King James IV of Scotland granted Thomas Boswell, of the Boswell family of Balmuto, the lands of Auchinleck in Ayrshire in this royal charter from 1504. Thomas Boswell fell fighting alongside his monarch at Flodden Field in 1513. In 1782 his descendant, James Boswell, would become the ninth laird of Auchinleck. Today this royal charter is housed in Yale’s Beinecke Library with the rest of the Boswell collection.
See the full charter under the jump!
Some time after Boswell’s death in 1795, his daughter Euphemia (1774 - 1834) wrapped up his letters to her older brother Alexander (1775 - 1822), also known as “Sandie/Sandy,” in this sheet of paper. Fifty-one of these letters are held at Yale’s Beinecke library.
Sometimes we just want to gaze at the spines of our rare books, like this detail of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) in a binding contemporary with the publication of this masterpiece…
@multcolib Sometimes we want to do the same thing - gaze in awe - when we’re thumbing through the Boswell papers at the Beinecke, like these original manuscript pages of JB’s biographical masterpiece, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
Boswell Book Festival, Dumfries House, Ayrshire, 12-14 May 2017
There was another meeting of the tutors, and we all dined very well. I was sorry at my ignorance of country affairs, but glad that I was sensible of my ignorance. I searched poor Treebank’s cabinet, and took what letters related to Sir Walter’s affairs, or were written by father or myself. It affected me with a strange feeling to observe how the most confidential papers of a dead man are ransacked. I must really be cautious as to my own. Yet, alas! of what consequence is this to a dead man, who is either insensible of any uneasiness from such a circumstance, or above it. Miss Macredie went away today. (Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778, eds. Charles C. McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle, McGraw Hill: New York and Heinneman: London, 1970.)
Volumes in the Yale Boswell Editions research series are now available in electronic form on the subscription based Intelex Past Masters.
The volumes in the Yale Boswell Editions research series are now
available in electronic form on the subscription based Intelex Past
Masters.
Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, & Emotion, 1760-1848, edited by Nancy E. Johnson, Bucknell University Press, 2015.
From Dr. Charles Burney,1
Saturday 16 July 1791
MS. Yale (C 705).
Address: To James Boswell Esqr., Great Portland Street
Endorsement: Dr. Burney
Chelsea College, July 16th 1791
Dear Sir: So much time has elapsed between the publication of our friend’s life and my being possessed of leisure sufficient to finish the perusal of it, that I shall seem to have waited till I could join the general Chorus of your praise. The approbation of an individual can now afford you but small gratification:2 the effects of praise and abuse are always proportioned to our wants and expectations.
Johnson had enemies, who of course will try to deprecate your work. The number of these will perhaps be somewhat augmented by your success, as well as by the severity of his private opinions;3 but to all else, the book is so uncommonly alluring, that I have hitherto met with no unprejudiced readers who have not been sorry when they were arrived at the last page. Some indeed have thought that too many of the weaknesses, prejudices, and infirmities, of this truly great and virtuous Man have been recorded;4 but besides the reputation which you will acquire for the fidelity of your narrative in telling all you knew, it will elevate the Character of our Hero: for what other man could have had his private life so deeply and minutely proved, without discovering vices, or at least foibles, more hurtful to Society than those which you have disclosed? The most gratifying information which I can give you concerning the effect of your narrative, is, that it has impressed your most hostile readers with a much more favourable opinion of the goodness of our friends heart than then had before conceived, though some of them were never insensible to his merit as a writer…. [from Waingrow, Marshall. The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, 1969]
The great appeal of Boswell’s Life of Johnson to C. S. Lewis is discussed by Paul Tankard, in David Werther, Susan Werther, eds., foreword by David C. Downing, C. S. Lewis’s List: The Ten Books That Influenced Him Most, New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2015: Ch. 8, “James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson.”
Rare Book School, University of Virginia. A lecture by Thomas F. Bonnell:
‘Pray gentlemen compositors …’: Boswell’s Life of Johnson from Manuscript to Book
Date: 9 June 2015
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: UVA Special Collections
As the Life of Johnson moved through the press, and as Boswell kept revising his work (drafting new passages, deleting others, altering diction and syntax—often heavily), he confessed that his “perplexed writing” was so tortuous that he could barely follow his copy-text. Like a stag unable to “trace his own doublings,” he regarded the compositor with awe: “The sagacious hound can find out & follow them all. … The slow hound earnestly & steadily plies his nose.” But slow was a pace neither biographer nor compositor could afford. “Pray gentleman compositors,” Boswell pleaded, urging them to work quickly, and they on occasion called for more copy so the presses would not come to a standstill. Scrambling to fulfill their respective roles, Boswell assiduously supplied copy, left directions in the manuscript to enable the compositor to incorporate the right documents at the right junctures, offered advice on the layout of his printed pages, and revised his text even as he corrected proof; while the compositors, in turn, did everything within their power to render the author’s work accurately in print, sought guidance from him in various ways, including taking dictation in the printing house, and improvised where unresolved contingencies in the copy-text lay beyond the reach of authorial control. The collaboration that played out between author and compositor throughout the process was of a depth and complexity to evoke—both figuratively and literally—the very definition of “compositor.”
Just published: the first Italian translation of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides —
This year’s Boswell Book Festival, at Dumfries House, Ayrshire, May 8-10: