This volume, tenth in the Research Correspondence Series of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, documents the long friendship between Boswell and Sir William Forbes This volume, tenth in the Research Correspondence Series of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, collects the letters exchanged between lawyer, diarist, and biographer James Boswell and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, eminent Scottish banker, civic improver, philanthropist, literary and cultural patron, and lay leader of Edinburgh's "English Episcopal" community. Forbes served as Boswell's most valued Scottish advisor, to whom he would often turn for personal, financial, moral, and religious guidance, and whom he would name executor of his estate and co-guardian of his children. The volume includes a total of 111 comprehensively annotated letters, few of which have appeared previously in print, between Forbes and Boswell and other correspondents. It illuminates in particular the period in which Boswell moved from Edinburgh to London and wrote his major books, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson and The Life of Samuel Johnson.

James Boswell (1740–1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a generous and varied selection of Boswell’s journalistic writings, most of which have not been published since the eighteenth century. It offers a new angle on the history of journalism, an idiosyncratic view of literature, politics, and public life in late eighteenth-century Britain, and an original perspective on a complex and engaging literary personality.