Hypochondria, melancholy, depression, pervaded every aspect of Boswell’s life and of his writing, manifesting itself as a sense of personal worthlessness, as excruciating guilt for things done, or not done, or simply as an undeniable awareness of the futility of human existence, often accompanied by religious doubts. As he writes to his friend John Johnston from Holland in 1764, ‘I saw all things as so precarious and vain that I had no relish of them, no views to fill my mind, no motive to incite me to action.... Black melancholy again took dominion over me.’[13] Moreover, as the existence of this letter indicates, Boswell also felt the overwhelming urge to tell others of his depression, an instinct that, he feared, laid him perpetually open to ridicule or to censure. In London, in 1786, he talks of his low spirits to his fellow bar counsel, adding in his journal account: ‘This was imprudent. But mental pain could not be endured quietly.’[14]

Boswell never endured mental pain quietly, but he did find ways of sharing it that reduced the risk of ridicule. He talked with and exchanged letters with friends, especially those of a hypochondriac tendency - with John Johnston; with Bennet Langton, with whom he agreed on the ‘deceitfulness of all our hopes of enjoyment on earth’;[15] or with Andrew Erskine: ‘On comparing notes, I found he differed from me in this: that he at no time had any ambition or the least inclination to distinguish himself in active life, having a perpetual consciousness or imagination that he could not go through with it.’[16] The need for such safe intimacy was also a motive behind his writing a series of essays, published as The Hypochondriack in the London Magazine between 1777 and 1783, a series in which Boswell, writing anonymously, offered advice and distraction to fellow sufferers. But the main means whereby he confessed the forms and frequency of his hypochondria, and thereby reined in what he refers to as ‘a kind of strange feeling as if I wished nothing to be secret that concerns myself’,[17] was in the privacy of his journal.

Journalistic confession, for Boswell, covered a range of activities and needs apart from his recurring depression, though some of these also had the tendency to feed that depression. This is particularly the case in respect of his frequent promiscuity, when his behaviour is recalled sometimes with relish, sometimes with regret, and often with a mixture of both. A sequence of events that took place in Edinburgh between November and December 1776 is illustrative. On Monday 25 November, Boswell, who should have been working at law-papers, instead argues with his wife, Margaret, and leaves the house. Later, ‘coming home at five,’ he writes, ‘I met a young slender slut with a red cloak in the street and went with her to Barefoots Parks and madly ventured coition. It was’, he adds, ‘a short and almost insensible gratification of lewdness. I was vexed to think of it.’ Vexed or not, two evenings later, in the High Street, he ‘met a plump hussy who called herself Peggy Grant’ and ‘went with her to a field behind the Register Office, and boldly lay with her. This was desperate risking.’ It was, Boswell interjects, ‘one of the coldest nights I ever remember’. Even more ‘desperate’ information is revealed in the following day’s entry:

The girl with whom I was last night had told me she lodged in Stevenlaw’s Close, and at my desire engaged to be at the head of it generally at eight in the evening, in case I should be coming past. I thought I could not be in more danger of disease by one more enjoyment the very next evening, so went tonight; but she was not there.

He finishes the day by observing: ‘I was shocked that the father of a family should go amongst strumpets; but there was rather an insensibility about me to virtue, I was so sensual. Perhaps I should not write all this’ - ‘all this’, from Monday through till Thursday, in fact being written on Friday 29 November. On Sunday 1 December, however, a crisis is reached. Boswell, listening to a sermon, is already sketching out his evening:

I must confess that I planned, even when sober, that I would in the evening try to find Peggy Grant, and, as I had risked with her, take a full enjoyment.... About eight I got into the street and made Cameron, the chairman, inquire for Peggy Grant.... He brought her out, and I took her to the New Town, and in a mason’s shed in St. Andrew’s Square lay with her twice.

At home, sober, by now, but ‘in a confused, feverish frame’, Boswell finds his wife suspicious: ‘My dear wife asked me if I had not been about mischief. I at once confessed it. She was very uneasy, and I was ashamed and vexed at my licentiousness. Yet’, adds Boswell, ending the day’s entry (written the following day, Monday 2 December), ‘my conscience was not alarmed; so much had I accustomed my mind to think such indulgence permitted.’[18]

Telling, for Boswell, was clearly an important dimension of living, as if the actual experience remained incomplete for him until it had also been recreated in writing, within the confessional of his journal. The prose is energetic, active, with an eye for the memorable detail - the ‘young slender slut with a red cloak’. It revives and re-enacts as it goes. And yet it does not simply recreate, for Boswell is also his own moral commentator, his own confessor: ‘I was vexed to think of it’; ‘This was desperate risking’; and especially ‘Perhaps I should not write all this.’ There is a mixing of time scales, with Boswell the writer, the man of words, the confessing voice, looking back on Boswell the actor, the misbehaver, the confessed for, so that the journal reality emerges as a superior, more roundedly truthful reality than a life simply lived with no account kept. Lived reality became, apparently, more real by virtue of giving itself over to language, of conceding its deeds, thoughts, layers, timescales to the written word, of making a perpetual confession of itself.

On this occasion, Boswell’s confession to his wife of his mischief - and again the event is illustrative - was not the end of the matter. The actual confession to Margaret is, of course, itself confessed within the journal, and therefore forms part of the more truthful reality of Boswell’s privately known self. One week later, on Sunday 8 December, Mrs Boswell ‘insisted to read this my journal,