James Boswell

Samuel Johnson was a poet, essayist, dramatist, and pioneering lexicographer, but his continuing reputation depends less on his literary output than on the fortunate accident of finding an ideal biographer in James Boswell. As Johnson's constant and admiring companion, Boswell was able to record not only the outward events of his life, but also the humour, wit, and sturdy common sense of his conversation. His brilliant portrait of a major literary figure of the eighteenth century, enriched by historical and social detail, remains a monument to the art of biography. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This volume, first in the Yale Research Series of Boswell's journals, covers his emotionally eventful travels as a young man through the German and Swiss territories. It begins in mid-June 1764 and ends on 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 includes the complete text of Boswell's diaries and memoranda, as well as a daily record of expenses and his frequently revealing "Ten Lines a Day" poems. This volume is the Research Series parallel to the 1953 trade series edition, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, whose annotation the editor, Marlies K. Danziger, expands, supplements, and, in many instances, corrects.

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 'Ebauche 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 typical liveliness and percipience, men and women across a strikingly diverse social range. The European journal, which Boswell had unfulfilled hopes later in life of revising and publishing in the manner of his Corsican and Hebridean diaries, records the young Scot's quest for experience in hopes of a cosmopolitan broadening, cultural enrichment, and religious and spiritual security, and conversations culminating in his deeply gratifying meetings with Rousseau and Voltaire. At the same time, it documents in close personal detail an unstable Europe rebuilding and restoring itself a little more than a year after the end of the Seven Years' War, a Europe whose quest for stability amid ominous political and religious fluctuation mirrors and parallels the diarist's own.

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 first complete reprint of Boswell's book on Corsica since the eighteenth century is enhanced by comprehensive annotation, textual apparatus, and a critical introduction. Boswell designed his text in two parts: first, an Account of Corsica, which gives a historical, political, socio-economic, and cultural overview of the Corsican people, and second, the Journal of his tour to see the Corsican leader Pascal Paoli in 1765. This edition, unlike so many reprints of just the Journal, allows the reader to appreciate Boswell's original design. The young and adventuresome Boswell wanted to write a book that would swing public opinion, and perhaps the British government, to support the Corsicans in their struggle for independence. He was well aware that his English readers had but the haziest ideas about Corsica gleaned from but snatches of news in the papers. The first part would therefore provide the context within which to understand and appreciate his account of his journey to and meeting with Paoli. The complete text also illustrates aspects of Boswell that have received less attention than they might, namely, his sense of history, his political enthusiasm for national liberty, and his scholarship. He brings to the book a solid foundation in the Classics and the law, a facility in French and Italian, and a sensitivity to writing that, as the notes show, is evident in the reworking of his manuscript. The editors' introduction and the extensive annotation point up Boswell the scholar--assiduous, sedulous to get at the relevant sources, careful to do justice to those he disagreed with, and open about seeking and acknowledging advice. The text reveals Boswell as a serious and independent thinker and a writer committed to Corsica's independence. What he argued for and presumed was about to be achieved is still a matter of debate in Corsica and metropolitan France.

Boswell was the most charming companion in the world, and London becomes his dining room and his playground, his club and his confessional. No celebrant of the London world can ignore his book.' Peter Ackroyd, from the Foreword In 1762 James Boswell, then twenty-two years old, left Edinburgh for London. The famous Journal he kept during the next nine months is an intimate account of his encounters with the high-life and the low-life in London. Frank and confessional as a personal portrait of the young Boswell, the Journal is also revealing as a vivid portrayal of life in eighteenth-century London. This new edition includes a Foreword by Peter Ackroyd, which discusses Boswell's life and achievement. Key Features: * Features a new Foreword by Peter Ackroyd, author of London: The Biography * This edition of Boswell's classic text has long been recognised as THE authoritative version * Edited by the renowned Boswell expert, the late Frederick A. Pottle * Includes a first-class introduction and informative notes throughout

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.