Richard B. Sher – författare

In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. "The Enlightenment and the Book" seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Life of Samuel Johnson" were made by their authors alone. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth century involved complex partnerships between authors and their publishers. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking for a variety of reasons, ranging from accumulating profits to advancing human knowledge.

In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. "The Enlightenment and the Book" seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Life of Samuel Johnson" were made by their authors alone. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth century involved complex partnerships between authors and their publishers. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking for a variety of reasons, ranging from accumulating profits to advancing human knowledge.

This Element throws new light on James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson by investigating its early publication history. Despite precarious psychological and financial circumstances and other limitations, Boswell was both author and publisher of the two-volume quarto edition that appeared in 1791. This study utilizes little-known documents to explore the details and implications of Boswell's risky undertaking. It argues that the success of the first edition was the result not only of Boswell's biographical genius but also of collaboration with a devoted support network, including the bookseller Charles Dilly, the printer Henry Baldwin and his employees, several newspaper and magazine editors, Boswell's 'Gang' (Edmond Malone, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and John Courtenay) and other members of The Club, and Sir William Forbes. Although the muddled second edition (1793) suffered from Boswell's increasing dysfunction in the years before his death in 1795, the resilient Boswellian network subsequently secured the book's exalted reputation.

Since its original publication in 1985, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment has come to be regarded as a classic work in eighteenth-century Scottish history and Enlightenment studies. It depicts Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson, John Home, and William Robertson as an intimate coterie that played a central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, seen here not only as an intellectual but as a cultural movement. These men were among the leaders in the University of Edinburgh, in the Moderate party in the Church of Scotland, and in Edinburgh’s thriving clubs. They used their institutional influence and their books, plays, sermons, and pamphlets to promulgate the tenets of Moderatism, including polite Presbyterianism, Christian Stoicism, civic humanism, social and political conservatism, and the tolerant, cosmopolitan values of the international Enlightenment. Using a wide variety of sources and an interdisciplinary methodology, this collective biography portrays these "Moderate literati" as zealous activists for the cause in which they believed, ranging from support for a Scots militia, Ossian, and Roman Catholic relief to opposition to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the American and French Revolutions.

This volume, tenth in the Yale Boswell Editions Research Series of correspondence, collects the letters exchanged between James Boswell (1740–1795) and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo (1739–1806), eminent banker, civic improver, philanthropist, literary and cultural patron, and lay leader of Edinburgh’s ‘English Episcopal’ community. Forbes served Boswell as his most valued Scottish advisor, an affectionate and admired counsellor to whom he would often turn for personal, financial, moral, and religious guidance, and whom he would name executor of his estate and co-guardian of his children. Their friendship probably began in 1759 as new members of the same Masonic lodge in Edinburgh, and it deepened over time, and included their families. Boswell shared with Forbes significant portions of his private journal, and discussed with him his authorial ambitions as he developed the innovative biographical technique that would characterize his major publications on Samuel Johnson. He sought Forbes’s opinions about his original 1773 account of what would become his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (1785), and about his journal of his 1777 visit with Johnson at Ashbourne, later used in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell, in turn, broadened and enriched Forbes’s social range, providing a gateway into his remarkable circle of friends in London, in particular the members of the ‘Literary Club’. As Richard B. Sher explains in his introduction, none of Boswell’s other close friends straddled Boswell’s various worlds—his family life and professional career in Edinburgh, his lairdship of the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, his literary life in London—in this way. The volume, while thoroughly documenting the friendship that lies at its core, also illuminates the lives of Boswell and Forbes individually, especially Boswell’s final decade in London. It publishes a total of 111 comprehensively annotated letters, few of which have appeared previously in print: 79 exchanged between Forbes and Boswell between 1772 and 1794, and 32 involving other correspondents. The edition draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts in both the Boswell Collection at Yale and the Fettercairn Papers in the National Library of Scotland, including revealing letters from Forbes to his beloved wife ‘Betsy’, Lady Forbes, and to his close friend James Beattie, who would become Forbes’s own biographical subject in the decade after Boswell’s death.