My Boswell Reading List in Five Groups

For all those poor devils who’ve never read any James Boswell, his journals, his publications or popular and academic works about him…what are you waiting for? Possibly: Where do I start? Well, this post is for you. Boswell was the Eighteenth-century Scottish lawyer who immortalised himself with his Life of Samuel Johnson, widely considered the world’s greatest work of biography. Those who are in on it (that’s me and 100,000s of other Boswell enthusiasts) know what’s out there to read, enjoy and learn.

How he shares his life, how he sees the world and people in it, his aspirations, his sadnesses, his grasp on life, his optimism just-undefeated by his own actions…he’s the person from the Eighteenth century about whom we know so much and who helps us see into that world that’s three centuries away. For all that, he’s worth reading. And yet most people don’t read today, I suppose, but the world of Boswell, of all characters from the past, would be worth a foray into. So, here’s my recommendation to those who are looking for something new.

A reading list for James Boswell

Search for any writer and you’ll find that a fan or fans have at some point attempted to arrange that author’s works into an order for a newbie reader. I’ve done the same with James Boswell. There’s so much out there about him, but if you get it in the wrong order you can put yourself off and lose interest. There’s no need to read in a chronological order, unless you’re getting into it and embark on his journals. You can dip into them in any order, but there’s much more to be had if you do it in the order they were written – it’s his life story, after all.

My reading list has been put together from my own experience. I haven’t read everything on these lists, but I have for group number 1, 2 and 3. Nos. 4 and 5 are more aspirational. It takes time to get up into those realms. No.5 is as much about possession of books as about reading. You’d have to be a serious collector with some goodly amount of kopeks in your pocket (and an understanding wife – or a separate bank account), to reach the top tier, Boswellevated. I wonder how many people make up this group?

Reading Boswell: Buy, borrow or read free online

I buy second hand and do most of my reading that way. That’s part of my hobby of collecting books about Boswell and his life and times in the Eighteenth century. I get a great deal of pleasure in doing this, though it drives my wife bonkers; we went from no bookcase to one bookcase, and then a second. We need a third now. I’ve said before I feel like I’m the book equivalent of a dog rescue shelter. I’m giving volumes from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries a secure home for the next two decades or so.

You can buy new, but where’s the fun in that? And then there’s the expense. Come on, it’s the Eighteenth century, it’s scholarship, it’s history: let’s keep the mood going with second hand. But why spend money when you can just borrow from a library. Once again, the collecting is part of the attraction for me. But I spent some time mooching round the Mitchell Library in Glasgow last year and saw a very small handful of Boswell titles on the shelf. But they’ll order volumes in for you, or just tap into their reference library.

And nowadays you can read all of Boswell’s own written work online, since it’s all looooooong past the copyright cut off point. The excellent Project Gutenberg is a useful resource, especially if you want to do a digital search of his works. It’s free to read. You won’t get the Yale journals that way, they’re all still in copyright, but many of those editions can be bought for not a lot of dosh. And you’ll find many fascinating academic articles available through sites like JSTOR, most of which are paywalled.

The message is: find him and his works and get reading.

Permission to not read everything

I should add: you don’t need to stick to my lists at all. And if you ‘get it’, then crack on – and launch into his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. I say! It’s really a rather excellent story and some top notch writing, what! I also predict that some of you will go from zero to hero, as they say, once you read The Club, The Scholar Adventurers (Ch.1) or the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. But nobody’s assigning homework here, dip in, stay a while, or rip your shirt off and run down the High Street. It’s your call.

Where do you fit in? Use my self-diagnostic tool

I’ve created five groups of readers. Three wouldn’t have been enough to allow for the range of interest and content. Six or more would have been an unnecessary division.

1. Bitten: Starters/newbies
2. Smitten: Had a taste – they want more
3. Committed: No escape – they’ve bought a ticket for life
4. Obsessed: All hobbies move aside, Boswell’s here
5. Boswellevated: At one with the Boswell canon, like Neo from the Matrix

Bitten
This is you if you’ve read something about Boswell, never gone further, but you’re intrigued and open to the possibility of more (this sounds like a dating profile). You’re Boswell-curious. This category has to be the most accessible works. If it’s too ‘heavy’ or ‘thick’ with the Eighteenth century it’ll put the reader off. It’s like introducing anyone to a new topic, don’t go too deep or you’ll lose them.

For that reason, my very first suggestion is Leo Damrosch’s wonderful book The Club, which has Boswell near the centre of it and more often than not fluttering around other characters like a moth. This is a terrific read. The second and final entry is Richard Altick’s marvellous description of the re-discovery of Boswell’s papers. This is partly included to turn people on to books-rather-than-digital, searching for second hand books online, book collecting and the world of literary history.

Smitten
This group of Boswell readers know about Boswell and they’re there for more. If they read Damrosch’s The Club, they’ve been introduced to Boswell’s world – London in the second half of the century – and they have an idea of who the man is and his essential relationship with Samuel Johnson. Now the focus is fully on Boswell. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides introduces the new reader to Eighteenth-century style prose, to Scotland and the Highlands and into Boswell’s world with all the gossipy detail he brings to his account. I’ve included Moray McLaren’s footsteps account of the same journey. It’s mid-Twentieth century, accessible and scholarly.

His London Journal’s in there as is his Corsica travel account – both great fun to read. He’s young and paying out some of his best insight. I added an abridged version of his Life (Horror!), which is particularly good for EH Shepard’s illustrations of Boswell and Johnson. And finally, Peter Martin’s weighty biography. I wasn’t sure where to add this. It’s not my favourite (I like DB Wyndham Lewis’ The Hooded Hawk), but it is scholarly and up-to-date and much more detailed. It’s a great reference if you want to check some facts and dates.

