Monday, May 2, 2011

Boswell's own life set to be celebrated

Book festival in his honour inaugurated at his Ayrshire home, and plans tabled for dedicated museum

During his lifetime, James Boswell ? the chippy, vain, lecherous and occasionally remorseful 18th-century biographer, whose work enshrined Dr Johnson as one of the wonders of the literary world ? maintained unswerving devotion to two things: Johnson himself, and his own stately home in Auchinleck in Ayrshire.

He would therefore undoubtedly have been delighted to learn that his literary descendants will converge on the gardens of his old home to pay homage to the man regarded as the inventor of the warts-and-all modern biography at the inaugural Boswell book festival, on the weekend of 20-22 May.

Participants will include Diana Athill, the laureate of old age; the actor Bill Paterson, discussing his memoirs of a Glasgow childhood; and Selina Hastings, author of critically acclaimed biographies of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham. On the Friday the actor David McKail will perform "Bozzy: an evening of Carnality, Calvinism, Clarit and Conviviality".

Boswell's father built the grand stone house in 1760, when he became Lord Auchinleck; one imagines he must have been less than delighted when, having finally been persuaded to take the road to Scotland, Dr Johnson said of the building: "I was less delighted with the elegance of the modern mansion than with the sullen dignity of the old castle".

The library at Auchinleck House was also the scene of an epic row between Johnson, a high church Tory, and Presbyterian Whig Auchinleck, which so shattered Boswell that he could never describe it fully, except to say that it began with a mention of the name of Cromwell. A contemporary cartoon showed Johnson bashing his host over the head with a prayer book.

The house's fortune declined during the 20th century; it was derelict when, in the 1980s, it was entrusted to the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust. The trust carried out a magnificent restoration project, and now lets some of the space as holiday apartments, while opening the main rooms regularly to the public.

Boswell admirers have bemoaned the fact that while the genius of his fellow Ayrshireman Robert Burns ? who greatly admired Boswell and wrote to say so, but never received a reply ? has been celebrated by a major new museum at the cottage where he was born, Boswell himself remains unfeted. The Boswell Museum and Mausoleum Trust, organisers of the book festival, aim to redress the balance: their ambitious plans include restoring the family graves, and creating a museum in the author's honour in the derelict Boswell Aisle of the adjoining church.

Just in time for the festival, and certain to be discussed there, comes the timely discovery of a lost Boswell manuscript. The unsigned manuscript, which was wrongly catalogued at the Bodleian Library in Oxford almost a century ago, was identified by Susan Rennie, an expert on the Scots language, as Boswell's unfinished dictionary of Scots dialect.

Entries include bubbly-jock (a turkey), dabberlock (an edible seaweed), and gardyloo (the warning cry that the contents of a chamber pot were about to cascade from an upper window).


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/02/boswell-life-celebrated-festival

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