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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2025
The journals covered by this volume relate to periods between the autumn of 1766 and May 1769. It has been said that the years 1766 to 1769 were the happiest years of Boswell's life. During the first three of those years, Boswell commenced practice as an advocate at the Scottish Bar; wrote a major literary work, the Account of Corsica, which was an instant best-seller; became a tireless volunteer for the Douglas camp in the great Douglas Cause, the cause célèbre of eighteenth-century Scottish legal history; and started to give serious thought to finding a wife, while at the same time carrying on a passionate affair with his mistress. For much of that period Boswell displayed remarkable energy. During 1767, in particular, ‘there seems to have been no limit either to the amount of work he could perform or of pleasure he could encompass’. And during Boswell's visits to London and Oxford in 1768 he produced some of his finest journal-writing.
The Law
The journals covered by this volume are to a large extent a record of Boswell's life as a young advocate during the first few years of his practice. While many of the journal entries relate to matters other than the law, the annotations in this volume, where appropriate, concentrate unashamedly on Boswell's legal career. In the ‘trade edition’ volume of Boswell in Search of a Wife, which covers the period 1766 to 1769, Frank Brady observed that ‘complete annotation – such as full explication of Boswell's legal cases – has been reserved for the research edition’.
Although Boswell had no inclination to be a lawyer, his father, Alexander Boswell (1707–82), who was admitted advocate on 29 December 1729, appointed sheriff-depute of Wigtownshire in 1748 and appointed Lord of Session (as Lord Auchinleck) on 15 February 1754, was keen that Boswell follow him (and Lord Auchinleck's father before him) in becoming an advocate. After studying Arts at Edinburgh University from 1753 to 1758, Boswell studied civil law (that is, Roman law) from 1758 to 1760, first at Edinburgh University and then at Glasgow University.
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