Committed
If you’re in the Committed group, you’re ready for the real thing — the full, unabridged Life itself, and the journals that made his name. This is where you get the key to a secret door, allowing you to enter a world within a world. I always think that anyone who takes the time to read a bit of Boswell will feel the invisible embrace of the Boswellian community. I did. And if you persevere, by asking questions about timelines and editors and series and editions and people and places and so on, if you find yourself doing that, then you should have that key and you should enter that room.

You’re likely going to collect the full set of journals. That’s part of the Boswell journey for me. The scholarship behind the Yale journals ties in with Altick’s Scholar Adventurers in Group 1. You’ll start day dreaming about Boswell, his world and the academic efforts bringing his journals to the world. You’ll need a bookcase. You’ll end up making notes, marking pages with sticky notes, getting out of bed at 2 in the morning to go downstairs and look something up in a journal, or cross reference it in the index to Peter Martin’s biography. It’s a well-trodden path. Embrace it.

Obsessed
This is where you start to think about filling out your Boswell collection. First there’s the remaining volumes in the Yale Trade edition. (It’s likely you’ve already done that when you got to group no. 3.) When you’re in this group you have to NOT make everything about Boswell. I know, I know. Boswell is everything. You see his likeness in your Weetabix, you follow up any character he meets… extending your knowledge of the Eighteenth century and you have to avoid referencing Boswell when you’re arguing with your spouse (that last one is really important. Don’t thank me. It’s what I do. Ahem)

And your collecting continues apace. Bailey’s collection of Hypochondriack essays sits on your bedside cabinet, but it never gets read because your mind’s racing ahead for other Boswell literature. You want to collect everything. You want the archive. The essays nobody reads. The minutiae.

Boswellevated
This group is legendary. This is for people who risk their mortgage, their health and their marriage to pursue the perfect collection. Their bookcases are pristine and support all 18 volumes in Isham’s Private Papers, perfect set of Yale Trade volumes and also an eye-openingly extensive, eye-wateringly expensive set of Yale Research editions. No-one you know understands the collection when they see it. You know. But you tell no-one.

You just keep searching the internet for volumes that are rarer, in better nick, and usually more expensive – I mean first editions. That means you’re buying doubles to improve your collection. You read everything you can about Boswell and you go to bed trying to solve in your head issues about him that have arisen as your brain processes enormous amounts of information about him…all while you should be speaking to your children or turning in that report for your boss. Whatever’s going on in your life, you have become Boswellevated – you are better than everyone else. Other Boswellians can only dream about how you think about Boswell. We’re jealous. (I’m jealous.)

Here’s the reading list

This is for fun. I’m in Group 4 for collecting my library, but in Group 3 for my reading. Compare yourself and pick your level. Or ignore all of this advice entirely and start wherever looks most fun. Either way, welcome to the club!

1. Bitten Catching the bug

• The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Leo Damrosch (2020)
• The Scholar Adventurers, Chapter 1, Richard D Altick (1950)

2. Smitten Great fun, no heavy lifting

• The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, James Boswell (1785) (Go for (ed) Ronald Black’s 2011 volume ‘To the Hebrides: Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour’)
• Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, (ed) FA Pottle (1950)
• An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, James Boswell
• Everybody’s Boswell (Abridged version of The Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell), Illustrated by EH Shepard (1930)
• The Highland Jaunt, Moray McLaren (1954)
• A Life of James Boswell, Peter Martin (2008)

3. Committed The core texts

• Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (The Penguin Classics edition, (ed) David Womersley, 2008, is a good volume to start with)
• Yale Trade volumes No. 2-6 (I suggest you skip Portraits, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, (ed) FW Hilles (1952))
  • Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764 (ed) FA Pottle (1952)
  • Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 (ed) FA Pottle (1953)
  • Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766 (ed) Frank Brady and FA Pottle (1955)
  • Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, (ed) F Brady and FA Pottle (1956)
  • Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, (ed) William K. Wimsatt, Jr and FA Pottle (1959)
• The Treasure of Auchinleck: The Story of the Boswell Papers, David Buchanan (1974)

4. Obsessed The full biographical picture

• James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769, FA Pottle (1966)
• James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–1795, F Brady (1984)
• Samuel Johnson, TB Macaulay’s 1831 Essay on Croker’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, in Critical and Historical Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review.
• Yale Trade volumes (remaining six vols)
  • Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776, (ed) C Ryskamp and FA Pottle(1963)
  • Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, (ed) Charles McC. Weis and FA Pottle (1970)
  • Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782, (ed) JW Reed and FA Pottle (1977)
  • Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, (ed) IS Lustig and FA Pottle (1981)
  • Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789, (ed) IS Lustig and FA Pottle (1986)
  • Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789–1795, (ed) MK Danziger and F Brady(1989)
• Boswell’s column : being the seventy contributions to “The London Magazine” under the pseudonym The Hypochondriack from 1777 to 1783, (ed) M Bailey (1951)

5. Boswellevated Into the archive

• Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle In the Collection of Lt-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham (ed) G Scott. (18 Volumes)
• The Yale Research Editions (all Boswell’s archive split into the following collections)
  • Journals (1 volume – more to come)
  • Correspondence (9 volumes – more to come)
  • Life of Johnson (3 volumes)
  • Catalogue (volume)
• First Editions
  • Letters Between the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and James Boswell (1763)
  • An Account of Corsica. The Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli. Illustrated with a New and Accurate Map of Corsica, James Boswell (1768)
  • The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D, James Boswell (1785)
  • The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, James Boswell (1791)