and finding in it such explicit instances of licentiousness, she was much affected and told me that she had come to a resolution never again to consider herself as my wife; though for the sake of her children and mine, as a friend, she would preserve appearances. When I saw her in great uneasiness, and dreaded somewhat - though not with much apprehension - her resolution, I was awakened from my dream of licentiousness, and saw my bad conduct in a shocking light. I was really agitated, and in a degree of despair.... At night I calmly meditated to reform.[19]

In one sense, the two realities have abruptly been brought together, and the private, more truthful reality has been forced to acknowledge itself within the real lived world. It has been exposed for the sham thing it is, a confession with no comeback, no penances, no risk. Boswell is forced to see his conduct, his mental prevarications, his moral shiftiness, as cheap, self-serving and hurtful. He is genuinely moved, sufficiently moved to write up the whole week, from Tuesday till Sunday, on the very evening of the calamity.

In another sense, however, the journal is reinforced as the superior reality, and this happens in two ways. Firstly, Margaret Boswell’s reading actually turns Boswell’s journal into a yet more genuine confession - more genuinely a confession than Boswell intended when he wroe it - and a still more roundedly true confession. Not only does she find out the whole truth, but her reading is also an endorsement, a consummation of one of the deepest instincts behind Boswell’s writing, the ‘strange feeling’ to have ‘nothing to be secret that concerns myself’. She is a third party who brings an outside eye to the confessing voice, the confessed actor, and thereby reintegrates it into the reality of deeds, feelings, people, out from the world of language in which it has been privileged to exist.

But secondly, and inevitably, the journalist goes on. Language can never be outflanked by life. Boswell writes up five days in order to get to the sixth, Sunday 8 December, and to record the catastrophe, to confess his ‘despair’, after which he leaves off writing for another week. The brutal enforcement into the world of Mrs Boswell, the children, appearances, the making of the journal a genuine confessional, is itself in its turn confessed, reincorporated into the more roundedly truthful linguistic reality, even more roundedly truthful, in fact, since the endorsement by Margaret and the outside eye.

Not that Boswell existed easily between these realities. There is, indeed, in his writing a constant ambiguity, a series of tensions between the self that acted and the self that was conscious of having participated in action. The reflective self can reflect at times with satisfaction on the self that has acted, as upon his arrival in London in 1762:

Since I came up, I have begun to acquire a composed genteel character very different from a rattling uncultivated one which for some time past I have been fond of. I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.[20]

The reflective self can even reflect with satisfaction on its existence within the reflective medium, on its own facility with language:

How easily and cleverly do I write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffat Hill; and I turn my periods smoothly and imperceptibly like a skilful wheelwright turning tops in a turning-loom.[21]

But more often the reflective self is forced to respond with distress, shame, censure at what it is obliged to record. So, in Scotland in March 1777, he ‘drank outrageously at Whitburn and at Livingstone and at some low ale-house, and arrived at Edinburgh very drunk. It was shocking in me to come home to my dear wife in such a state.’[22] Or in London in March 1776 he finds my ‘moral principle as to chastity was absolutely eclipsed.... I was in the miserable state of those whom the apostle represents as working all uncleanness with greediness.... This is an exact state of my mind at the time. It shocks me to review it.’[23] Even in the generally buoyant record that is the London Journal, Boswell has to observe: ‘I now see the sickly suggestions of inconsistent fancy with regard to the Scotch bar in their proper colours. Good heaven!... I shudder when I think of it. I am vexed at such a distempered suggestion’s being inserted in my journal....’[24]