Boswell's journals record his melancholy moods as regularly as all his other sensations. This hypochondria or “Hyp” was at once another pose for the chameleon diarist (he wrote an entire series of periodical papers under the pseudonym “The Hypochondriack”), and the most intractable, unwriteable part of himself. Any eighteenth-century writer expressing melancholy was doubly conscious of its public and private dimensions: in Boswell's journals its presence focuses the problems of integrating life and writing with the degree of intimacy that his record tries to achieve.

Melancholy or hypochondria was a recognized medical condition also known as “spleen,” which was supposed peculiarly characteristic of English persons of quality, idleness being the condition under which it flourished. It was accompanied by languor, disgust for worldly activities which charmed at other times, and the feeling of pointlessness identified by Boswell in his London Journal. Luxury it was to some extent, and even its victims recognized a fashionable dimension to their affliction. But it was also painfully real and intensely private: the silent resistance of the inner self to all the demands of social living.