Boswell's London Journal 1762 - 1763 HC/DJ BCE 1950 James Boswell

Description: Boswell's London Journal 1762 - 1763 ; hardcover with dust jacket ; book club edition ; 1950 Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763 Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by FREDERICK A. POTTLESTERLING PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH. YALE UNIVERSITY With a Preface by CHRISTOPHER MORLEY On August 1. 1949. when it was announced that the long-lost and recently discovered Private Papers of James Boswell had been bought by Yale University and their publishing rights acquired by the McGraw-Hill Book Company, the story was front-page news all over the world. Joseph Wood Krutch, scholar and critic, called this perhaps the greatest literary find ever made." "It would be impossible, says Christopher Morley in his Preface. "to invent any detective story so fantastic as the history of the Boswell Papers." The high points of the tale are these:In his will, Boswell named three friends as his literary executors, giving them power to publish; but during their litetime nothing was printed. Nevertheless, the documents were preserved and hidden away, and many of them were eventually forgotten and lost.The first break occurred in the 1840s when an English traveller, one Major Stone. made purchases in a shop in Boulogne and found them wrapped in manuscript pages signed "James Boswell." They were letters to his lifelong friend William Temple.In the 1920's, Professor Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale made a search for Boswell material, and in the course of it received an anonymous tip: "Try Malahide Castle" (in Ireland). Tinker did try Malahide, met Boswell's descendant, the late Lord Talbot de Malahide, was given a tantalizing glimpse of a few Boswell papers. and then could go no further.Not long afterwards, another American had better luck. Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham of New York, a well-known collector, visited Malahide, and thus began a series of negotiations, searches, finds, legal battles, to which this extraordinarily persistent man was to devote more than twenty years of his nite and a considerable part of his private fortune. It was he who succeeded at long last in bringing the Boswell Papers together again.Meanwhile, Professor C. C. Abbott had stumbled upon an important cache of Boswell documents at Fettercair House in Scotland, where he had gone to look for something else. The present journal was among the items discovered there.Finally, even as this volume was being prepared for press, still another find was made at Malahide, and these papers were also purchased by Colonel Isham and are now at Yale. Among them was a letter written by Lord Auchinleck, Boswell's father, to the young man in London at the time of this journal, and it is here included as Appendix II."His chosen life work," Professor Tinker has said of Boswell, was "defeating the forces of oblivion." How well he had defeated them is only now becoming known.

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