Samuel Johnson and James Boswell spent the autumn of 1773 touring through the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland as far west as the islands of Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, Inchkenneth and Iona. Both kept detailed notes of their impressions, and later published separate accounts of their journey. These works contain some of the finest pieces of travel writing ever produced: they are also magnificent historical documents as well as portraits of two extraordinary men of letters. Together they paint a vivid picture of a society which was still almost unknown to the Europe of the Enlightenment. Entertaining, profound, and marvellously readable, they are a valuable chronicle of a lost age and a fascinating people. For the first time, Ronald Black's edition brings together Johnson's and Boswell's accounts of each of the six stages of the two men's journey - Lowlands, Skye, Coll, Mull and back to the mainland. Illustrated with prints by Thomas Rowlandson, it includes a critical introduction, translations of the Latin texts and brief notes.

This edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson details how Boswell's original words were changed during the publication process, and offers a fresh reading of Boswell's work. Marshall Waingrow charts the changes made during composition and at the proof stage, and corrects and explains the printer's misreadings and author's errors which crept into the final edition. This edition of the manuscript is a companion work to the standard scholarly edition of the Life of Johnson, known as the Hill-Powell version.

This edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson" details how Boswell's original words were changed during the publication process, and offers a fresh reading of Boswell's work. Marshall Waingrow charts the changes made during composition and at the proof stage, and corrects and explains the printer's misreadings and author's errors which crept into the final edition. This edition of the manuscript is a companion work to the standard scholarly edition of the "Life of Johnson", known as the "Hill-Powell" version.

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.

Originally published in 1923, this book presents the complete text of James Boswell's 1768 work, The Journal of a Tour to Corsica. An editorial introduction is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Corsica, travel writing and the works of Boswell.

This volume, tenth in the Yale Boswell Editions Research Series of correspondence, collects the letters exchanged between James Boswell (1740-1795) and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo (1739-1806), eminent banker, civic improver, philanthropist, literary and cultural patron, and lay leader of Edinburgh's 'English Episcopal' community. Forbes served Boswell as his most valued Scottish advisor, an affectionate and admired counsellor to whom he would often turn for personal, financial, moral, and religious guidance, and whom he would name executor of his estate and co-guardian of his children. Their friendship probably began in 1759 as new members of the same Masonic lodge in Edinburgh, and it deepened over time, and included their families. Boswell shared with Forbes significant portions of his private journal, and discussed with him his authorial ambitions as he developed the innovative biographical technique that would characterize his major publications on Samuel Johnson. He sought Forbes's opinions about his original 1773 account of what would become his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (1785), and about his journal of his 1777 visit with Johnson at Ashbourne, later used in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell, in turn, broadened and enriched Forbes's social range, providing a gateway into his remarkable circle of friends in London, in particular the members of the 'Literary Club'. As Richard B. Sher explains in his introduction, none of Boswell's other close friends straddled Boswell's various worlds--his family life and professional career in Edinburgh, his lairdship of the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, his literary life in London--in this way. The volume, while thoroughly documenting the friendship that lies at its core, also illuminates the lives of Boswell and Forbes individually, especially Boswell's final decade in London. It publishes a total of 111 comprehensively annotated letters, few of which have appeared previously in print: 79 exchanged between Forbes and Boswell between 1772 and 1794, and 32 involving other correspondents. The edition draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts in both the Boswell Collection at Yale and the Fettercairn Papers in the National Library of Scotland, including revealing letters from Forbes to his beloved wife 'Betsy', Lady Forbes, and to his close friend James Beattie, who would become Forbes's own biographical subject in the decade after Boswell's death.

Considered one of the best written biographies of all-time, The Life of Samuel Johnson gives insight into the glowing mystique of the prominent English writer. By incorporating key elements from his past and personal relationships, James Boswell creates an extensive narrative of the revered figure. Drawn from Boswell's own journals, the author recounts the life and experiences of Samuel Johnson. He uses his personal connection to investigate Johnson's origin and rise to power. His career is filtered through brief episodes highlighting obstacles and successes alongside his notable peers. It's an intimate record of the celebrated writer and fixture within literary circles. Through his compelling writing, James Boswell successfully illustrates the character and reality of Samuel Johnson. The biography explores his strengths and weaknesses as well as his motivations and fears. Boswell's input is crucial to the story structure, delivering an informative and impactful narrative. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson is both modern and readable.

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.

In 1773, James Boswell made a long-planned journey across the Scottish Highlands with his English friend Samuel Johnson; the two spent more than a hundred days together. Their tour of the Hebrides resulted in two books, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), a kind of locodescriptive ethnography and Johnson's most important work between his Shakespeare edition and his Lives of the Poets. The other, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785), a travel narrative experimenting with biography, the first application of the techniques he would use in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). These two works form a natural pair and, owing that they cover much of the same material, are often read together, focusing on the Scottish highlands. The text presents a lightly-edited version of both works, preserving the original orthography and corrected typographical errors to fit modern grammar standards. The introduction and notes provide clear and concise explanations on Johnson and Boswell's respective careers, their friendship and grand biographical projects. It also examines the Scottish Enlightenment, the status of England and Scotland during the Reformation through to the Union of the Crowns, and the Jacobite

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.

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.

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.

Offering the texts of letter between Boswell and 123 correspondents, this volume covers Boswell through the early stages of his legal career in Edinburgh and closes shortly after the time of his marriage to his penniless Ayrshire cousin, Margaret Montgomerie. Among various topics, the volume traces the aftermath of Boswell's vigorous partisan legal and journalistic involvement with the Douglas Cause, the beginnings of his patronage of an obscure struggling playwright and poet, William Julius Mickle, and the publication and reception of his successful Account of Corsica and his efforts to rouse British interest in the Corsican cause.

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.

Considered one of the best written biographies of all-time, The Life of Samuel Johnson gives insight into the glowing mystique of the prominent English writer. By incorporating key elements from his past and personal relationships, James Boswell creates an extensive narrative of the revered figure. Drawn from Boswell's own journals, the author recounts the life and experiences of Samuel Johnson. He uses his personal connection to investigate Johnson's origin and rise to power. His career is filtered through brief episodes highlighting obstacles and successes alongside his notable peers. It's an intimate record of the celebrated writer and fixture within literary circles. Through his compelling writing, James Boswell successfully illustrates the character and reality of Samuel Johnson. The biography explores his strengths and weaknesses as well as his motivations and fears. Boswell's input is crucial to the story structure, delivering an informative and impactful narrative. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson is both modern and readable.