These issues, always underlying Boswell’s attitudes towards his journal and its writing, are especially accentuated in the recording of the final years of his life, from the mid 1780s until 1795, following the death of Johnson, Boswell’s own move from Scotland to London, and the death in 1789 of his wife. Boswell, while working on the Life of Johnson, experienced almost unrelieved depression:

What sunk me very low was the sensation that I was precisely as when in wretched low spirits thirty years ago, without any addition to my character from having had the friendship of Dr. Johnson and many eminent men, made the tour of Europe, and Corsica in particular, and written two very successful Books. I was as a board on which fine figures had been painted, but which some corrosive application had reduced to its original nakedness.[29]

He castigates the journal he is keeping: ‘What a wretched Register is this! “A Lazarhouse it seem’d.” It is the Journal of a diseased mind.’[30] The mentality that had been in doubt over so many years of recording, held in check or endorsed in words, is revealed for what it is. The ambiguities have cleared: confirmed by the journal, he has a diseased mind.

Back in September 1777, on a trip to Ashbourne in Derbyshire with Dr Johnson, Boswell had recorded a conversation concerning death and futurity, concluding the journal entry by observing of himself:

I felt my own mind much firmer than formerly, so that I was not depressed tonight; and even the gloom of uncertainty in solemn religious speculation, being mingled with hope, was much more consolatory than the emptiness of infidelity. A man can live in thick air, but perishes in an exhausted receiver.[31]

The same image, the ‘exhausted receiver’, recurs two years later, in August 1779, in Boswell’s Hypochondriack essay ‘On Reserve’. ‘An Hypochondriack’, he writes, ‘is sometimes ... totally incapable of conversation, having a mind like an exhausted receiver, and organs of speech as if palsied....’[32] However, an important slip has taken place in those two years. Where in Ashbourne the image referred to an intellectual and spiritual milieu, religious non-belief, in The Hypochondriack the ‘exhausted receiver’ is an image of the mind itself, and in particular of the mind in relation to language.

Less than a decade later, not only is the mind confirmed as exhausted, but Boswell’s journal writing is so palsied by depression that language itself can scarcely be brought to persist in giving an account of it. Boswell resident in London, for so long the absolute height of his ambitions, is unrelievedly miserable. At last, after weeks of dreariness, he finally makes, in what is virtually a footnote to his journal entry, the confession that in effect concedes defeat. Wednesday 10 October 1787: ‘N.B. Understood not well till a change is marked.’[33] The moment is crucial. The lifelong battle to keep pace in language with the events of his life, to live no more than he could record, has been lost, not because Boswell has been living too much, but too little. Language, after all, was outflanked by life, the confessor by the confessed, the recreative energies of the world of language by the inertness, the exhausted capacities of habitual depression.

If Boswell’s journal had been a place for confessional recreation, in all the variety of his life’s activities, this defeat has other implications, for confession, especially of the order of Boswell’s, depends on language telling more truthfully, in its privileged space, than deeds, actions, appearances can. But language, now, for Boswell, has nothing to tell, or rather what it tells is nothing pertinent to what is really the case. It is appearance that is given over to the language of the journal, while confession is reduced to silence. That which is more roundedly true is to be marked not in language but by the absence of language, ‘understood’ until ‘a change is marked’. Silence, when all is said and done, is conceded to be the appropriate medium for a state of mind ‘whose reality should not be allowed in words’.

In 1793, several hundred miles away, in Scotland, Andrew Erskine, Boswell’s lifelong friend and fellow hypochondriac, finally gave up his struggle against depression. The news of Erskine’s suicide was entered into Boswell’s journal: he had received, he said, ‘an intimation from Sir William Forbes that my old friend _______ had killed himself’.[34] Boswell and Erskine, when young, had published together, including the playful Letters Between the Honourable Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq. Later letters, not written for publication, had contributed to the safe confession of hypochondriac suffering, evidence of a relationship which was founded upon the word. But here, in the blank that Boswell could not fill, where Andrew Erskine’s name should be, we read a fitting testimony to the man with whom depressive intimacies had been shared, and a fitting epitaph on the language of confession. Identity has been reduced to anonymity, feeling to emptiness. Reality is elsewhere, beyond the confessional word, while the language that once, apparently, gave truth and life, that redeemed from oblivion, is replaced by a confessional space.