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The Contributions of John Nichols to Boswell's Life of Johnson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The monumental collections of biographical material published by John Nichols are, combined, the richest source of eighteenth-century literary biography. Nichols is known to have been as generous as he was prolific. It would be strange, therefore, if the two greatest biographers of the period, Johnson and Boswell, had not been indebted to some extent to him. That Johnson was so indebted for material included in six of the Lives of the Poets, I have shown previously. I shall show here that Boswell was similarly indebted, by examining the contributions of Nichols to the Life of Johnson.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 “Some New Sources of Johnson's Lives,” PMLA, lxv (1950), 1088-1111.
2 Johnson's Letters, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1892), ii, 68 (letter 581).
3 Gentleman's Mag., lv, i (Jan. 1785), 9.
4 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812-15), ii, 550. See G. B. Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies (Oxford, 1897), i, 178, n. 3.
5 This letter, dated 4 Feb. 1784, is not printed in Hill's collection of Johnson's letters. It is number 929.3 in the letters listed by R. W. Chapman in “Johnson's Letters,” RES, xiii (April 1937). My text comes from Nichols, Lit. Anec., ii, 551, which I believe to be the first place of publication.
6 See Hill, Letters, ii, 425, where the editor says merely, “Published in the Life, iv.369.” No place of first publication is given by him. It was published for the first time in the Gentleman's Mag., liv, ii (Dec. 1784), 893-894. See also Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. ed. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), iv, 369.
7 Hill has represented some of these letters as having appeared for the first time in other places. See, e.g., Letters, ii, 431, n. 1 (letter 1042), where he wrote: “First published in Malone's Boswell.” Its first publication was actually in the Gentleman's Mag., liv, ii (Dec. 1784), 892. Hill made other mistakes. He said that letters 822 and 950 were first published in Nichols' Lit. Anec.; but letter 822 appeared first in the Gentleman's Mag., liv, ii (Dec. 1784), 893, and letter 950, in ibid., lviii, i (Jan. 1788), 49. Even without external evidence, one could almost be certain that if Nichols had had letters from Johnson in his possession he would have printed them himself before turning them over to any other person. All but one of the letters from Johnson to Nichols in the Gentleman's Mag. appeared within two months of Johnson's death. The single exception is letter 950, referred to previously in this note. Nichols was too astute a publisher to have missed the advantage of timeliness in the publication of these letters.
8 “The occasional publication of the [Johnson's] letters,” wrote Chapman (see n. 5, above), “may be said to begin with the Gentleman's Magazine for December, 1784” (p. 2).
9 An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson (London, 1792), p. 66.
10 Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs (London, 1828), i, 37.
11 Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 359. This letter, dated 13 Aug. 1784, is number 989 in Hill, Letters, ii, 413.
12 Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castte, ed. G. Scott (Vols. i-vi) and F. A. Pottle (Vols. vii-xviii) (New York, 1928-34), xiii, 217. See Hill-Powell, Boswell, iii, 371; iv, 480; and Hill, Letters, ii, 197, n. 2.
13 Boswell Papers, xiv, 225. Italic indicates expansion by Professor Pottle of Boswell's abbreviated words.
14 As a member of the Essex Club, Nichols received an invitation to attend Johnson's funeral. Being there himself, he was able to compile the List of those present at the Funeral. It is typical of the care with which Nichols handled documents that he should have preserved the invitation and the list (now Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 33,498), from which Hill took his copy for Letters, ii, 434. See Gentleman's Mag., lv, i (Jan. 1785), 8; ibid. (Feb. 1785), 98-99.
15 Lit. Anec., iii, 191-192, n.
16 Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, ii, 36-37.
17 Other occasions upon which Boswell records that he met Nichols are in Boswell Papers, xviii, 33, 182, 215, 272-273.
18 Lit. Anec., ii, 400.
19 Life of Johnson (London, 1791), ii, 345-346. The letters from Johnson to Nichols reproduced here are 580.1, 597, 603, 611, 729.2. Boswell also printed all of letter 1026 (p. 549) and parts of others.
20 Life (1791), i, 41, n. Boswell also mentions calling upon Mary Cave in his journal (Boswell Papers, xviii, 11).
21 This anecdote is reprinted by Nichols in Lit. Anec., iii, 333-334, in the life of Budworth. See Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 445-447.
22 See Gentleman's Mag., lxxxv, ii (Nov. 1815), 388-391; also Lit. Anec., iii, 337, n.
23 Powell has, in this instance, made the proper citation in an appendix, where he has also reproduced the letter from S. P. which accompanied the Scheme in the Gentleman's Mag. See Hill-Powell, Boswell, i, 531-532.
24 Gentleman's Mag., liv, ii (Dec, 1784), 891-892.
25 Boswell, Life (1791), i, 69-70. The work of Father Paul which Johnson was translating was Paolo Sarpi's Istoria del Concilio Tridentino, from the French of Le Courayer of 1736.
26 See Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 407-410; also Lit. Anec., v, 15.
27 See Hill, Letters, ii, 431-432 (letter 1042); Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 550, 381-382.
28 Hill-Powell, Boswell, i, 24.
29 Ibid., iii, 443.
30 A mistake; Johnson died in Dec. 1784.
31 This same letter is in Lit. Anec., ii, 552.
32 Gentleman's Mag., lxi, i (June 1791), 499-500. See Lit. Anec., ii, 552-555.
33 Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 407-410. There are some slight errors of fact in these aneo dotes from Nichols. They are all corrected in Appendix G, iv, 445-447.
34 Ibid., iv, 244, n. 2. See also Lit. Anec., ii, 553.
35 lv, i (Feb. 1785), 99-101.
36 See, e.g., lxiii, ii (Oct., Nov., Dec. 1793), 875, 1009, 1098.
37 xlix (April 1779), 205-206.
38 Boswell, Life (1791), i, 43, n. 3; The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam (Oxford, 1941), p. 94.
39 Gentleman's Mag., lxi, i (May 1791), 396.
40 Boswell, Corrections and Additions to the First Edition (1793), p. 1; Gentleman's Mag., lxiii, ii (Oct. 1793), 875; and lxiv, i (Jan. 1794), 32-35.
41 Boswell, Corrections and Additions, p. 1; Lit. Anec., viii, 416.
42 Lit. Anec., ii, 553. See Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 276-277. The incident is mentioned in one of Johnson's letters, to which Hill has a note: “In this he was mistaken. Rasselas was translated into Russian in 1795, but the Rambler remains untranslated” (Letters, ii, 377, n. 2).
43 Lit. Anec., viii, 81; Hill-Powell, Boswell, iii, 308, n. 3.
44 MS. Malone 39, fol. 154 (recto and verso), reproduced here, along with the letter which follows, by the kind permission of Dr. R. W. Hunt, Keeper of Western MSS. at the Bodleian Library.
45 Nichols was at that time republishing Fuller's Worthies.
46 Bodleian MS. Malone 39, fol. 156.
47 Hill, Letters, ii, 271-272 (letter 808), and 290 (letter 835).
48 Boswell, Life, ed. Edmond Malone, 6th ed. (1811), iv, 224-227, n. See Johnson's letter to Compton in Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, ii, 453; also reference to Compton in Hill, Letters, ii, 271, n. 4, and in Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 504.