James Boswell (1740-1795) was a Scottish advocate and the heir, later the laird, of Auchinleck in Ayrshire. He met Samuel Johnson in Thomas Davies's London bookshop on 16 May 1763, toured the Highlands and Hebrides with him in 1773, and published An Account of Corsica (1768), The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) and The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). His private journals, recovered in the twentieth century, confirmed how carefully he recorded conversation.
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“Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?”
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
