Genius Fan

Nothing’s hidden or lost anymore. Back in 1975 though, before broadband, smartphones and the World Wide Web put everything at our fingertips, one could still believe there were exciting discoveries yet to be made. That was the case among literary scholars who speculated about the existence of letters exchanged between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson. In a New York Times (25 July 1975) article journalist Israel Shenker ended his story about the so-called ‘Boswell Factory’ at Yale University, with a conversation he had with Professor Frank Brady: “He and his associates hope that one day the great Mountain of Rubies – the JohnsonBoswell letters – will be discovered.”

Johnson (1709-1784) wrote letters to a wide range of people…though he was not conscientious in the practice (Boswell nudged him about this while he was abroad studying). How many letters do we have? (I mean, do we know about) in collections? RW Chapman in the Introduction to his The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 1 states George Birkbeck Hill enumerated 1,043 letters from Johnson. Chapman in his 1952 volume updates that to 1,515 letters.

In 1936, scholar Claude Colleer Abbott was aware of this gap among the newly discovered Boswell papers. He wrote about his experience discovering stashes of Boswellian correspondence and manuscripts at Fettercairn House in the north east of Scotland. “I had no leisure yet to examine them, for I hoped that one of the other bundles might contain an even bigger prize, Johnson’s letters to Boswell… This, however, was to be my chief disappointment. I found not a letter from Johnson to Boswell, nor any draft or a copy of a letter from Boswell to him… I am convinced that someday they will appear.”

In 2000, Adam Sisman wrote about the appearance in dribs and drabs of Boswell papers in the 50s and 60s and brought it up to date: “Still remaining to be found are several important batches of Boswell papers, including those letters to Temple not retrieved by Major Stone, Boswell’s journal in Holland, and, most important of all, his correspondence with Johnson.”

Through all my reading I’ve not yet come across anything saying that stash of letters has been recovered. Maybe they were destroyed shortly after Boswell’s death, maybe they are still hidden, but rotting away over time, maybe they still await discovery in an attic somewhere or maybe they HAVE been found and sit in a hidden, private collection somewhere.

Notes
Boswell’s Life a Thriving Industry at Yale, Israel Shenker, New York Times (25 July, 1975)
The Letters of Samuel Johnson, With Mrs Thrales Genuine Letters to Him, Vol 1: 1719-1774 (Letters 1-369), RW. Chapman (coll & ed) (1952)
A Catalogue of Papers relating to Boswell, Johnson & Sir William Forbes Found At Fettercairn House A Residence of the Rt. Hon. Lord Clinton 1930-1931, (p.xx) Claude Colleer Abbott (1936).
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, (p.334) Adam Sisman (2000)