Killing Time and Filling Space: Epistolary Experience in the James Boswell–William Johnson Temple Correspondence

Abstract: This essay offers a new perspective on the correspondence of James Boswell (1740–95) and William Johnson Temple (1739–96). While twentieth-century critics deprecated Boswell's letters, placing his real literary accomplishment in the journals and published biographies, I argue that we can find value in the letters of both men not as finished individual artworks but as the fabric of a continuous lifelong network of communication, carried out through the technology of the mid-to-late-eighteenth-century British postal system. By paying close attention to the two men's experience of pen and ink, of waiting for the post to arrive, of misdirected mail and the uncertainty that inhered in the whole system, we can see how the mail made them who they were. Both Temple's passive-aggressive dependence and Boswell's self-dramatizing insecurity, playing out in all aspects of their lives, are inseparable from the conditions of postal communication. Letters, as we now see them, were a process, not a product, and in the letters of Temple and Boswell we can see the relationships of two lifetimes shaped by the medium in which they took place.