Boswell's London
by Martin Schlombs, November 2025
At the same time as the Poet-Artists exhibition was showing in the Athenaeum, our partner gallery, CASSIUS&Co., was showing works by the famous American satirist, Robert Crumb. The exhibition was accompanied by a selection of satirical books reflecting Crumb’s many influences.
Robert Crumb has held a fascination for me since childhood, a fascination born not from books or galleries, but from lived experience. I would accompany my father to visit him in Sauve, a quaint medieval village nestled along the Vidourle River in the South of France. This was not the Crumb of countercultural legend, but a man inhabiting a world of his own making: a landscape of cafe dwellers with pen, paper, and white-out ever in hand, of sun-baked flea markets in nearby townships. Now, twenty years removed, I am no longer certain where memory ends and fiction begins. One of the most striking images etched in my mind is that of Robert fencing in the streets of Sauve with Pete Poplaski, a former Marvel cartoonist and painter, who would don the costume of the great Zorro. One can scarcely imagine the excitement this spectacle instilled in a boy of eight—where else does such theatre unfold in medias res? It was a living cartoon, a breach between the imagined and the real that Crumb himself would spend his career exploring.
It is this memory I carry with me as we celebrate Robert Crumb at CASSIUS&Co. This exhibition argues for Crumb’s rightful place not as a mere provocateur, but as a cornerstone of American art, a figure who, alongside pioneers like George Herriman, fundamentally transformed comics from mere entertainment into a potent medium for expressive, philosophical inquiry. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Crumb’s A Klassik Komic, a comic adaptation of James Boswell’s 18th century London Journal. First published in issue 3 of Weirdo, this comic holds special significance as Crumb’s first mature foray into adapting a literary work, a venture that would anticipate his later monumental engagements with Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, and the Old Testament, thereby constituting a fundamentally new pathway in his oeuvre.
In the 18th-century Scottish gentleman James Boswell, Crumb found a historical ally and kindred spirit vibrating across the centuries. Boswell—not an aristocrat, but the well-born heir to a Scottish landed estate—was, as a Scot in Georgian London, perpetually the outsider. Boswell’s remarkably candid London Journal, discovered in the 1930s and published to international acclaim in 1950, chronicles his life as a young bachelor in London, perpetually torn between the literary and pious pursuits of high society and a powerful, often tumultuous, inner life. The journal is a marvellous piece of writing precisely because its protagonist is so flawed and human; while he can often seem a boisterous fool, he is also deeply, endearingly relatable. Like Crumb, Boswell was highly self-conscious and possessed of a vivid sexual imagination. This connection provided Crumb with the perfect conduit to explore and mock his own nature at one remove, through the rich veil of history.
Crumb’s narrative does not attempt to visualise all 250 days of Boswell’s London Journal; instead, with an editor’s precision, it curates a handful of episodes that capture the essential narrative arc of a year in the young man’s life. The comic begins with Boswell meeting the actress Louisa, his admiration rendered with an unflinching clarity that is both earnest and comical. This is followed by a dinner with his mentor Thomas Sheridan, involving lofty discussions of virtue and literature—a classic scene of Enlightenment aspiration.
Yet, merely four days later, the tone shifts: Boswell visits Louisa again, expecting sexual intercourse, and is sharply rejected. The comic then traces his relentless, often pathetic, pursuit of pleasure. In early January of 1763, he finally takes Louisa to an inn under a false name and has sex with her. A week later, he sleeps miserably and realises he has contracted gonorrhoea. In his misery, he breaks off all contact. Two months later, healed, he goes to St. James’s Park and has sex with a prostitute described as “ugly and lean”. In April, he meets another prostitute. Several weeks later, he encounters two women who agree to drink sherry and have sex, free of charge. The following day he meets his Scottish patron and friend, the rakish Lord Eglinton, and proudly recounts his sexual exploits.
Then, in a masterful pivot, Crumb brings us back to Boswell’s literary life. In July 1763, Boswell dined with the formidable man of letters Samuel Johnson and George Dempster, a member of parliament. Finally, in late July, Boswell and Johnson walk the streets together. When approached by a prostitute, their conversation turns to the misery of “irregular” love and the virtues of civilized “subordination” over savagery—a moment of profound hypocrisy and human frailty that Crumb illustrates with a brilliantly subtle detail: a barrel inscribed “Small Beer”—a contemporary term for something of trivial importance. This single image serves as Crumb’s editorial comment on the entire proceeding.
In its condensed format, A Klassik Komic positions itself as a subversive heir to the Classics Illustrated series—comics begun in the 1940s that summarised literary masterpieces into simplified, sanitised booklets for reluctant readers. Crumb disdained such comics for diminishing both literature and the comics form itself. Yet, in a characteristically paradoxical move, he appropriated its format precisely to challenge those very limitations, to engage with canonical texts with a shocking and earnest depth. He would later expand on this conceptual approach with The Book of Genesis (2009), a complete comic adaptation wryly promoted on its cover as containing “ALL 50 CHAPTERS!”
There have been few prior attempts to illustrate Boswell’s London Journal, owing to its relatively recent discovery. Crumb therefore immersed himself in the visual culture of the period. The portrait of Boswell on the cover is a jocular reinterpretation of George Dance’s 1793 portrait. The influence of William Hogarth is palpable throughout; the seventh panel keenly recalls Hogarth’s Before and After (1736), while the twenty-first panel echoes the third plate of A Rake’s Progress (1735). Stylistically, Crumb’s heavy cross-hatching, used to masterfully render the darkened interiors of 18th-century taverns and rooms, owes a great debt to Hogarth’s engraving technique. This debt receives a final, explicit acknowledgement in panel fourteen, where a sheet from A Rake’s Progress (albeit incorrectly in portrait format) hangs on a wall.
Yet for all these historical references, the final work is unmistakably and singularly Crumb’s. His soft, sloping lines, especially in the nuanced and empathetic rendering of faces, are his own signature. The women, with their emphatically prominent breasts and buttocks, are the objects of Crumb’s signature fantasies and obsessions—inventions not of Boswell or Hogarth, but of Crumb himself. The comic is a fusion: the 18th century’s moral satire filtered through the 20th century’s neuroses. It is a testament to Crumb’s genius that he could so seamlessly intertwine his voice with those of Boswell and Hogarth, creating a work that is simultaneously a faithful adaptation, a sharp historical critique, and a deeply personal confession. It is this very alchemy—this blurring of lines between memory and history, between satire and self-portrait—that I first glimpsed in a village square in the South of France, and which this exhibition invites you to explore.
- Martin Schlombs