Boswell’s piety and profligacy are both informed by the self-dramatizing, self-regarding quality of his character. In this respect Boswell’s journal is not a record of his actions, nor even a record of the impressions that his actions made upon himself. It is rather the transcript of his appreciation of actions undertaken with more than half an eye to their eventual reception and remembrance.6 Boswell’s London life was a dramatic performance, and metaphors of the theatre run insistently through his journal entries, perhaps most strikingly in this encounter with Louisa: ‘When I came to Louisa’s, I felt myself stout and well, and most courageously did I plunge into the fount of love, and had vast pleasure as I enjoyed her as an actress who had played many a fine lady’s part.’7 It would be hard to find a more concentrated example of Boswell’s performative idea of character, so perfectly parallel are its reflecting planes of performance and reception.

Into this strange worldof dissoluteness, fantasyand delusion walked Samuel Johnson. At the time, Boswell recorded Johnson’s arrival with these words:

I drank tea at Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr. Samuel Johnson, whom I haveso long wishedto see. Mr. Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’ However, he said, ‘From Scotland.’ ‘Mr. Johnson,’ said I, ‘indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’ ‘Sir,’ replied he, ‘that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.’ Mr. Johnson is a man of a most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king’s evil. He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has great humour and is a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness of manners is disagreeable. I shall mark what I remember of his conversation.8

However, when it came to writing this up in The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell chose slightly different words, and a more elaborate treatment:

At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies’s back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us, – he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, ‘Look, my Lord, it comes.’ I found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson’s figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had published his Dictionary, in the attitude of sitting in his easy chair in deep meditation, which was the first picture his friend did for him, which Sir Joshua very kindly presented to me, and from which an engraving has been made for this work. Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’ – ‘From Scotland,’ cried Davies roguishly. ‘Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’ I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expence of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression ‘come from Scotland,’ which I used in the sense of being of that country, and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, ‘That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.’ This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down, I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come next.9

Comparing the two versions, one notices at once the fuller and more ceremonious form the episode takes in the Life; next, perhaps, the softening of Boswell’s original sense of Johnson’s disagreeableness into the milder emotion of nonplussed embarrassment. But it is the characteristic Boswellian allusion to the theatre – ‘he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes”’ – which is the pivotal element in the transformation of the original impression into the eventual work of literary art. The encounter between Hamlet and his father’s ghost is the event which determines the shape of, and gives direction to, young Hamlet’s life; at the same time, it is the occasion when old Hamlet lays an obligation on his son to do for him what death prevents him from doing for himself. Boswell’s reference to Hamlet was apt to his own case – in addition, of course, (and this is once again characteristically Boswellian) to being ludicrously self-flattering, casting Boswell as the glamorous protagonist in the momentous drama of his own life. But it was pertinent also to the case of Johnson. The task of memorializing Johnson gave shape and direction to Boswell’s life (and it was a task he performed with occasional Hamlet-like waverings and delays).10 Moreover, the friendship launched by that meeting in Davies’s back-parlour bestowed on Johnson a posthumous reach which would have eluded him had he been obliged to rely on his other biographers – that troop of the now all but unread, comprising Sir John Hawkins, Mrs Piozzi, Isaac Reed, George Steevens, Thomas Tyers, William Cooke, William Shaw, Joseph Towers, James Harrison, et al.11 That meeting, then, was not only the beginning of Johnson and Boswell’s friendship.