General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763

This volume, ninth in the Research Series of correspondence in the Yale Boswell Editions, assembles the bulk of the surviving letters between the young Boswell and his circle of friends and acquaintances in a period crucial to his personal and authorial development, up to the time he wrote his now famous journal in London in 1762-63. Opening with an exchange - rooted in his rebellious adolescent fascination with the Edinburgh theatre - with the gentleman-actor West Digges, it closes with letters written in July 1763 near the end of his second visit to London (the one in which he first met Samuel Johnson), a short time before his reluctant departure for legal study in Utrecht. The volume features centrally the correspondence between Boswell and his friend and literary collaborator Andrew Erskine (1740-93), a poet-soldier of the kind the young Boswell briefly aspired to be. Their surviving letters, printed here alongside the revised versions in the facetious Letters between the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and James Boswell, Esq., Boswell’s first book-length publication, and the first to bear his name, offer revealingly early evidence of the kinds of selective self-revision Boswell would employ in his later writings and perfect in the Life of Johnson (1791).Overall, these letters document Boswell’s fluid experiments in selfhood as he ponders his life’s future possible trajectories - as soldier, lawyer, wit, author, bon-vivant, Scots laird, or M.P. Some thirty-five correspondents are represented in more than 150 letters and other documents (such as verse-epistles), comprehensively annotated to the long-established standards of the Yale Boswell Editions.

James J. Caudle has been a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow for the past five years. During his time at Glasgow, he has been part of the teams working on the pathbreaking Oxford Robert Burns (Correspondence) and Edinburgh Allan Ramsay (The Ever Green) Editions. Before that, he was employed as the Associate Editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (2000–2017), and as a Professor at Ouachita Baptist University (1996–2000). He has received research fellowships from the Huntington and the Clark Libraries, and has also been awarded visiting fellowships at Lyon College and the University of St. Andrews. His research interests are in eighteenth-century British Studies, focusing on the social history of ideas (including clubs), the history of the book and publishing trade (including censorship and copyright), political thought in early modern mass media (particularly Georgian loyalist political sermons 1714–1789), and the functions of amateur or social verse in Georgian culture (looking at James Boswell and other versifiers and songsters as the ‘Contemporaries of Burns’).