This volume is the third in the Yale Boswell Editions’ manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, a four-volume sequence designed to stand as a research supplement to the Hill-Powell version of the Life. The first volume, edited by Marshall Waingrow and covering the years 1709–1765, appeared in 1994, and the second, 1766–1776, edited by Bruce Redford with Elizabeth Goldring, in 1998. In this volume, for the years 1776–1780, Thomas F. Bonnell continues the genetic transcription of Boswell’s heavily revised manuscript—a master narrative into which Boswell keyed scores of satellite ‘Papers Apart’ and other documents—in the system devised by Waingrow for the series. The text picks up at the point at which Boswell and Johnson return to London after a Spring jaunt in 1776 to the English midlands, and follows Johnson through the years during which he began, laboured on, and then produced the first several volumes of the greatest work of his later career, the Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to The Works of the English Poets (commonly known as the ‘Lives of the Poets’). Bonnell’s transcription tracks the many and various changes made in manuscript, proof, revises, and successive published editions, identifies (and for the first time in many instances definitively corrects) compositorial and other misreadings and errors that have long remained undetected, and restores a revealing array of deleted and lost material.
