Frederick Pottle
1897—1987
Frederick Albert Pottle is best known as the editor of James Boswell's papers and the author of an outstanding account of Boswell's life. A native of Maine, he was born on 3 August 1897 to Fred Leroy and Annette Kemp Pottle and raised on a farm in Otisfield; his primary education took place in a one-room schoolhouse. As an undergraduate at Colby College he majored in chemistry; but during his senior year his discovery of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems brought about a change reminiscent of some of Boswell's own youthful shifts of direction. From that time on Pottle pursued a career as a man of letters.
After graduating from Colby in 1917 he volunteered as a surgical assistant with an evacuation hospital unit in France and Germany. On his return from the war he enrolled in graduate studies in literature at Yale. In 1920 he married Marion Isabel Starbird. They had two sons, Christopher and Samuel; and a daughter, Annette, who died in infancy. Pottle took honors in the Cook Poetry Prize competition in 1921; he received his M.A. the same year and took an assistant professorship at the University of New Hampshire while continuing his graduate studies at Yale. His interest soon shifted from the writing of poetry to a study of the Romantics, especially Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth.
Pottle's First book, Shelley and Browning (1923), already suggests the biographical focus, enthusiasm, and meticulousness characteristic of his later writing. Pottle uses his own youthful excitement about Shelley as a way of understanding what the discovery of Shelley's work must have meant to a similarly excited Robert Browning in the early stages of his poetic career. He establishes the identity of the volume that provided Browning with his first exposure to Shelley, and he uses linguistic evidence—a catalogue of parallelisms in Browning's and Shelley's poems—to demonstrate that the earlier poet's influence on Browning's conception and technique was profound. An appendix recounts the steps of Pottle's research and provides detailed descriptions of the volume of Shelley's poems that once belonged to Browning and of Browning's marginalia. Reprinted in 1965, the book remains a standard resource for students of Browning's work.
The direction that Pottle's major research would take became clear when Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, a biographer of Boswell and a collector and editor of Boswell's papers, suggested that he undertake a bibliographical study of Boswell for his doctoral thesis. He agreed, in order to have Tinker as his supervisor. The thesis won the John Addison Porter Prize and earned Pottle his doctorate in 1925; that year he became an instructor at Yale, rising to the rank of assistant professor in 1926. Pottle's First published venture in the area of Boswell studies, written in collaboration with Tinker, was A New Portrait of James Boswell (1927), which traces a picture of Boswell to the Scots artist George Willison and establishes that it was painted in 1765 in Rome, while Boswell was on his grand tour.
Pottle's doctoral thesis was published in greatly revised form in 1929 as The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. In this volume Pottle laid the foundation for the biography that was to be published almost forty years later. Examining all available information, he establishes as fully as possible the publication history of each of Boswell's works, translations of it into other languages, and its significance in terms of Boswell's life, ambitions, and reputation among his contemporaries. This bibliographical study helped Pottle to formulate the principles of biography that he adhered to in his later study of Boswell's early years. Although many documents have surfaced since the publication of The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., its comprehensiveness and detail make it still the most authoritative reference work for Boswell scholars.
Stretchers, an account of Pottle's experiences with U.S. Evacuation Hospital 8 during World War I, was published in the fall of 1929, As in his biographical oeuvre, Pottle attempts here to recreate each experience as it was in the moment of its unfolding; wherever possible, he includes dialogue, letters, and journal entries. The result is a dramatic, often moving testimonial to the heroism and endurance of those who served in the war, both in battle and in the medical corps.
The same year brought Pottle the editorship of the Boswell papers, which was to become his central research project for the rest of his life. At the time, nearly all of the manuscripts, journals, and letters that had been discovered and released by Boswell's estate were in the possession of an avid American collector, Lt. Col. Ralph Heyward Isham. Planning to publish the papers in expensive, leather-bound, privately printed volumes, Isham had engaged the noted British architect, poet, and scholar Geoffrey Scott as editor. Soon after the publication of the sixth volume of Private Papers of James Boswell, however, Scott died. An unmailed letter to Pottle, commending The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., was found in the pocket of one of Scott's suits; Pottle was immediately chosen to succeed Scott as the editor of Private Papers of James Boswell and of a trade edition of the journals that Isham was projecting."
At the time he accepted the editorship. Pottle was already committed to full-time teaching duties at Yale for the 1929-1930 academic year; thus he commuted from New Haven to Glen Cove, Long Island, where he and his wife rented an apartment near Isham's home, to work on the editions. He later recalled this as a "crowded, exciting, and very happy period" in his life. He was promoted to full professor in 1930."
Despite the disorderly state of the Isham collection when Pottle entered the project, and despite his taxing schedule, he completed work on volumes 7, 8, and 9 of Private Papers of James Boswell in the summer of 1930. He interrupted his editing work to collaborate with his wife, a trained librarian, on a catalogue of Isham's collection for an exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York; members of the club received paperback copies, and a small edition of the hardbound volume, The Private Papers of James Boswell From Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt.-Col. Ralph Heyward Isham, was published by the Oxford University Press in 1931. Pottle once estimated that he and his wife spent nearly twelve hundred hours on the catalogue. In December 1930, after Isham moved with his collection to New York City, the Pottles took an apartment there. Pottle worked daily from January to September 1931 to bring out volumes 10 through 12 of the papers."
