Boola Boswell

It looked something like moving day at a metropolitan bank. Each of the two private cars that pulled up in front of Yale University's library had four big metal chests inside--and an armed guard. Nobody actually expected hijackers, but Yale, egged on by the insurance companies, was taking no chances. The chests held the private papers of James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson and pertinacious observer of the 18th Century in general.

In a sense, the papers had been on their way to New Haven for 23 years, ever since Ralph H. Isham (Yale '14) first heard of them. One batch had been uncovered in Ireland's Malahide Castle in 1927, another in Scotland. Isham bought the Malahide papers, and after years of dickering acquired the rest. Scholars hailed them as the greatest literary find of the century.

The eight chests contained 1,300 unpublished pages of the Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell's diary, the complete manuscript of the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Boswell's correspondence with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick and Voltaire. Isham had always wanted a place like his alma mater to have them. Last week, Yale bought them all with funds supplied by the McGraw-Hill Co." (which will have exclusive publishing rights) and the Old Dominion Foundation (founded by Paul Mellon, Yale '29).

A team of scholars under Professor Frederick A. Pottle (Yale '21) had already begun the job of sorting and editing. Eventually there will probably be a new Life of Johnson and a definitive biography of Boswell, together with volumes of correspondence and hitherto unknown poems by Johnson, and essays by Reynolds, which are included in the Isham collection. Scholars guessed that those books would be only the beginning. From now on, it seemed, no 18th Century scholar would be up on his subject unless he had spent some time at Yale.

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