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.
General
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