Correspondence with David Garrick, Edmund Burke and Edmond Malone - Hardcover

James Boswell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0434837024 ISBN 13: 9780434837021

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd, 1987

Synopsis

The volume collects Boswell's correspondence with three of the most prominent members of The Club, and each reveals a different facet of Boswell's full and varied involvement with life and literature. When an admiring Boswell initiated a correspondence in 1767 with Garrick, he was a promising young Scots advocate who was about to publish his popular and influential Account of Corsica, while Garrick was at the height of his theatrical fame. They carried on a lively, light-hearted exchange, always more urgent on Boswell's than on Garrick's part, until Garrick's death in 1779. A year earlier Boswell had begun writing to Burke, and this correspondence extends until 1791, a period that included much of Burke's active political life as well as Boswell's major accomplishments and disappointments. It is characterized by a warmth and ease that gradually turned into a cool distance under the strain of personal and political developments. The longest and most intimate correspondence of this volume, that with Edmond Malone, illuminates in a striking manner Boswell's professionalism as a writer. It begins in 1785 with Boswell and Malone immersed in revisions for the second edition of The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and continues through their collaboration on his Life of Johnson. Throughout, it reveals the essential help Malone provided for Boswell, and the sureness with which Boswell organized and wrote his great works. This correspondence ends only a month before Boswell's death in 1795. This volume prints a total of 150 letters: 13 letters to Garrick and 16 from Garrick; 26 letters to Burke and 11 from Burke; 43 letters to Malone and 41 from Malone. 16 additional letters (10 to Boswell and 6 from him) of which no texts are known to be extant, receive notice under their proper dates, with as much information about their contents as could be gathered. Boswell's correspondence with Burke also includes 1 letter from Burke and 1 letter to Burke from Henry Seymour Conway.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0434837024
• ISBN 13: 9780434837021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480