James Boswell (1740–95): Letters (1764–6)

Summary

IT WAS NOT UNUSUAL for a young man with an eye to a legal career to spend a year studying law in Holland; Boswell's father, a senior Scottish judge, Lord Auchinleck, had done so in Leyden; his son chose Utrecht, where he went in August 1763. Once there he was determined to make Utrecht the launching pad for the Grand Tour. His father was strenuously opposed to the idea, insisting that he should complete his studies and establish himself in the practice of the law. The prospect of his son loose on the Continent, and spending parental money without restraint, no doubt alarmed Auchinleck. It is more than likely that he entertained ‘gloomy suspicions’ about his son's prodigality. He wrote in August 1765 expressing the hope that Boswell would ‘return with a proper taste and relish for [his] own country’; otherwise,

I should most heartily repent that ever I agreed to your going abroad, and shall consider the money spent in the tour you have made as much worse than thrown away.

Both the message and the tone recall Sir Thomas Lyttelton's warning to his son George.

However, as Boswell told his friend John Johnston, Laird of Grange (in Annandale, Dumfriesshire), his ‘worthy Father’ eventually and reluctantly agreed that he should accept an invitation from the 10th Earl Marischal, George Keith, to accompany him to Berlin. The young traveller would also be able to draw on ‘a genteel credit’ provided by his father. Not that Boswell and his father had reached a common view about the purpose of a Continental tour.