Boswell's London Journal: 1762-1763 - Softcover

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9780300057355: Boswell's London Journal: 1762-1763

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300057350 ISBN 13: 9780300057355

Publisher: Yale Univ Pr, 1992

Read by Anthony Quayle. James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (October 29, 1740 May 19, 1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for his biography of Samuel Johnson. His name has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer. Boswell is also known for the detailed and frank journals that he wrote for long periods of his life, which remained undiscovered until the 1920s. These included voluminous notes on the grand tour of Europe that he took as a young man and, subsequently, of his tour of Scotland with Johnson. His London Journal is a published version of the daily journal he kept between the years 1762 and 1763 while in London. Along with many more of his private papers, it was found in the 1920s at Malahide Castle in Ireland, and first published in 1950. In it, Boswell, then a young Scottish man of 22, visits London for his second time. The most notable event in the journal is Boswell's meeting Samuel Johnson, the famous writer, moralist, and lexicographer with whom Boswell would form a close relationship, eventually writing the biography Life of Johnson.

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Review:

[The journal is] more perceptive and uninhibited and magically alive than one could have hoped... Boswell transforms the most trifling occurrences into adventures, and imparts to the reader his own surpassing lust for experience and his keen sense of the fascination of life. -- Austin Wright The journal is admirably edited and annotated. -- W. H. Auden [The journal is] more perceptive and uninhibited and magically alive than one could have hoped... Boswell transforms the most trifling occurrences into adventures, and imparts to the reader his own surpassing lust for experience and his keen sense of the fascination of life. The journal is admirably edited and annotated.

About the Author:

Frederick A. Pottle was Sterling Professor of English Emeritus at Yale University, and editor, bibliographer and biographer of James Boswell. Peter Ackroyd is author of London: The Biography, The Life of Thomas More, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination and many other books.

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