Dead Man Talking: James Boswell, Ghostwriting, and the Dying Speech of John Reid

This essay examines lawyer and biographer James Boswell's anonymously published broadside,The Mournful Case of Poor Misfortunate and Unhappy John Reid(1774). Drawing on and subverting the generic conventions of the “dying speech,” Boswell's unauthorized account of Reid presents his condemned client as a living ghost. Anticipating his treatment of Samuel Johnson in theLife(1791), Boswell's deployment of this supernatural conceit ameliorates the inconsistencies of Reid's character by configuring the otherwise morally questionable and “unfeeling” criminal as an idealized and sympathetic biographical subject. The broadside was not only an attempt to redeem Reid's character and concomitantly Boswell's own role in defending Reid for posterity, but also reveals the limitations and complacencies of eighteenth-century criminal literature and its connection with legal practice.