Genius Fan

This is the story of how Claude Colleer Abbott discovered James Boswell’s ‘lost’ London Journal. The year was 1930. Essex-born Abbot was lecturing in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen, and looking for a new research subject. Following up on the university Librarian’s suggestion to consider Dr James Beattie, an Eighteenth century Scottish poet and Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen, Abbott found himself on a scholarly hunt for documents at Fettercairn House, 35 miles south west of Aberdeen. He was searching out Beattie correspondence, but documents relating to other people from that period were popping up, including Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, the well-known banker and an executor of James Boswell’s estate. In his 1936 book Boswell Papers found at Fettercairn, Abbot describes how Lord Clinton, owner of the house, made available a room overlooking the garden which was brightened by a blazing log fire in which “most of the floor space was filled with a variety of boxes, metal and wood, open and unopened, attended by noble bunches of keys.” This was the scene greeted by Abbot when he arrived on Monday 6 October 1930. His description of events shows him to be a methodical and patient man as he worked his way through the containers in front of him.

Come the afternoon, there was Abbott (41), knee deep in dusty correspondence, manuscripts and documents. He had exhausted all the open boxes and was now working his way through the paper stacks and “…at the bottom of one pile, was a stout bundle whose cover had almost disappeared, though the writing on what remained of it was still legible. It was ‘My Journal’…” He continued: “…when I looked at the writing there I knew it at once for Boswell’s, and stared in excited astonishment at the truth.” This journal was written during Boswell’s stay in London from November 1762 to August 1763. Now, before we continue, let’s rewind by a decade and travel 350 miles south west, over the Irish Sea to Ireland, where an enthusiastic American book collector named Lt Col Ralph Isham had been negotiating with the owners of Malahide Castle, outside Dublin, to purchase boxes of Boswell papers, those from the so called ‘ebony cabinet’. Between 1928 and 1936 Isham had privately published seventeen volumes of his Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham. This publishing endeavour was incredibly stressful and costly for Isham who, time and time again, was forced to find funds to purchase further Malahide finds. By September 1930 Isham had published volumes 1-9 in the series, and Abbott would have been aware of these new materials. As a literary scholar he would have known that Boswell’s London Journal was not among Isham’s collection. Conversely, the discovery of Boswell’s London Journal was unknown to Isham and his editor, Frederick Pottle, who by 1930 were both at work in the USA. It would be another 20 years before it was purchased in 1949 by Yale University, USA and published in 1950, when it became a bestseller in the UK and the United States.

There will be a follow up to this story shortly: ‘Operation Hush’!

Notes
Claude Colleer Abbott (1889-1971)
Boswell Papers found at Fettercairn, Claude Colleer Abbott (1936)
Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt.-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham (1928-1936)