![]() A draft of Boswell's Dictionary of Scots has just been announced as rediscovered, but up to now we have also had Boswell's sketches for the work. James Boswell (1740-1795), friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson, strove to emulate Johnson, who had in 1755 produced the most famous dictionary of English to date, by beginning his own dictionary, of the Scottish language, in 1764. This book was produced as a keepsake for the 2009 dinner of The Johnsonians, celebrating the Three-Hundredth Birthday of Samuel Johnson." ![]() My two major critical arguments are that (a) Boswell did not simply publish unselectively every scrap of Johnson's conversation that he had saved, and (b) the Boswelliana are another source for the *Life* first edition worthy of consideration with the Life manuscript, papers apart, etc. My edition seeks in its annotation to link those Johnsoniana to their corrolaries in the published *Life of Johnson*, although some anecdotes did not appear in the *Life*. Rather, it excerpts from the bound volume at Houghton those anecdotes which are directly about Samuel Johnson, usually things Johnson said, sometimes things said about Johnson. This book does not attempt to collect all the Boswelliana. Numerous Boswelliana survive at Harvard's Houghton Library and Yale's Beinecke Library. These collected sayings he dubbed 'Boswelliana'. ![]() ![]() ![]() "James Boswell kept a personal record - not, I should note, his famous journals - of clever things he heard and said. ![]()
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