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The girl with whom I was last night had told me she lodged in Stevenlaw’s Close, and at my desire engaged to be at the head of it generally at eight in the evening, in case I should be coming past. I thought I could not be in more danger of disease by one more enjoyment the very next evening, so went tonight; but she was not there.

He finishes the day by observing: ‘I was shocked that the father of a family should go amongst strumpets; but there was rather an insensibility about me to virtue, I was so sensual. Perhaps I should not write all this’ - ‘all this’, from Monday through till Thursday, in fact being written on Friday 29 November. On Sunday 1 December, however, a crisis is reached. Boswell, listening to a sermon, is already sketching out his evening:

I must confess that I planned, even when sober, that I would in the evening try to find Peggy Grant, and, as I had risked with her, take a full enjoyment.... About eight I got into the street and made Cameron, the chairman, inquire for Peggy Grant.... He brought her out, and I took her to the New Town, and in a mason’s shed in St. Andrew’s Square lay with her twice.

At home, sober, by now, but ‘in a confused, feverish frame’, Boswell finds his wife suspicious: ‘My dear wife asked me if I had not been about mischief. I at once confessed it. She was very uneasy, and I was ashamed and vexed at my licentiousness. Yet’, adds Boswell, ending the day’s entry (written the following day, Monday 2 December), ‘my conscience was not alarmed; so much had I accustomed my mind to think such indulgence permitted.’^[18]

Telling, for Boswell, was clearly an important dimension of living, as if the actual experience remained incomplete for him until it had also been recreated in writing, within the confessional of his journal. The prose is energetic, active, with an eye for the memorable detail - the ‘young slender slut with a red cloak’. It revives and re-enacts as it goes. And yet it does not simply recreate, for Boswell is also his own moral commentator, his own confessor: ‘I was vexed to think of it’; ‘This was desperate risking’; and especially ‘Perhaps I should not write all this.’ There is a mixing of time scales, with Boswell the writer, the man of words, the confessing voice, looking back on Boswell the actor, the misbehaver, the confessed for, so that the journal reality emerges as a superior, more roundedly truthful reality than a life simply lived with no account kept. Lived reality became, apparently, more real by virtue of giving itself over to language, of conceding its deeds, thoughts, layers, timescales to the written word, of making a perpetual confession of itself.

On this occasion, Boswell’s confession to his wife of his mischief - and again the event is illustrative - was not the end of the matter. The actual confession to Margaret is, of course, itself confessed within the journal, and therefore forms part of the more truthful reality of Boswell’s privately known self. One week later, on Sunday 8 December, Mrs Boswell ‘insisted to read this my journal,