well-connected American book collector forms the subject of two books: David Buchanan's The Treasure of Auchinleck (which focusses principally on Isham's fascinating thirty-year quest to unite the Boswell papers), and Frederick A. Pottle's more general history of the whole strange saga, Pride and Negligence.

Frederick A. Pottle: Pride and Negligence (1981)

The story is too complicated to summarise here, but suffice it to say that the papers spread over houses in two different countries, in attics and haylofts and cabinets in old dusty rooms, were eventually united - after various vexatious law-suits - at Yale University, whence they've been issuing in a steady stream ever since.

The jewel in the crown of all these efforts was undoubtedly Boswell's incomparable journal, kept on and off for four decades, and now published (not quite in full) with extensive annotations and commentary in a series of 13 volumes:

Frederick A. Pottle, ed.: Boswell's London Journal (1950)

1. Boswell, James. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763. As First Published in 1950 from the Original Mss. Ed. Frederick A. Pottle. 1950. London: The Reprint Society, 1952.


2. Boswell, James. Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764: Including His Correspondence with Belle de Zuylen (Zélide). Ed. Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 2). London: William Heinemann, 1952.


3. Boswell, James. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764. Ed. Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 4). London: William Heinemann, 1953.


4. Boswell, James. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765-1766. Ed. Frank Brady & Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 5). London: William Heinemann, 1955.


5. Boswell, James. Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769. Ed. Frank Brady & Frederick A. Pottle. 1957. London: The Reprint Society, 1958.


6. Boswell, James. Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774. Ed. William K. Wimsatt & Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 7). London: William Heinemann, 1959.


7. Boswell, James. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, 1773. Ed. Frederick A. Pottle & Charles H. Bennett. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 8). London: William Heinemann, 1963.


8. Boswell, James. Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776. Ed. Charles Ryskamp & Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 9). London: William Heinemann, 1963.


9. Boswell, James. Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778. Ed. Charles McC. Weis & Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 10). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970.


10. Boswell, James. Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck, 1778-1782. Ed. Joseph W. Reed & Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 11). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977.


11. Boswell, James. Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782-1785. Ed. Irma S. Lustig & Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 12). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981.


12. Boswell, James. Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785-1789. Ed. Irma S. Lustig & Frederick A. Pottle. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 13). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1986.


13. Boswell, James. Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789-1795. Ed. Marlies K. Danziger & Frank Brady. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 14). New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1989.

Marlies K. Danziger & Frank Brady, ed.: Boswell: The Great Biographer (1989)

The first of the volumes, Boswell's London Journal (1762-63), which records his famous meeting with Dr. Johnson ('I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it'), was a publishing sensation. Appearing when it did, in buttoned-up 1950, its revelations of Boswell's whoring ways among the street women and courtesans of the metropolis, certainly made it seem like a saucy, rollicking read.

With the best will in the world, the subsequent volumes could not really keep up this reputation, and by the time the series finished in 1989, its British publishers had given up on it entirely, and only MCgraw-Hill in America was prepared to keep on issuing it faithfully. All of which is a bit of a pity, because Boswell's skill as an autobiographer certainly didn't lessen over the years.

What other pieces of Boswelliana ought one to mention? Well, there's the fascinating (and previously unknown) collection of biographical sketches of his friends by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which was found among Boswell's papers, and therefore formed part of the Yale edition of his writings (there are actually two editions: one for the general reader, and another - far more expensive and slow to appear - of critical editions of all the papers in the collection):

1. Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Portraits: Character Sketches of Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and David Garrick, together with other Manuscripts of Reynolds Recently Discovered among the Private Papers of James Boswell and now first published. Ed. Frederick W. Hilles Bodman. Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (Trade Editions, 3). London: William Heinemann, 1952.


2. Boswell, James. Boswell’s Book of Bad Verse (A Verse Self-Portrait), or ‘Love Poems and Other Verses.’ Ed. Jack Werner. London: White Lion Publishers Limited, 1974.

Then there's the collection (above) of Boswell's poetry, for the really keen.

The standard biography is in two parts, the first by Frederick A. Pottle, the second by his long-time collaborator on the papers, Frank Brady. Adam Sisman's book, below, gives a good, succinct account of the complex process of composition which led to Boswell's immortal biography.

1. Pottle, Frederick A. James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769. London: Heinemann, 1966.


2. Brady, Frank. James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984.


3. Sisman, Adam. Boswell’s Presumptuous Task. 2000. London: Penguin, 2001.

So next time anyone solemnly informs you that Boswell was a good writer by accident rather than by design, or that it was somehow easy to compile the greatest biography in the English language, tell them they're full of it. That pompous old windbag Macaulay (as so often) was dead wrong on that one.

Boswell's long journal, together with his lifetime's crop of letters, constitute one of the most entertaining reads you'll ever come across, as well as being an incomparable source of information on just about everything to do with British - and Continental - culture in the late eighteenth century.

Thomas Rowlandson: The High Street in Edinburgh (1786)