Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers

The full story of how the Boswell Papers — James Boswell's private journals, letters, and manuscript drafts — survived two centuries of near-misses, family indifference, and extraordinary luck to become one of the great literary archive discoveries of the twentieth century. Frederick Pottle spent his career at Yale editing the papers and knew the story from the inside. The title says it all: pride kept the family from destroying them, negligence kept them from being catalogued or cared for, and a series of improbable finds brought them — from Malahide Castle in Ireland and Fettercairn House in Scotland — to Yale's Beinecke Library.

First edition, published by McGraw-Hill in 1982. Dust jacket worn with creasing; boards and interior clean. For readers of Boswell, Johnson, and anyone interested in the detective work of literary scholarship.