Series:

The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell

1 primary work • 14 total works

Book 4

Cover of James Boswell's "Life of Johnson"
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.

Cover of Life of Samuel Johnson

Life of Samuel Johnson

by James Boswell

Published 1 January 1900
Abridged, with an Introduction, by Bergen Evans, The Powell-Hill text

Cover of James Boswell

James Boswell

by James Boswell

Published 29 April 2008

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.

Cover of The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the "Life of Johnson"
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.

Cover of The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1766-1769
This book is the first in a two-volume edition of James Boswell's correspondence during a period that was one of the happiest and most productive of his life--from his return from the Grand Tour in February 1766 to his marriage in November 1769. During this time Boswell became a practicing lawyer, a best-selling author, a family man, and a landowner as Laird of Dalblair. The correspondence--some 742 letters--gives a new perspective on Boswell's personal and professional development as well as on society, politics, gender issues, crime, theater, industry, agriculture, domestic life, religion, philosophy, publishing, and much more.
Volume I of the edition contains letters between Boswell and a rich diversity of correspondents, including Giuseppe Baretti, William Pitt the Elder, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Wilkes, and Zelide, the beautiful Dutch bluestocking. The texts have been transcribed from the original manuscripts. Carefully introduced and thoroughly annotated, the volume will be read with pleasure as well as for enlightenment.

Cover of The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757-1763
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.

Cover of Boswell, the Great Biographer, 1789-1795

Cover of Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763
In 1762 the 22-year-old James Boswell left Edinburgh to conquer London. His journal, published for the first time only in 1950, is an intimate and exhilarating account of the momentous nine months he spent exploring the high and low life of 18th-century London. It describes Boswell's growing friendship with the great Dr Johnson (later to be immortalized in Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson"), the taverns, playhouses and coffee houses they frequented, and the men and women Boswell befriended, such as the poet James MacPherson and the actor David Garrick.

v. 8

Cover of The Correspondence of James Boswell with James Bruce and Andrew Gibb, Overseers of the Auchinleck Estate
This collection brings together many of James Boswell's weekly letters to and from James Bruce and Andrew Gibb, the overseers of his Ayrshire estate. Dealing with the day-to-day issues of estate, rents, milking, hedge-cutting and bottle-washing, as well as more general comments on Boswell's bugeoning career, these letters reveal his closely-maintained links with his birthplace, despite his long absences from it.

v. 6

Cover of The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple, 1756-1795
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.

Cover of Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778-82
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.

Cover of English Experiment, 1785-89

English Experiment, 1785-89

by James Boswell

Published 23 February 1987

Cover of The Correspondence of James Boswell and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo

Cover of James Boswell, the Journals in Scotland, England and Ireland, 1766-1769
A fully annotated Research Edition volume of James Boswell's journalsThe journals covered by the volume record much of Boswell's life as a young advocate during the first few years of his practice at the Scottish bar. The journals also record much information about Boswell's composition and publication of his instant best-seller, Account of Corsica, his involvement as a volunteer for the Douglas camp in the great Douglas Cause and his search for a wife. During Boswell's visits to London and Oxford in 1768, he produced some of his finest journal-writing, including details of memorable and significant conversations with Samuel Johnson. The manuscript journals in the volume have been printed to correspond to the originals as closely as is feasible in the medium of print.