James Boswell's Drinking
1991; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2738667
ISSN1086-315X
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoTWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY BIOGRAPHERS have demonstrably neglected the important effects of heavy drinking on the lives and works of their subjects.' But these biographers are not the sole culprits. Frank Brady, the most recent biographer of Boswell, and Boswell's modern editors seem to have entered into a tacit agreement to evade, ignore, or simply deny the significance of Boswell's heavy drinking. There are some likely reasons for this attitude, especially the still common assumption that a heavy or alcoholic drinker is virtually a skid-row bum, a man who has lost everything. Andrew Crosbie, an Edinburgh lawyer and friend of Boswell, conforms to this stereotype: owing to drink, he lost friends, home, law practice, and good name. These disasters enable Irma Lustig, editor of Boswell's Applause of the Jury, to call Crosbie an alcoholic 2 a term that, so 1 See my Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 5-6. See also Roger Forseth, ' Alcoholite at the Altar': Sinclair Lewis, Drink, and the Literary Imagination, Modern Fiction Studies 31 (1985): 581-607, and Forseth's Alcohol and the Writer: Some Biographical and Critical Issues (Hemingway), Contemporary Drug Problems 13 (1986): 361-86. 2 Boswell: The Applause of the Jury 1782-1785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 54-55 n. 8. The following abbreviations will henceforth be used for the various volumes of Boswell's journals, and citations will be made in the text of my article: SW = Boswell in Search of a Wife 1766-1769 (1957); BD = Boswellfor the Defence 1769-1774 (1959); OY = Boswell: The Ominous Years 1774-1776 (1963); BE = Boswell in Extremes 1776-1778 (1970); LA = Boswell Laird of Auchinleck 1778-1782 (1977); AJ = Boswell: The Applause of the Jury 1782-1785 (1981); EE = Boswell: The English Experiment 1785-1789 (1986); and JB = The Journal of James Boswell 1789-1794 (1934). All of these are part of the Yale edition of Boswell's papers; all but the last volume have now been published by McGraw-Hill in a trade edition. Although this edition omits some passages included in the 18-volume, privately printed version (edited by Geoffrey Scott and Frederick Pottle), the omissions are of small importance for my purposes; I have preferred to use the trade edition because it is well annotated and widely available.
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