Boswell and the Press
Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell
Edited by Donald J. Newman
Bucknell University Press
Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writing, his contributions to periodicals, his pamphlets, and his broadsides. The essays collected here enhance our comprehension of his interests, capabilities, and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. This book will also be of interest to historians of journalism and the publishing industry of eighteenth-century Britain.
Boswell and the Press is a powerful, intellectually stimulating, and persuasively written book, offering a range of compelling and often luminous chapters by authors expert in Boswellian studies. The book breaks new ground in surveying a large corpus—for example, The Cub, at New-market; A Letter to the People of Scotland; An Account of Corsica—and finds fresh things to say about an author who most of us thought we knew as well as the back of our hand.
This groundbreaking volume of new essays on James Boswell is of unusually high quality: the essays are individually eloquent and informative, and as a whole the volume opens up Boswell to new approaches with new information. If you thought that James Boswell was old hat, Boswell and the Press will have you rethinking the career of Johnson’s biographer.
Among the best of those essays is Newman’s introductory overview of Boswell’s ephemera, which largely avoids the necessary evil of such introductions, namely, a brisk trot through all the following essays in an attempt to illustrate, or create, a unity in the collection. A mere three of the 29 pages are so employed, with the balance providing an excellent summary of the role that producing journalism played throughout the author’s life.
. . . this collection surpasses the modestly stated aims to sort the ‘wheat [from] the chaff’ (2) and to ‘constitute a start’ (27) for the serious consideration of Boswell’s ephemeral writing, blazing a transformative path for Boswellian studies. With the recent shuttering of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, this kind of scholarship is more valuable than ever.
DONALD J. NEWMAN is an independent scholar in Texas with research interests in James Boswell and eighteenth-century journalism. He has published numerous articles about Boswell and is the editor of James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations, The Spectator: Emerging Discourses, and Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and “The Female Spectator.”
1. Boswell’s Ephemeral Writing: An Overview
Donald J. Newman
2. Anonymity and the Press: The Case of Boswell
Paul Tankard
3. James Boswell’s Design for a Scottish Periodical in the Scots Language: The Importance of His Prospectus for the Sutiman Papers (ca. 1770?)
James J. Caudle
4. Boswell in Broadside
Terry Seymour
5. An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady: Serious Effort or Elaborate Joke?
Donald J. Newman
6. "Making the Press my Amanuensis": Male Friendship and Publicity in
The Cub, at New-market
Celia Barnes
7. The Hypochondriack and Its Context: James Boswell, 1777–1783
Allan Ingram
8. The Embodied Mind of Boswell’s The Hypochondriack and the Turn-of-the-Century Novel
Jennifer Preston Wilson
9. Principle, Polemic, and Ambition: Boswell’s A Letter to the People of Scotland and the End of the Fox-North Coalition, 1783
Nigel Aston
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Donald J. Newman
2. Anonymity and the Press: The Case of Boswell
Paul Tankard
3. James Boswell’s Design for a Scottish Periodical in the Scots Language: The Importance of His Prospectus for the Sutiman Papers (ca. 1770?)
James J. Caudle
4. Boswell in Broadside
Terry Seymour
5. An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady: Serious Effort or Elaborate Joke?
Donald J. Newman
6. "Making the Press my Amanuensis": Male Friendship and Publicity in
The Cub, at New-market
Celia Barnes
7. The Hypochondriack and Its Context: James Boswell, 1777–1783
Allan Ingram
8. The Embodied Mind of Boswell’s The Hypochondriack and the Turn-of-the-Century Novel
Jennifer Preston Wilson
9. Principle, Polemic, and Ambition: Boswell’s A Letter to the People of Scotland and the End of the Fox-North Coalition, 1783
Nigel Aston
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
