Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of

Boswell, James, 1740-1795Project Gutenberg · United StatesMar 2023

Rating 3.4
Word count
367K words
Chapters
37

Tags

Motivation and Growth Literary ArchivesPortrait SketchesTestament of FriendshipLiterary FriendshipEpistolary FormColloquial NarrativeFamous FiguresDiary Essays18th Century EnglandCultural Change

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal ofAuthor: Boswell, James, 1740-1795,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jan 4, 2007

Editor's review

This book is a primary source for eighteenth-century English literary history, collecting James Boswell's correspondence with Andrew Erskine and Boswell's journal. Boswell is best known for The Life of Samuel Johnson, and his letters and journals likewise preserve a vivid tone, wit, and private feeling, allowing readers to observe up close the social habits, verbal play, and sociable life of eighteenth-century Scottish literary circles. Erskine as correspondent gives these letters the texture of two-way dialogue rather than monologue, while the journal is more private, showing the author's daily movements and self-scrutiny. For readers studying eighteenth-century English literature, life writing, and epistolary prose, this is a primary text worth close reading; for general readers it is more like a window onto the literary life of an old era, whose interest lies in voices and period detail rather than plot.

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the journal to feel Boswell's private tone, then turn back to the letters to understand their social context.
  2. Note names and places as you read, and consult basic background on eighteenth-century English literature.
  3. It need not be read straight through; sample by correspondent or chronology as a bedside sourcebook.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  7. 7
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  11. 11
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  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37

FAQ

How does this book relate to The Life of Johnson? Both are by Boswell, but this book is his correspondence with Erskine and his journal, earlier and more private primary material, not an excerpt or sequel of The Life of Johnson. It can help explain how Boswell's biographical method took shape, but readers should not expect it to reproduce that work's structure and content.
Can I read it without a background in eighteenth-century English literature? Yes, but it calls for some English reading ability and patience. The letters and journal involve period names, places, and social allusions, and without background they can feel fragmentary. It helps to learn first who Boswell was and how he stood in relation to Johnson; the reading then goes much more smoothly.
This is a public-domain e-book; what should I keep in mind? It comes from Project Gutenberg, a free public-domain e-book with plain layout and notes and probably without the detailed annotation of a modern scholarly edition. Readers should supply background themselves, and those who need textual scholarship should compare it with a scholarly edition.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Boswell, James, 1740-1795 Author

James Boswell (1740–1795) was an English biographer best known for his records of Samuel Johnson's life and conversation. The library holds eleven of his works, including the multi-volume Life of Johnson and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. These works are distinguished by close firsthand observation and vivid dialogue: Boswell writes as a participant, recording Johnson's conversation, temperament and daily dealings, which gives the biography both documentary value and literary readability. His method of presenting his subject's words and actions faithfully had a lasting influence on later biographical writing. The library classifies his works under inspirational personal growth, perhaps for their exemplary figures and life experience; details of his own life are limited in publicly available sources.