A Date With Signor Gonorrhea: James Boswell's London Journal 1762

It’s London, 1763 - we're paying a visit to the most fashionable, literary, sexy, filthy, glamorous capital in the world.

The 22 year old James Boswell, born and raised on a large country estate outside Edinburgh, has escaped his ambitious and pushy Presbyterian parents and arrived in London. They want him to follow the family footsteps and become a lawyer. He wants a commission in the guards - which means that he wants to loaf around London in peacetime wearing a smart uniform and getting paid. But more than that, he wants to make a splash – to leave his mark among the great writers and artists of his day.

Boswell will go on to write the "Life of Samuel Johnson," maybe the greatest biography ever written, and the founding text in modern biography. But in 1762 he’s having trouble getting a start on his career. When this journal was discovered hidden away in a house in Aberdeen in the 20th century, the full extent of Boswell’s literary genius was finally understood. The "London Journal" was published to instant notoriety and celebrity, because of Boswell’s tell-all sexual adventures and total frankness about his efforts to make a mark on literature, and his own life.

We see Boswell in company with the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, and we hear about his adventures with his most treasured possession – a reuseable eighteenth-century condom, fabricated from sheeps' intestines.

Content warning: this episode includes scenes of sexual violence.

Books referred to in this episode:

James Boswell, London Journal

James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson

James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Dictionary

Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

John Hunter, A Treatise of Venereal Disease

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the Tatler and The Spectator

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