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Boswell's most prominent display of support for slavery was his 1791 poem "No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love", which lampooned Clarkson, Wilberforce and Pitt. The poem also supports the common suggestion of the pro-slavery movement, that the slaves actually enjoyed their lot: "The cheerful gang! – the negroes see ...
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- Legacy of James Boswell
For long it was believed that Boswell’s private papers had been destroyed shortly after his death, but the bulk of them were recovered in the 1920s at Malahide Castle near Dublin and sold to an American collector, Ralph H. Isham, by Boswell’s great-great-grandson, Lord Talbot de Malahide. These papers, as well as others found at Malahide Castle during the 1930s, were united with another portion discovered by a professor, Claude Colleer Abbott, in Aberdeenshire in the home of descendants of Boswell’s executor and sold to Yale University, which, under the editorship of Frederick A. Pottle, began a systematic program of their multivolume publication, beginning with Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–63 (1950). The papers give an extraordinary picture of an enlightened yet tormented man, a participant in the intellectual debates of his time who was often driven by sensual appetites and religious fears.
The Life of Johnson will always be regarded as Boswell’s greatest achievement, although, since the publication of his papers, its unique values can be seen to be derivative. It is the stretches of Johnson’s conversation that make it superior, and those conversations were lifted bodily from the journal, sometimes with so little change that the journal leaves served as printer’s copy. The extended commercial publication of the journal, by proving his ability to compete with 20th-century authors on their own terms, has confirmed and added to Boswell’s stature as artist. It also for the first time gives the general reader a properly complex portrait.
For long it was believed that Boswell’s private papers had been destroyed shortly after his death, but the bulk of them were recovered in the 1920s at Malahide Castle near Dublin and sold to an American collector, Ralph H. Isham, by Boswell’s great-great-grandson, Lord Talbot de Malahide. These papers, as well as others found at Malahide Castle during the 1930s, were united with another portion discovered by a professor, Claude Colleer Abbott, in Aberdeenshire in the home of descendants of Boswell’s executor and sold to Yale University, which, under the editorship of Frederick A. Pottle, began a systematic program of their multivolume publication, beginning with Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–63 (1950). The papers give an extraordinary picture of an enlightened yet tormented man, a participant in the intellectual debates of his time who was often driven by sensual appetites and religious fears.
The Life of Johnson will always be regarded as Boswell’s greatest achievement, although, since the publication of his papers, its unique values can be seen to be derivative. It is the stretches of Johnson’s conversation that make it superior, and those conversations were lifted bodily from the journal, sometimes with so little change that the journal leaves served as printer’s copy. The extended commercial publication of the journal, by proving his ability to compete with 20th-century authors on their own terms, has confirmed and added to Boswell’s stature as artist. It also for the first time gives the general reader a properly complex portrait.
May 16, 2013 · A meeting 250 years ago led to Scottish author James Boswell completely re-inventing how biography is written.
Oct 25, 2024 · James Boswell (born October 18 [October 29, New Style], 1740, Edinburgh, Scotland—died May 19, 1795, London, England) was a friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson (Life of Johnson, 2 vol., 1791). The 20th-century publication of his journals proved him to be also one of the world’s greatest diarists.
The young earl of Eglintoun took him to Newmarket and introduced him into the society of "the great, the gay and the ingenious." He wrote a poem called "The Cub at Newmarket," published by Dodsley in 1762, and had visions of entering the Guards.
Jun 8, 2018 · The Scottish biographer and diarist James Boswell (1740-1795), who wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., published in 1791, ranks as the greatest biographer in the history of Western literature. His private papers also reveal "Bozzie" as a most distinguished diarist.
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Jun 10, 2015 · The 18th-century biographer James Boswell is the central character of a new exploration of the Enlightenment by Robert Zaretsky, who pulls together Boswell's writings with those of his subjects...
