Boswell - London Journal 1762-1763

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First published 1950
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2010
Reprinted with corrections 2013

Editorial material copyright Gordon Turnbull, 2010

Cover: Detail from View of Covent Garden with St. Pauls Church, (c.1750) by Balthasar Nebot Tate, London

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-21545-6

PENGUIN CLASSICS

JAMES BOSWELL (174095) was born in Edinburgh, the eldest surviving child of the devoutly Calvinistic Euphemia (Erskine) Boswell and Alexander Boswell, Edinburgh advocate, later a judge in the Scottish Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary, and laird of the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire. Reluctant to follow his father and grandfather in a legal career after studies in arts and law at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, he found more pleasure and excitement in the company of theatre people and authors. He ran away to London for a first escapade in 1760, and on a second visit there, in 1763, he met Samuel Johnson, who would become the subject of his later path-breaking biographical works. Capitulating to his fathers wishes, he set off in August 1763 for law study in Utrecht, where he met Belle de Zuylen (later Madame de Charrire) then took an extended and unorthodox Grand Tour, during which he met Rousseau and Voltaire, among other notables. He made a dangerous detour to the little-visited island of Corsica, at that time fighting for its independence from the Genoese. That struggle, and its leader, General Pasquale Paoli, became the subject of his first major publication, the Account of Corsica (1768). He practised law ably but unhappily in Edinburgh for some twenty years, having married his penniless cousin Margaret Montgomerie in 1769, kept up a prolific miscellaneous journalism for Edinburgh and London periodicals, suffered serious bouts of depression (hypochondria) and drank heavily, often recording his life in a candid, detailed series of diaries. He visited London during court recesses almost annually, relishing life there, and recording (among much else) Johnsons conversation. He was elected to The Club in 1773, and later that year toured the Scottish Highlands and western isles with Johnson. He succeeded as laird of Auchinleck in 1782, but, though proud of his ancestry and estate, he moved his family to London in 1786, ostensibly to try to transfer to the English Bar but in reality to research and write his long-planned biography of Johnson, who had died in late 1784. He served as recorder of Carlisle 178890, under the patronage of the tyrannical James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, but remained disappointed that he rose thereafter to no significant political office. Following his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with SamuelJohnson LL.D. (1785) and The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), he was known for the century and a half after his death in 1795 essentially as Johnsons biographer. He won a remarkable posthumous renewal of fame in our own time with the recovery of his diaries, letters and other private papers, long thought to have been lost or destroyed, in a sequence of improbable retrievals in the early twentieth century, bringing him new recognition as a gifted and candid recorder of himself and his times.

GORDON TURNBULL graduated with first-class honours at the Australian National University, and, after teaching in the English Department of the University of Newcastle (New South Wales), took his PhD at Yale, and taught at Yale and at Smith College before succeeding as general editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell in 1997.

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To re-edit the manuscript used for so admired a volume as Frederick A. Pottles frequently reissued worldwide bestseller of 1950 was (to borrow the opening of Boswells Life of Johnson) an arduous and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task. I have freshly transcribed the manuscript of this portion of Boswells diary and private memoranda, and re-researched and reannotated the whole, but while these researches have allowed correction in places in which Pottles edition erred, and the filling-in of matters it passed over in editorial silence, they have naturally been helped by the resources of the former Yale Boswell Editions, established under Pottles direction and carried on by his collaborators and heirs. For his sustained support of this project intellectual, moral and practical I warmly thank the former Yale University deputy provost, Charles Long. I have been able to consult a collection of research notes made by Rufus Reiberg for a planned but not completed volume of Boswells earliest journals, a file of post-publication correspondence and other documents connected with Pottles edition, and a copy of that edition with some marginal corrections in Pottles hand. For assistance with specific research items I am grateful to Brian Allen, Nigel Aston, Rachel Margolis Bond, Marie-Jeanne Colombani, Catherine Dille, Rmy Duthille, Hiba Hafiz, Jacob Sider Jost, James McLaverty, Michele Martinez, Elisa Milkes, Carrie Roider, John Staines, John Stone and Nicholas Wrightson. I am deeply indebted to Marian Homans-Turnbull for some desperately needed last-second scribal assistance. I thank Mark Spicer and Nadine Honigberg for much practical help, and Daniel Gustafson for a careful reading of a draft of text and notes. The work of Bob Davenport included but far exceeded the normal duties of a copy-editor, and his attentions to the later drafts of text and annotation to the first proofs improved the edition in style, substance and accuracy. Most especially, my work for this edition and James J. Caudles for the Yale Research Series volume devoted to Boswells journals of 175863 have enjoyed a particularly fruitful reciprocity. It is a pleasure to record here my admiration for Dr Caudles research skills, and appreciation of his generosity. The editions errors and infelicities are my own.