The Correspondence & Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life

by James Boswell, Professor Marshall Waingrow (Editor)

This valuable collection presents James Boswell’s quest over a period of some twenty years to amplify his personal knowledge of his major biographical subject, Samuel Johnson, through correspondence with a wide network of friends, authorities, and informants. The volume has been expanded to include 21 letters that were unavailable at the time of its first publication in 1969. Boswell’s papers testify to the diligence of his researches, illuminate his powerfully innovative biographical method, and provide the groundwork for assessments of the complex principles of selection and exclusion that came into play as his overall vision of Johnson took shape. With Marshall Waingrow’s insightful annotations, the collection brings to life an impressive gallery of figures from late eighteenth-century Britain.

Correcting production and other errors in the first edition, which has been out of print for two decades, and taking into account recent scholarship, this volume will serve as an indispensable companion to the ongoing manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson. Readers with an interest in the theory and practice of biography or the social world of Britain in the 1700s will find this book filled with enlightening information.



Copublished with Edinburgh University Press

556 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

James Boswell, 10th Laird of Auchinleck and 1st Baronet was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the eldest son of a judge, Alexander Boswell, 8th Laird of Auchinleck and his wife Euphemia Erskine, Lady Auchinleck. Boswell's mother was a strict Calvinist, and he felt that his father was cold to him. Boswell, who is best known as Samuel Johnson’s biographer, inherited his father’s estate Auchinleck in Ayrshire. His name has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer.

Boswell is also known for the detailed and frank journals that he wrote for long periods of his life, which remained undiscovered until the 1920s. These included voluminous notes on the grand tour of Europe that he took as a young nobleman and, subsequently, of his tour of Scotland with Johnson. His journals also record meetings and conversations with eminent individuals belonging to The Club, including Lord Monboddo, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith. His written works focus chiefly on others, but he was admitted as a good companion and accomplished conversationalist in his own right.