Henry Luce III, chair and chief executive officer of The Henry Luce Foundation, has announced a three-year grant of $450,000 to Yale to support the work of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell.
The gift will help bring to completion a massive project begun 50 years ago: the publication -- for both a popular audience and scholars -- of the abundant writings by the noted chronicler of 18th-century British life.
President Richard C. Levin, in thanking the Luce Foundation, stated: "I am deeply appreciative of this generous support for the Yale Boswell Editions. The grant demonstrates yet again the foresight and generosity of The Henry Luce Foundation and its commitment to supporting the advancement and preservation of knowledge."
The Yale Boswell Editions were inaugurated in 1949 under the direction of the first general editor, the late scholar Frederick A. Pottle. The project is one of several literary and historical research undertakings at Yale, which include the Yale Center for Parliamentary History, the Papers of Benjamin Franklin and the Works of Jonathan Edwards.
The Scottish-born Boswell (1740-1795), a lawyer, diarist and biographer, was originally best known for his landmark "Life of Samuel Johnson" (first edition, 1791). He won renewed fame with the unexpected sequence of recoveries in the earlier part of the 20th-century of his controversial private diaries and correspondence, and the publication of his diaries in a popular reading edition produced by the Yale editors. That 14-volume series began with the "London Journal 1762-1763," which became a bestseller when it appeared in 1950, and was completed in 1989 with the publication of "Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789-1795."
The current focus of the project is the ongoing publication of a series of research volumes annotated for a scholarly readership. The material being edited has been selected from the large collection of Boswell's documents, as well as material from his ancestors and descendants, which is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Over the years, the Boswell Editions have won a reputation for the comprehensiveness and authority of their scholarly work and for elucidating a wide range of literary, cultural and historical topics in Boswell's writings.
The first volume of the parallel research edition was published in 1966. Since then, 13 volumes have been produced, including a comprehensive three-volume "Catalogue" of the papers and the first two volumes of a projected four-volume transcription of the manuscript of the "Life of Johnson." The volumes are prepared in press-ready form by the Boswell Editions staff in the project's offices on the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library, and are published jointly by Yale University Press and Edinburgh University Press.
Boswell's archives -- which were scattered, censored, stored unsystematically and originally believed to have been destroyed -- came to light in major holdings among his descendants, the Talbots of Malahide, outside Dublin, in the early part of the 20th century. New discoveries followed at Fettercairn, in Scotland, where portions of them had become tangled with the papers of one of Boswell's literary executors. The American collector Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham (1890-1955), after arduous effort, overcame family reluctance and then endured protracted proceedings in the Scottish courts to acquire virtually the whole known collection. Purchase of the papers by Yale was made possible by an unsolicited grant of $300,000 in 1948 by the late Paul Mellon's Old Dominion Foundation, and by the purchase of commercial publication rights by the McGraw-Hill Book Company.
"The papers of James Boswell -- lawyer, diarist, champion of Corsican liberty and author of literature's most influential and decisive contribution to Western biography, 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' -- were hailed rightly as one of the greatest literary finds of this or any other age when they first came to light earlier in the 20th century," says Gordon Turnbull, current general editor of the Yale Boswell Editions.
"Because of Boswell's journalistic range, energy, pertinacity and zest, they offer an unrivaled window on the time that helped form our own," he adds. "In the correspondence volumes, letters to Boswell greatly outnumber letters by him, so that the focus has now moved away from Boswell himself and onto the great range of 18th-century voices and topics his papers illuminate."
The Luce grant, Turnbull adds, comes at a time of "great productivity" for the Yale project, which has published four research volumes in the past two years and has several others in advanced states of preparation.
Other recently published works include the first two volumes of "The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple," edited by Thomas Crawford; "The Correspondence of James Boswell with James Bruce and Andrew Gibb, Overseers of the Auchinleck Estate," edited by Nellie Pottle Hankins and John Strawhorn; and the second volume of the manuscript edition of the "Life of Johnson," edited by Bruce Redford, with Elizabeth Goldring.
Volumes to come include "Boswell's Political Correspondence," "Boswell's Correspondence with the Scots Literati," the manuscript edition of his "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" and research editions of Boswell's "Grand Tour" journals.
Funding for the project recently had come chiefly from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); a number of family and foundational donors, including the James J. Colt Foundation, the L.J. and Mary C. Scaggs Foundation, and the De Muth Family Foundation; and from individual donors. After NEH funding cutbacks, Yale supported the project at full cost for a year while alternative funding sources were sought.
Connections between the Boswell papers and the Luce family are "close and intricate," says Turnbull, noting that Leila Hadley Luce, wife of Henry Luce III, is a direct descendant of James Boswell and that Lieutenant-Colonel Isham was a close family friend. In addition, Colonel Isham's descendants are related by marriage on Leila Luce's side.
The Henry Luce Foundation was created in 1936 by the late Henry R. Luce, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Time Magazine, as a tribute to his parents, the Reverend Dr. Henry Winters Luce and Elizabeth Root Luce. The Luce family has a tradition of strong ties to Yale, starting with Reverend Luce, who graduated from Yale in 1892, and continuing with his son, Henry R. Luce '20. Henry Luce III, the current chair and CEO of the Luce Foundation, is a graduate of the Yale College Class of 1945W. His son, Henry Christopher Luce, graduated from Yale in 1972.
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