The papers of James Boswell – journals, letters (to him as well as by him), manuscripts of his Johnsonian and other published works – are part of the much larger Boswell family collections of legal, estate and other documents, spanning six centuries, in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Boswell’s ‘Journal from the time of my leaving Scotland 15 Novr. 1762’ is an early part of the lengthy series of journals he kept, with lapses, for most of his adult life. This 1762–3 London portion of this journal was discovered (as noted above in the Introduction) in 1930 at Fettercairn House in Aberdeenshire. Boswell’s personal daily agendas (styled ‘memoranda’ by his twentieth-century editors and not intended by Boswell as part of his journal) were part of the earlier and larger recoveries of Boswell’s private papers from Malahide Castle, near Dublin. The journal made its first published appearance at the end of 1950, as Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, edited by Frederick A. Pottle, published by Heinemann (in the UK) and McGraw-Hill (in the USA). Pottle made a few adjustments and corrections to his annotation for a Signet edition, published in 1956. His version – to date the only one available – has been reissued many times under several different imprints (including Penguin, in 1966). It was brought back into print by Edinburgh University Press in 1991 and Yale University Press in 1992, and this reissue was again reissued (with a new brief foreword added, and oddly described as a ‘Second Edition’) in 2004. In accordance with editorial policy decisions taken for the Yale ‘reading’-edition series of Boswell’s journals, Pottle’s edition rendered Boswell’s text in modern norms: that is to say, in mid-twentieth-century British spelling, punctuation, capitalization and paragraphing. Pottle decided also, with confessed reluctance, to exclude Boswell’s (frequently informationally and psychologically revealing) memoranda, though in the event he reproduced several of them, and quoted from even more, in his footnotes.
This edition restores Boswell’s original (sometimes erratic) spelling, punctuation and paragraphing. Some punctuation has been introduced for clarity, always enclosed within editorial square brackets. A sprinkling of obvious slips of the pen have been silently corrected. The surviving memoranda appear in italics ahead of the diary entries for the days to which they refer. When Boswell’s abbreviations (which he uses frequently) have been spelled out for clarity, editorial square brackets again indicate the expansions. Boswell occasionally rendered certain words in his memoranda in a version of shorthand, using the consonant strokes (not always accurately) from a seventeenth-century shorthand system, Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy. These words have been normalized, and enclosed within braces. Some sentences and phrases in the memoranda (usually ones referring to Boswell’s amorous activities) have been scored out in heavy ink by Boswell’s descendants. Boswell’s writing in these instances has been with difficulty recovered, but his punctuation (which is generally inconsistent in the memoranda) can sometimes in these passages only be guessed at. For the portion of text after Boswell’s final London journal entry (4 August 1763) up to the time of his departure from Harwich for Holland, for law study, the first draft of the Life of Johnson has been used. Though written much later by an older Boswell, it completes the narrative of his momentous and life-changing second London stay.
The fluent, demotic prose of Boswell’s journal is both brisk and careful, written with precision, but often hasty – put down in the spaces of his London stay’s many other activities, excitements, despondencies and distractions – and it seems he posted sequential segments of the journal to his friend John Johnston in Edinburgh without review. Whatever intermittent sacrifices of immediate clarity may result from such things as his infrequent paragraph breaks, the absence of quotation marks, unorthodox spellings and inconsistent punctuation, restoration of something close to Boswell’s original writing and inclusion of the private memoranda may, among other effects, allow recapture of the contemporary feel of the composer and his circumstances of composition. The many accounts of Boswell (following the modernized version of 1950) as remarkably ‘modern’, as one of us, feel less secure when we sense something of the difference between him, his time and place, and the readers of the times and places in which his private writings were recovered, published and are now read. Should further justification be needed for restoring Boswell’s original text, it might be found in the reflections of Claude Colleer Abbott, who recorded in a review his reaction to the 1950 edition some twenty years after he first discovered the manuscript. ‘Does it stand up,’ he asked, ‘to my first thought that Boswell, at twenty-two, had written a masterpiece?’ Abbott answered himself ‘firmly’ in the affirmative, but found it a ‘pity’ that Pottle’s edition had modernized ‘Boswell’s spelling and punctuation’, since something ‘characteristically Boswellian is lost, and to small purpose’ (The Listener 42 (28 December 1950), pp. 843–4). But I quote also, with trepidation, from Abbott’s next sentence: in Pottle’s ‘valuable introduction and helpful notes’, some of the ‘information gathered were better omitted’. This Penguin edition’s annotation aims to explicate the contexts of Boswell’s self-record, and to identify the many people, places, works and contemporary topics and concepts to which this densely detailed record naturally alludes. Readers who find Boswell’s text here blighted by the frequent endnote cues, and the notes full of even more ‘information gathered’ that ‘were better omitted’, are cordially invited to ignore them.