cover image Boswell’s Enlightenment

Boswell’s Enlightenment

Robert Zaretsky. Harvard Univ, $26.95 (282p) ISBN 978-0-674-36823-1

This sparkling work is a partial biography of one of the 18th century’s most arresting figures—someone often taken to be emblematic of that intellectually critical era. Zaretsky (A Life Worth Living), professor of French history at the University of Houston, sees James Boswell—known for “his oddness, his youth, and his melancholy”—as embodying the Enlightenment’s many conflicting currents and torn by them all. Seeking to escape from conflicts between the flesh and Protestant religiosity, and between the ancient and modern, the young Scot sought and gained the acquaintance and counsel, much of it unsettling to him, of some of the age’s great figures—Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, John Wilkes, and Pascal Paoli—in a famous two-year tour of the Continent. Boswell’s earnest search for answers to life’s bewildering puzzles continues to fascinate. Zaretsky brilliantly, sometimes movingly, adds to that fascination. It’s frustrating, however, that he leaves his protagonist in mid-life, before Boswell takes up his classic Life of Samuel Johnson. Also, though Zaretsky opens the book with a short, lively critique of Enlightenment scholarship, he doesn’t indicate how, if at all, his portrait of Boswell alters our present knowledge of the era. So convincing are Zaretsky’s observations, so sure his touch, that one wishes for more—a longer, fuller study of his subject. (Mar.)