Addenda and Corrigenda to the Annotations of the Bailey Edition of Boswell's “Hypochondriak”

摘要

From October 1777 to August 1783 James Boswell published monthly and anonymously in the London Magazine seventy periodic essays entitled “The Hypochondriak”. These essays could be read only in their original source for the next 145 years, until Margery Bailey produced her heavily annotated, two-volume scholarly edition in 1928. In the following eight decades, with the exception of a contemporary review by R. W. Chapman in Modern Language Notes and a few updated notes in a condensed edition by Bailey in 1951, textual cruces and unidentified allusions in Boswell's essays have been ignored. Samuel Johnson believed that literary allusions and quotations of earlier writers, rather than being pedantry, showed “a community of mind”, and Boswell demonstrates his agreement throughout “The Hypochondriak”, where he engages in the parole of literary men in a frequent and deliberate manner. With labour-saving devices (such as computers, on-line texts, and search engines) that Bailey lacked, I have compiled a list of thirty-three items that can be thought of as supplemental to reading Boswell's essays in her 1928 edition. These items fill in gaps that Bailey acknowledged, make corrections when necessary, add especially appropriate information from the subsequently published versions of Boswell's private papers, and on occasion offer original notes, all to help the reader better understand Boswell's text.