James Boswell - Edinburgh Journals, 1767-1786

Boswells Edinburgh Journals

P RAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION :

Undoubtedly the most vivid, honest and complete account that exists of Edinburgh at one of its great periods... [Boswells] journals are still topical as well as vastly entertaining.

The Scotsman

Boswells journals are an incomparable, intoxicating, timeless record of life in Enlightenment Edinburgh... In this handsome edition... Milne has taken entries from the indispensable Yale edition and knitted them seamlessly into a narrative which spans twenty years, with helpful connecting passages and a flurry of judicious and unobtrusive footnotes and witty appendices. The result is a fully rounded portrait of a man who wore his fallibilities on his forehead.

Alan Taylor, Sunday Herald

[Boswells] London Journal... sold a million copies when it was published more than a hundred and fifty years after his death... His much less well-known journals of his nineteen years as an Edinburgh advocate are themselves full of interest. They contain, for example, his interview with the dying David Hume, a vivid, journalistic account that is strikingly modern in tone, remarkable at least as much for the interviewers reactions as for what the interviewee says. They record Boswells greedy concourse with prostitutes and his almost heroic bouts of drinking. They also detail periods of debilitating melancholia, which rendered him almost paralysed with gloom for days on end.

Adam Sisman, Literary Review

Boswells tempestuous career as a Scottish advocate can now be followed in compulsive detail.

New York Review of Books

The journals... amount to a painfully truthful expos of their lovable authors many quirks and foibles... In deliriously skewed detail, Boswell opens out the life of Edinburgh at the time.

Irish Times

Hugh Milne brilliantly brings together journal entries and correspondence selected from the various volumes of the Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell... This is a new picture of Enlightenment Edinburgh... in that we now have these rich passages, with their cast of characters straight out of Kays Portraits, on which to feast in their entirety for the first time.

Scottish Book Collector

An enjoyable anthology... It brings together for the first time in a single volume the reprobates accounts of his escapades in his home city.

Times Literary Supplement

Boswells scandalously frank journals show the great biographer to have been a truly remarkable diarist as well.

Scotland on Sunday

Milne aimed to produce a reading edition of the Yale volumes, conveying a fair representation of every aspect of Boswells life during the relevant period. In this he succeeds splendidly, and this book will be a welcome addition to the shelves of all who are intrigued by Boswell and the Edinburgh of his day.

Book of the Old Edinburgh Club

Milne has produced a masterly work, a most valuable addition to Boswellian studies... This fine publication is Scottish publishing at its best, with one of the most remarkable figures in the history of all literature as its subject.

Scots Law Times

This eBook edition published in 2013 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2001 by Mercat Press

This revised edition published 2013

Yale University, 2001

Introduction and notes Hugh M Milne, 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Print ISBN: 978-1-90656-661-6

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-586-4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This volume is dedicated by the editor to Odell, Natasha and Alexandra

This volume has been prepared as a reading edition of the journals kept by Boswell while practising in Edinburgh as an advocate from 1767 to 1786. The text of the selected journal entries is taken from the following volumes of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell: Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769; Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774; Boswells Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1773; Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776; Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778; Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778-1782; Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782-1785; and Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785-1789. The extracts from Boswells correspondence which are to be found amongst the journal entries are likewise taken from those volumes. Parts of the Introduction, Epilogue and annotations (including bridging passages between journal entries) are based on, or contain quotations from, the text of journal entries as set out in those and other volumes of the Yale Editions. To avoid an excessive number of footnotes, dates of journal entries from which extracts are quoted in bridging passages between journal entries are not normally supplied unless the dates cannot be ascertained from the context. All quotations from Boswells correspondence in the Introduction, Epilogue and annotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Yale Editions and, except where the contrary is shown, are from volumes containing the journals rather than volumes relating primarily to correspondence.

For full bibliographical details of the various volumes of the Yale Editions from which material has been used, reference should be made to the list of sources (pp. 565-70), where the volumes in question are marked with an asterisk.

The text is exactly as it appears in the Yale Editions apart from changes to the spelling of some names, minor stylistic alterations, the omission of certain passages and the occasional insertion of words (in square brackets) either to make a passage grammatically correct following the removal of words or to make the meaning of a passage clearer (being a device also used by the editors of the Yale Editions). I have made alterations to the spelling of the names of places in only a few instances: Livingston instead of Livingstone, Blair Drummond instead of Blair-Drummond (the former being the spelling adopted by the editors of Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck while the latter was chosen by the editors of Boswell: The Applause of the Jury), and Advocates Close instead of Advocates Close. The only alteration I have made to the name of a person in the text has been the insertion where it does not already appear of a hyphen in the name James Hunter-Blair (being the spelling given in G E Cokaynes Complete Baronetage). No distinction is made between square brackets already inserted in the text by the editors of the Yale Editions and square brackets inserted by me. Differences in editorial practices adopted by the editors of the various volumes of the Yale Editions have resulted in some minor inconsistencies in the text of this volume, such as memorial in certain passages and Memorial in others, but I trust that such discrepancies will be seen as immaterial.

Although this volume is not a complete version of the journals kept by Boswell while living and working in Edinburgh, the book contains the bulk of those journals, and, it is hoped, conveys a fair representation of every aspect of Boswells life during the relevant period. Omissions from the text have been made with reluctance and have primarily been made in order to remove those passagesor in some instances complete entrieswhich are uninteresting or obscure, or which would result in needless repetition. Omissions are not marked except to the extent that where they require the restructuring of a sentence the necessary alteration is shown in square brackets.