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Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763 by Frederick A Pottle Yale Editions HardCover
Boswells London Journal 1762-1763 by Frederick A Pottle
The Yale editions of the private papers of James Boswell
Hard Cover
370 pages
Copyright 1950
CONTENTS
Preface By Christopher MorleyIx
Introduction By Frederick A. Pottle 1
Text Of Boswell's London Journal 1762-176339
Appendix I 335
Appendix Ii 337
Index 343
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
OPENING PAGE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF BOSWELL'S LONDON JOURNAL 1762-1763 Facing page 39
TWO PAGES OF THE MANUSCRIPT RECORDING BOSWELL'S FIRST MEETING WITH JOHNSON Facing page 260
MAP OF LONDON IN 1761Endpapers
PREFACE
As the express trains between London and Liverpool go racing across the Midlands, the passenger can see, for a minute or so, the noble bulk of Lichfield Cathedral. It rises above the green fields of Staffordshire, a couple of miles west of the line, landmark of the town where Samuel Johnson was born. I'm afraid many travellers miss that glimpse, and I know I have caused puzzled looks by nudging attention to it; but there must also be others who, when they see the spire, think momentarily of the extraordinary life, and the endless fountain of ink, that began below it. When I last saw it (autumn, 1949), on account of some weakness in the great fleche, it was "reticulated and decussated" in steel scaffold, fine as cobweb, hardly less spectacular than the cathedral itself.
I remember that glimpse as an emblem of the work, patient these many years, of scholars and collectors who, before they are done, will have given us exciting new perspectives not only on Johnson, but, more to the present purpose, on his friend and biographer, James Boswell. With equal craft and judgment the scholars and collectors have clustered about a famous edifice, mending, supporting, renewing the tall spire. The parable is not exact: there was certainly no instability in the great Cathedral of Biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson: but that masterpiece begins to emerge, from devoted masonry and restoration, taller and more decorative than ever. Of that intricate scaffolding this book is a small but critical platform. These notes, or well-meant nudges, are not for the architects and experts; only for riders in the train.
Perennially, fact reasserts prevalence over fiction. It would be impossible to invent any detective story so fantastic as the history of the Boswell Papers, running through five generations from Scotland to Ireland, and from their initial suppression and neglect by those most intimately concerned, to their discovery, a century and a half later, their purchase by an American, and then their eventual transfer to a safe new haven in the vaults of the Yale University Library. To understand what happened we must go back to Boswell's strict Presbyterian family.
From the first, Boswell's family had disapproved of his association with Johnson, and even more of his profligate way of life. At twenty-one he had fathered an illegitimate child; afterwards his amorous escapades had been both numerous and notorious; still later, though devoted to his wife ("that valuable woman"), he had been incapable of remaining faithful to her. Small wonder, then, that by the time he died he was already a legend of impropriety, which death transmuted to the skeleton in the family closet. The papers he left-and especially the uninhibited journals, of which this volume is one-served only to confirm this impression of him within the home circle at Auchinleck; and later events, as we shall see, reinforced it further. So it would appear that the family legend of Boswell as an ancestor to be on the defensive about, and therefore to be kept under cover, took firm hold and was passed on from generation to generation.
But "his chosen lifework," as Professor Chauncey B. Tinker has said of Boswell, was "defeating the forces of oblivion." Even Tinker, at that moment (1922), did not know how decisively Boswell had defeated them. The process took a long time, but at his death, in 1795, it was already well begun. Being both a canny Scot and a lawyer with an eye to the future, Boswell left a will in which he named three of his friends as trustees of his unpublished manuscripts: Sir William Forbes, the Reverend W. J. Temple, and Edmond Malone. The fact that he took this precaution is proof enough that Boswell attached considerable importance to his papers, no matter what his immediate heirs may have thought.
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