SOURCE: "Introduction," in New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of "The Life of Johnson," edited by Greg Clingham, pp. 1-8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

In the following introduction to a collection of essays about Boswell as a biographer, Daiches describes the paradoxes between Boswell's life and character, and his literary style and portrayal of himself.

James Boswell remains one of the most fascinating and puzzling figures in literary history. Regarded at one time as a shallow egoist who succeeded by some kind of naive mimetic ability in producing one of the greatest of biographies, thus becoming an accidental genius, he is now visible to us as a much more complex and artful person whose inner tensions and contradictions are bound up with remarkable talents. The massive Boswell repository now at Yale, with its diaries, letters, notes, drafts, and other manuscripts...