The Letters of Samuel Johnson - Volume I, 1731-1772

Oxford: The Clarendon press/ Oxford University Press, 1992. The Letters of Sarnuet Johnson, known as the Hyde Edition, is the most complete scholarly edition of Johnson's letters ever to appear. in editing these five volumes, Bruce Redford has included fifty-two newly discovered letters or parts of letters, and he has supplied more accurate versions of many others. Redford also has decoded numerous references that previously had resisted explanation, and Ms annotations integrate the vital discoveries ofrecent scholarship. The overall result is a far richer understanding of Samuel Johnson's life, work, and milieu. The Hyde Edition offers major professional advances over any previous publication of these materials. It transcribes scores of texts from the original documents for the first time-a feature of special importance in the case of Johnson's revealing letters to Hester Thrale, a number of which have been available only in expurgated form. It is the first edition systematically to record substantive deletions in a way that will allow readers a more intimate knowledge of stylistic procedures, mental habits, and chains of association. The Hyde Edition also documents the current disposition ofthe manuscripts, hundreds of which have changed hands in recent decades. Volume I opens with the sparse epistolary record ofJohnson's early adulthood, the period that followed his brief career at Oxford and ended when he set out to try his literary fortunes in London. It includes the letters relating to Ms precarious years in Grub Street, and to the two great projects of his early middle age, the Dictionary and the edition of Shakespeare. In the later stages of this volume, we observe Johnson consolidating his friendship with Hester and Henry Thrale through letters that involve themselves in the family's "whole System of Life." BRUCE REDFORD, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of The Converse oft/it Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth- Century Familiar Letter (Chicago). Brown cloth with gilt lettred spine on black panel, in cream and grey dustwrapper. xxix, 431 pages, Frontispiece portrait of Johnson, plus some letters reproduced in facsimile. 6.5 X 10 inches, Near fine book in a near fine dustwrapper, appears unread, clean and unmarked throughout.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good.