Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell – serie

This is the first of two volumes containing Boswell's correspondence with more than 200 people, including Pitt, Rousseau, Paoli, John Wilkes, Sir Alexander Dick, Baretti and numerous women friends. The letters date from a three year period between 1766, when Boswell returned from his Grand Tour, to 1769, and his marriage to his cousin Margaret Montgomerie. They show Boswell in the happiest days of his life as the law student became a practising advocate, the literary hopeful a best-selling author, the pursuer of rich heiresses a family man, and the dreamer a landowner as the Laird of Dalblair. The letters to and from his correspondents are reprinted in full, with extensive explanatory notes.

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.

James Boswell's 'Life of Johnson', An Edition of the Original Manuscript, in Four Volumes; Vol. 4: 1780-1784This volume is the final 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. The third, 1776-1780, edited by Thomas F. Bonnell was published in 2012. This fourth volume traces Boswell's processes of composition from first draft to final publication. It restores much deleted material and passages lost or overlooked at proof and revision stage. It also corrects a host of errors—from compositorial to misreadings—that have stood in all editions of Boswell’s biographical masterwork. Thomas Bonnell's annotation clarifies a range of textual issues, and sheds revealing light on Boswell's processes of selection and deletion.

Marshall Waingrow's opus magnum is not a corrected edition of the printed text of Boswell's Life of Johnson. Rather, Waingrow presents an edition of the manuscript which enables us to follow Boswell's compositional process through successive revisions.

The Correspondence of James Boswell with James Bruce and Andrew Gibb, Overseers of the Auchinleck Estate

These letters chart the friendship between Boswell and the man he called his "most intimate friend", William Johnson Temple. Covering the period from Boswell and Temple's student days at Edinburgh University until their mid-30s, the dialogue reveals the two men's thoughts on their families, ambitions, sex-life and friendship. Each is the other's "brother confessor" and the letters provide glimpses into Boswell's personality and the subjective life of an 18th-century country parson.

The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1766-1769

This edition, expanded to include the text of letters unavailable at the time of the volume's first publication in 1969, records James Boswell's quest over a period of more than twenty years to amplify his knowledge of his major biographical subject, Samuel Johnson, through a detailed correspondence with a wide network of friends, informants, and other authorities. The volume, with revised and updated annotation, shows not just Boswell’s struggles through his personal distresses to gather material for his Life of Johnson, but notes many of his revisions of his sources, changes made in manuscript and proof, and revisions of the first and second editions. It presents letters that illuminate the contemporary reception of his powerfully innovative, controversial, and influential biography (which appeared first in 1791), taking the story as far as exchanges in 1808 between Boswell’s friend and editor, Edmond Malone, and his son, James Boswell the younger, about corrections for the sixth edition of 1811. Throughout, the annotation brings to life an extensive range of eighteenth-century figures, issues and topics.The Times Literary Supplement (23 July 1970) found the interest of this ‘fascinating’ volume threefold: ‘It gives fresh evidence of Boswell’s scrupulousness, ability and tact; it leads us to a fuller understanding of what people expected from biography, and what were eighteenth-century notions of propriety and accuracy; and it enables us perhaps to define more clearly the achievement of Boswell’s masterpiece.’ This corrected and enlarged version (the first edition has been out of print for two decades) will serve as a valuable supplement and companion to the Yale manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, upon which all future editions of Boswell’s biography will need to draw.

This volume, ninth in the Research Series of correspondence in the Yale Boswell Editions, assembles the bulk of the surviving letters between the young Boswell and his circle of friends and acquaintances in a period crucial to his personal and authorial development, up to the time he wrote his now famous journal in London in 1762-63. Opening with an exchange - rooted in his rebellious adolescent fascination with the Edinburgh theatre - with the gentleman-actor West Digges, it closes with letters written in July 1763 near the end of his second visit to London (the one in which he first met Samuel Johnson), a short time before his reluctant departure for legal study in Utrecht. The volume features centrally the correspondence between Boswell and his friend and literary collaborator Andrew Erskine (1740-93), a poet-soldier of the kind the young Boswell briefly aspired to be. Their surviving letters, printed here alongside the revised versions in the facetious Letters between the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and James Boswell, Esq., Boswell’s first book-length publication, and the first to bear his name, offer revealingly early evidence of the kinds of selective self-revision Boswell would employ in his later writings and perfect in the Life of Johnson (1791).Overall, these letters document Boswell’s fluid experiments in selfhood as he ponders his life’s future possible trajectories - as soldier, lawyer, wit, author, bon-vivant, Scots laird, or M.P. Some thirty-five correspondents are represented in more than 150 letters and other documents (such as verse-epistles), comprehensively annotated to the long-established standards of the Yale Boswell Editions.

This volume, first in the Yale Research Series of Boswell's journals, covers his emotionally eventful youthful travels through the German and Swiss territories, from mid-June 1764 (after his law studies in Utrecht) to New Year's Day, 1765, when he crossed the Alps for the next stages of his European tour, in Italy, Corsica and France. The volume is the Research Series parallel to Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, ed. F. A. Pottle (1953), whose annotation the editor, Marlies K. Danziger, has greatly deepened, expanded, supplemented and in many cases corrected. In keeping with the editorial policies of the Research Series, it restores Boswell's original spelling, punctuation and paragraphing (and his generally less than perfect French). The editor's detailed notes illuminate the contemporary political and historical context as well as a vast array of contemporary issues, concepts and personalities no longer familiar to modern readers (especially English-speaking ones). As well as the text of the fully-written journal, the volume includes Boswell's personal daily memoranda and his frequently revealing 'Ten Lines a Day' poems; the autobiographical 'Ébauche de ma vie' written for Rousseau, along with its various drafts, outlines, and attendant correspondence; his detailed expense accounts (a window on the fluctuating currencies and erratic economy of a Europe not yet formed into our modern nation-states); and four maps, adapted from contemporary cartographic records, illustrating Boswell's complicated and often arduous itinerary. Boswell's European travels followed his exhilarating stay in London of 1762-1763 and his mostly bleak winter in the United Provinces in 1763-64. Though forever to be best known for his later accounts of his principal biographical subject, Samuel Johnson, Boswell has emerged since the recovery of his private papers as a compelling autobiographer, and here shows his fascination with, and abilities to record with typic

This volume is the first complete and unexpurgated edition of James Boswell's account of his sojourn in Italy and France, accompanied with extensive annotations, appendices (including items not previously published) and other editorial material. A single day's entry in Boswell's journal can require discussions of a wide range of topics such as post roads, architectural history, opera buffa, taxidermy, political theory and classical mythology, to name just a few examples. It is an important contribution to the study of what scholars now conceive as multiple European enlightenments and contributes significantly to our understanding of the set of travel practices, itineraries and institutions associated with 'The Grand Tour'.

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.

It's 1778, Boswell is now aproaching his 40th birthday, married with three young children and a fourth on its way. His father, the laird of Auchinleck, is ill and dying. Boswell himself is full of both the doubts of middle age and the pleasures of family life. Far removed from the rakish, scholarly and amorous adventures described in earlier journals, "Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck" records Boswell's daily trials and incidents as he struggles to manage the family estate of Auchinleck in Ayrshire. Full of momentary detail and flashes of self-knowledge, Boswell's journal is an insight into the mind of the mature diarist.