James Boswell

James Boswell (1740–1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a generous and varied selection of Boswell’s journalistic writings, most of which have not been published since the eighteenth century. It offers a new angle on the history of journalism, an idiosyncratic view of literature, politics, and public life in late eighteenth-century Britain, and an original perspective on a complex and engaging literary personality.

This volume is the third and penultimate in the Yale Boswell Editions' transcription of Boswell's heavily revised manuscript of his biography of Johnson. Designed as a research supplement to the Hill-Powell version of the 'Life' and employing the complex but accessible system devised for the series by the late Marshall Waingrow, the edition traces Boswell's processes of composition from first draft to final publication. It restores much deleted material, passages lost or overlooked at proof and revise stage, and corrects a host of compositorial and other errors and misreadings. Professor Bonnell's annotation clarifies a wide range of textual and editorial issues, and sheds new light on Boswell's processes of selection and deletion.