‘I Smell You in the Dark’

On 14 August 1773, Johnson was walking down the High Street in Edinburgh with James Boswell. ‘I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia’, Boswell recalls. ‘A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr Johnson to be without one of his five senses upon this occasion. As we marched slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, “I smell you in the dark!”’ Boswell has identified in this seemingly insignificant remark an aspect of Johnson’s character which this chapter explores: his sensory engagement with the world and the consequences of other immediacies for his biographical writings, as exemplified in his ‘Lives’ of Savage, of Pope, and his old colleague on The Gentleman’s Magazine during his early Grub Street years, Edward Cave. Setting out with Johnson’s interest in the details of Scottish life, this chapter turns to the general smelliness of the eighteenth-century world that Johnson inhabited (perhaps even in the relative elegance of Gough Square). It is a capacity to grapple with such everyday facts of human life, alongside the many inconveniences and sources of pain, the chapter suggests, that reveal the workings of an entire personality, and in this, the general nature of which individuals are a part.