Romping in the capital

There can't be many books which remain unpublished for almost two centuries, and then sell a million copies. James Boswell's journal of his stay in London during 1762-3 was lost, buried among piles of discarded papers in a remote castle in Scotland, until discovered in the 20th century. And perhaps that was just as well, because the young Scot's descriptions of his erotic adventures were far too explicit to have been published before the more permissive postwar years.

It was these passages which helped to make Boswell's London Journal an enormous best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the many episodes Boswell described was meeting "two very pretty little girls" in Covent Garden. Though he explained he had no money, they agreed to accompany him to a private room in the Shakespeare Tavern, where all three drank a bottle of sherry while Boswell toyed with the girls and then "solaced my existence with them, one after the other, according to their seniority." Afterwards, "I parted with my ladies politely and came home in a glow of spirits".

James Boswell was only 22 when he arrived at the top of Highgate Hill and gleefully beheld the city stretched out before him. On the face of it, this was not a good moment for a young Scot to arrive in London. The city was seething with resentment against Scotsmen, who were thought to be unfairly preferred by the new Prime Minister, the Scots Earl of Bute. One evening at the theatre, only a fortnight after his arrival, Boswell became involved in a shouting-match with the mob in the gallery when they began hissing at two Scots soldiers.

Boswell's journal in London was written as a kind of souvenir. Its special charm derives from the fact that it is by a naive young man, full of hope and vigour, relishing every experience. One evening he leaps up on to the back of a coach and rides home from Vauxhall Gardens like a footman, just for the hell of it.

He was intoxicated by the beau monde: the parties, the fine clothes, the glamour of Court, the excitement of the theatre and the beautiful painted actresses. He managed to secure a meeting with the actor David Garrick, whose pulling-power was then so great that a theatre where he was appearing was full a good two-and-a-half hours before the performance began. London seemed a liberation from the narrow society of Scotland, where the theatre was illegal, and where everyone knew his strict father, the judge Lord Auchinleck. London was much more relaxed, and more anonymous.

After two venereal infections, Boswell was determined to avoid "houses of recreation". Instead, he laid siege to an actress two years older than him, Mrs Lewis (identified as "Louisa"), culminating in a seduction at The Black Lion Inn, off Fleet Street. "Five times was I lost in supreme rapture." Alas, ardour cooled, and a week later an examination confirmed his suspicions: "Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhoea." Boswell remonstrated with Louisa, and demanded the return of two guineas he had lent her, while she loudly protested her innocence. When she returned the money, he wondered if he had not misjudged her.

But Boswell's London Journal is more than a mere record of a London romp. At its heart is an earnest young man trying to improve: wondering if he is becoming too familiar with his servant, trying to persuade a shopkeeper to give him credit, and quarrelling with his landlord who suspects him of keeping a girl in his rooms. He sought out older and wiser men who might help him live better, in particular Samuel Johnson, then renowned as a sage, one of the most famous men in England. At last the Great Man came into the bookshop in Covent Garden where Boswell was sipping tea with the proprietor. "Don't say where I come from," pleaded the young Scot, having heard much of Johnson's supposed antipathy to his countrymen. His host teasingly introduced him as "the gentleman from Scotland". Despite this inauspicious beginning, Johnson took to the young man almost immediately, and within weeks Boswell found himself dining alone with Johnson, confiding in him all his hopes, dreams, and experiences. When Boswell was forced by his father to leave London to study on the Continent, Johnson offered to accompany him to Harwich to see him off on the boat.

One reason why Johnson liked Boswell so much was his openness. Boswell poured the contents of his mind freely into his journal, without either embarrassment or knowingness. His London Journal is a wonderfully entertaining book. For those of us who live in the country, coming up to town even today and experiencing the razzmatazz of the capital gives us a sense of how James Boswell must have felt when he arrived here 238 years ago.

?Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task is published by Hamish Hamilton, £17.99.