  Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides was published in 1785 and reached a sixth edition in 1813. Many of the later editors of Boswell have included the Tour in their editions of the Life. It is published as a separate volume in Dent's Temple Classics, with a few notes by Arnold Glover (1898) and is contained in a volume of Dent's Everyman's Library. The Life appeared in two quarto volumes in 1791 and went through ten editions before the much-criticised edition of J. W. Croker in 1831. The sixth edition, 1811, edited by Malone, is the safest of the early editions. It is not disfigured by the liberties which Croker took with Boswell's text. Later editions are almost innumerable. Napier's edition of 1884 included some valuable new material, but the incomparable edition for students is that of George Birkbeck Hill, published by the Oxford University Press in 1887. It is in six volumes, of which four contain the Life, one the Tour, and one the monumental index to which every student of Johnson must pay his debt of gratitude. Among modern editions the following may be noted: Arnold Glover: 6 volumes (text of 1811), annotated. Dent. 1901. Roger Ingpen: 2 volumes, illustrated. Pitman. 1907. Among the cheapest and handiest modern reprints are: The Oxford edition. (Two volumes; or, on India paper, in one volume.) The Globe edition. (One volume; double columns of print. Macmillan.) The Everyman edition. (Two volumes. Dent.) The contemporary authorities for Johnson's life, other than Boswell, are Sir John Hawkins's Life, Mrs Piozzi's Anecdotes, Fanny Burney's Diary, and anecdotes by many others. Most of these were collected by the late Dr Birkbeck Hill in his two volumes of Johnsonian Miscellanies (Oxford, 1897); two volumes of Johnson's Letters were also published by the same editor in 1892. Of modern criticism on Johnson the following may be recommended: Lord Macaulay: Boswell's Life of Johnson. 1831. Article on Johnson in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1856. Thomas Carlyle: Boswell's Life of Johnson. 1832. Sir Leslie Stephen: Samuel Johnson. (English Men of Letters series. Macmillan, 1878.) G. B. Hill: Dr Johnson, His Friends and His Critics. (1878.) Sir Walter Raleigh: Six Essays on Johnson. (Oxford, 1910.) Lieut.-Col. F. Grant: Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson, with a bibliography by J. P. Anderson. (Great Writers series. Walter Scott Co.) Johnson's Collected Works, of which there were many editions, e.g. the Oxford edition (Works, 9 vols, Debates, 2 vols, 1825), are easily obtainable second-hand, as are also The Lives of the Poets and The Rambler. The Lives of the Poets and Rasselas were edited with notes by Dr Birkbeck Hill for the Oxford University Press. Johnson's Poems, together with the poetry of Goldsmith, Gray, and Collins, are published in a handy form, with introduction and notes by Colonel T. Methuen Ward, in the Muses' Library series (Routledge, 1905). A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson, by W. P. Courtney, was published by the Oxford University Press in 1915. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY |
|
