Nostalgic Correspondence and James Boswell's Scottish Malady

The essay examines James Boswell's correspondence with his friend, John Johnston of Grange, most of which dates from the 1760s; the essay emphasizes the correspondence that transmitted Boswell's London Journal. The essay argues that these letters invoke a form of social melancholy that surrounds a mythical and absent Scottish past, and that this mythos is closely connected to midcentury rhetorics of spontaneity and sentiment. The mythos of Scotland involves a particular sort of masculinity— spontaneous, sentimental, and unproduced—which Boswell and Grange understand to be no longer available in eighteenth-century Britain, where hegemonic forms of masculinity are understood to be polished, refined, and calculated.