The Correspondence of James Boswell and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4744-6152-8 (ISBN)
Forbes served Boswell as his most valued Scottish advisor, an affectionate and admired counsellor to whom he would often turn for personal, financial, moral, and religious guidance, and whom he would name executor of his estate and co-guardian of his children. Their friendship probably began in 1759 as new members of the same Masonic lodge in Edinburgh, and it deepened over time, and included their families. Boswell shared with Forbes significant portions of his private journal, and discussed with him his authorial ambitions as he developed the innovative biographical technique that would characterize his major publications on Samuel Johnson. He sought Forbes’s opinions about his original 1773 account of what would become his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (1785), and about his journal of his 1777 visit with Johnson at Ashbourne, later used in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell, in turn, broadened and enriched Forbes’s social range, providing a gateway into his remarkable circle of friends in London, in particular the members of the ‘Literary Club’. As Richard B. Sher explains in his introduction, none of Boswell’s other close friends straddled Boswell’s various worlds—his family life and professional career in Edinburgh, his lairdship of the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, his literary life in London—in this way.
The volume, while thoroughly documenting the friendship that lies at its core, also illuminates the lives of Boswell and Forbes individually, especially Boswell’s final decade in London. It publishes a total of 111 comprehensively annotated letters, few of which have appeared previously in print: 79 exchanged between Forbes and Boswell between 1772 and 1794, and 32 involving other correspondents. The edition draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts in both the Boswell Collection at Yale and the Fettercairn Papers in the National Library of Scotland, including revealing letters from Forbes to his beloved wife ‘Betsy’, Lady Forbes, and to his close friend James Beattie, who would become Forbes’s own biographical subject in the decade after Boswell’s death.
Richard B. Sher is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus in the Federated History Department of New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He has published widely on topics relating to eighteenth-century Scotland, including The Enlightenment and the Book (2006), Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (2nd ed., 2015), and many articles, book chapters, and edited volumes.
List of IllustrationsPreface and AcknowledgementsList of Correspondence Editorial Procedures Cue Titles and Abbreviations Chronology
Introduction
The Correspondence
Appendices
The Family of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo
Sir William Forbes’s Courtship of Elizabeth Hay, 1770
Boswell, Johnson, Forbes, and the Quarrel with ‘Young Mr. Tytler’, October–December 1785
Boswell and the Newspaper War over Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Resignation as President of the Royal Academy, 1790
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 21.02.2022 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell |
| Zusatzinfo | 3 black and white illustrations |
| Verlagsort | Edinburgh |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 156 x 234 mm |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Briefe / Tagebücher |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-4744-6152-2 / 1474461522 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-4744-6152-8 / 9781474461528 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
aus dem Bereich
