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“New Light on the Early Publication History of Boswell's Life of Johnson”

“New Light on the Early Publication History of Boswell's Life of Johnson” –The 2024 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trades by Richard B. Sher “The Life of Samuel Johnson” is often considered the greatest biography ever written. Although Boswell's book has received much scholarly attention since it first appeared in two large quarto volumes in 1791, one topic has been curiously neglected: the story of how Boswell's book was printed, published, and reprinted in the first, second, and third editions—the only editions to which Boswell himself contributed. This neglect is all the more curious because of the unusually rich manuscript materials that exist about this subject among the Boswell Papers in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, in the National Library of Scotland, and elsewhere. Drawing on these little-known materials, as well as other sources, this talk shows that—although one would not guess it from the title page—Boswell's great book was actually self-published, and its success owed much to a devoted support network of printers, booksellers, newspaper and magazine editors, and friends. Although this muddled second edition (1793) suffered from Boswell's increasing dysfunction in the years before his death in 1795, the resilient Boswellian network subsequently secured the book's exalted reputation. Richard B. Sher is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus in the Federated History Department of New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He has published widely on the Scottish Enlightenment and its publication history. In 2015, Edinburgh University Press issued a 30th-anniversary "classic" edition of his 1985 book “Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment.” His 2007 work “The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Britain, Ireland, and America” won the American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has given many presentations in North America, the UK, and Ireland, including the 2007 Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade in Los Angeles. His most recent publications are “The Correspondence of James Boswell and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo,” published in 2022 in the Yale Boswell Editions, and “Making Boswell's Life of Johnson: An Author-Publisher and His Support Network,” which appeared in Cambridge University Press's "Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections" series in 2023.