“My Journal Goes Charmingly On”: Boswell Reedited

James Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763was first published over sixty years ago, and for a number of reasons—not the least of which is the great advance in Boswell studies—it is time for a new edition. This now famous text, a unique example of a twentieth-century classic written in the eighteenth century, is now presented in the prestigious Penguin Classics series. The new edition, which represents a thorough rethinking of what constitutes the London Journal, 1762–1763, has been prepared by Gordon Turnbull, the general editor of the Yale Boswell Editions, who must know more about Boswell than any person, living or dead, with the possible exception of Boswell himself.

In this early portion of the journal or journals that Boswell kept for most of his adult life, the twenty-two-year-old Scotsman gives a vivid daily record of eight-and-a-half months in London, where he was determined to find or make a place for himself. He pursues his ambitions with energy, and describes them with candor, grasping the varied opportunities of each new day. Many readers, not only literary scholars, will enjoy the account of his socializing, cultivating the acquaintance of influential people, seeking to advance in literature, enjoying the freedoms of anonymity in a big city. The most interesting things he did, arguably, were meeting Samuel Johnson for the first time, or having numerous professional encounters with prostitutes (here, my fondness for counting deserted me). But one’s overall impression, after reading this journal, is of a young man trying to decide what to think about himself. On the one hand, he is completely open to experience, on the other, he is working full time to make an impression, not only on his peers and friends, on Johnson, Lord Eglinton, and various girlfriends, serious and otherwise, but also on himself.

If you know the London Journal, 1762–1763from the only previous edition, the lightly annotated text edited by F. A. Pottle (first published in the USA by McGraw-Hill and in the UK by Heinemann), this version will appear to be in many ways a new book. The 1950 edition was prepared for—and found—a wide general readership, and as such, was regularized and modernized for easy reading. ¹By contrast, this new edition prints Boswell’s text as closely as possible to how it was written (that is, not for publication): spelling errors or inconsistencies, slips of the pen, minimal paragraphing and punctuation and all—the spelling is not corrected, though when necessary, punctuation is supplied and abbreviations expanded (and clearly indicated as editorial). Furthermore, over half of this new edition consists of completely new material; some of it is Boswell’s, but most is the editor’s. The primary new Boswellian material is his daily memoranda, hitherto unpublished, which are interspersed with the journal proper. The editorial material includes 58 pages of preliminaries, 212 pages of notes, and a 60-page index.

When I was an undergraduate studying English literature, we were advised by lecturers to use only authoritative editions, which meant (among other things) not the inexpensive paperbacks published by Everyman or Penguin. Penguin Classic (and Modern Classic) editions used to be very simple, with very little in the way of annotation, usually no textual apparatus, and only a short, somewhat informal introduction. But this Penguin London Journalis clearly a scholarly edition, and a particularly comprehensive one at that, containing much that a general reader might have to try to overlook; indeed, the reader is “cordially invited” to do so by the editor (lviii.) But perhaps the increasing scholarliness of former “popular” editions is a sign that premodern texts, literary and otherwise, are in fact now only read by students, and that publishers believe the educated general reader to be an almost extinct species.

I first noticed this when in 1995 the Penguin Modern Classic edition (1973) of Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness(a slim book of 111 pages, containing only the text...