"It is now become so much the fashion to publish letters, that in
order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can," Samuel
Johnson declared, according to Boswell. And Boswell answered, "Do
what you will, Sir, you cannot avoid it. Should you even write as
ill as you can, your letters would be published as curiosities."
But Johnson's letters are far more than that. Even at their most
cursory and casual, they are never less than precious biographical
documents, and many of them mirror, define, and re-create a vivid
likeness of the most versatile writer of eighteenth-century
England. With these three volumes Princeton University Press
inaugurates the first scholarly edition of this remarkable material
to appear in forty years--the planned five-volume series The
Letters of Samuel Johnson. Known as the Hyde Edition, the project
will be completed with the fourth volume, covering the years 1782
through 1784, and the fifth, containing the comprehensive index and
appendices. The series as a whole will present fifty-two previously
unknown letters or parts of letters that have come to light since
the publication of R. W. Chapman's three-volume set (Oxford, 1952).
Such "new" letters, however, are scarcely more important than those
for which only inferior printed texts or copies of varying
reliability had previously been recovered. The Hyde Edition offers
scores of texts transcribed for the first time from the original
documents--a feature of special importance in the case of Johnson's
revealing letters to Hester Thrale, many of which have been
available only in expurgated form. The Hyde Edition is also the
first systematically to record substantive deletions, which can
yield intimate knowledge of Johnson's stylistic procedures, mental
habits, and chains of association. Furthermore, its ownership
credits document the current disposition of the manuscripts,
hundreds of which have changed hands during the last four decades.
Finally, the annotation of the letters incorporates the many
significant discoveries of postwar Johnsonian scholarship, as well
as decoding references that had previously resisted explanation.
The result is a far richer understanding of Samuel Johnson's life,
work, and milieu. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton
Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again
make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished
backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the
original texts of these important books while presenting them in
durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton
Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly
heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton
University Press since its founding in 1905.
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