Arrangements were made the following year for photostats of the manuscripts, by then deposited at the New York Public Library, to be sent to Pottle at Yale. He continued to devote all his research time to them, while also serving as chairman of the Department of English during the 1932-1933 academic year. He began a graduate course called "The Boswell Papers," for which his students produced annotated, indexed editions of some of Boswell's manuscripts that remain valuable resources for scholars. By the end of 1932 volumes 13 through 16 of the papers were in print; volume 17 followed late in 1933 and volume 18 early in 1934. At Isham's insistence, Pottle then undertook an index to the papers; he completed it, with the assistance of Charles H. Bennett, Joseph Foladare, and others, in 1937."
Meanwhile, Pottle and Bennett brought out the first volume of the trade edition of Boswell's papers, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1773, Now First Published from the Original Manuscript , in 1936. In that same year Pottle was awarded his first honorary degree by the University of Glasgow.'"
Pottle's short but fascinating Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay (1937), originally delivered as a lecture to the Elizabethan Club at Yale in 1932, traces Boswell's relationship with Mary Bryant, a young convict exiled to Australia. Drawing on the journal of a British captain who met Bryant and recorded much of her story, Pottle tells of her marriage to a fellow exile, her escape with her husband and their two children, her recapture and imprisonment at Newgate, and her pardon through the advocacy of Boswell, who paid her expenses in London out of his own pocket and won pardons for four convicts who had escaped with her. Without idealizing her. Pottle offers a portrait that pays homage to her heroic spirit and demonstrates the depth of his own sympathy and imagination."
In July 1938, while on vacation in Maine, Pottle received a transatlantic call from Isham inquiring about a passage in Boswell's journal that might have a bearing on litigation over newly discovered papers. Within a few minutes Pottle was on his way, traveling three hundred miles by train to New Haven to locate the passage; after sending it by cable to Isham, he returned late that night to Maine."
During the 1938-1939 academic year Pottle took his first sabbatical leave, which he devoted to preparation of the trade edition of the Boswell papers. Pottle and his family temporarily moved to Cambridge, where he continued work on the papers in the Harvard College Library."
The Messinger Lectures that Pottle delivered at Cornell University in the spring of 1941 were published the same year as The Idiom of Poetry; the book was enlarged in 1946 with the addition of the Averill Lecture delivered at Colby College in 1942. Arguing for critical relativism, in anticipation of much later critics. Pottle maintains that every age derives critical standards for assessing the work of earlier poets from its own habits of taste, which are shaped by its social circumstances. He shows that only by allowing for the differences between the thought of earlier ages and one's own can one fully appreciate the literary legacies of the past. His use of analogies drawn from the sciences, especially relativity theory, shows a mind with exceptional flexibility and a wide range of interests and knowledge. The Idiom of Poetry provides a useful distinction between aesthetic and moral modes of critical evaluation, and even in upholding Christian orthodoxy as a basis for moral evaluation it is never narrow, dismissive, or dogmatic."
In 1944 Pottle was named Sterling Professor of English at Yale, and in 1945 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. On sabbatical leave in 1945-1946 he completed the trade edition of Boswell's papers and began work on a biography of Boswell. The latter project was to occupy him for the next twenty years."
In July 1949 Isham, under the pressure of failing health and waning finances, sold his collection of Boswell's papers to Yale for five hundred thousand dollars. An editorial committee was established to prepare the texts for publication, with Pottle as chairman. A research edition was planned, which was to include Boswell's journals, his correspondence, and a critical text of his manuscript for The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791). A trade edition was to include the material in Boswell's journals that would be of interest to the general reader."
The first volume of the trade edition, Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763 (1950), was immediately successful: by 1953 McGraw-Hill had sold 347,000 copies and William Heinemann in London had sold 111,000. It was reprinted in paperback in the United States in 1956 and in England in 1958 and 1966, and it was translated into Danish, Swedish, Finnish, French, Italian, and German. The second volume. Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764 (1952), though not as well received, was a favorite of Pottle's because he felt that he had constructed a coherent account of this period in Boswell's life from fragmentary materials."
For the 1952-1953 academic year Pottle was granted a sabbatical leave and received a second Guggenheim Fellowship. His first task was to prepare the next volume of the trade edition: Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 (1953). The remainder of the sabbatical was spent working on the biography. The third volume of the trade edition, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765-1766, edited with Frank Brady, appeared in 1955; the fourth, Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769, also edited with Brady, in 1956; the fifth, Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774, edited with William K. Wimsatt, in 1959; the sixth, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 1773 , largely reprinted from the 1936 edition that Pottle had prepared with Bennett, in 1961; and the seventh, Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, prepared with Charles Ryskamp, in 1963. Successive volumes of the trade edition were not produced as quickly, largely because of the demands placed on Pottle's time by the preparation of his biography of Boswell and his supervision of the research edition of Boswell's letters. Volume 8, Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778, edited with Charles McC. Weis, was published in 1970, and volume 9, Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778-1782, a collaboration with Joseph W. Reed, in 1977. Irma S. Lustig, a senior research associate in English at Yale, collaborated with Pottle on volume 10, Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782-1785 (1981), and on volume II, Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785-1789 (1986)."
Pottle's editions are notable for their creativity and workmanship. Although the series naturally follows the chronology of Boswell's life, Pottle made crucial decisions about the contents of each volume based not only on length restrictions but also on his perception of the successive phases of Boswell's experience and development; each volume thus represents a coherent segment of Boswell's life. To preserve chronology and continuity when manuscripts covering parts of Boswell's life had been lost, Pottle often had to supply reconstructions from notes, letters, memoranda, and other materials; Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764 was produced almost entirely by this means. Pottle's annotations provide essential historical and social detail as well as background on Boswell's life, and the introduction to each volume provides a useful characterization of the period covered and its importance for Boswell's life as a whole, the development of his character, and his progress as a man of letters."
The principles that guided Pottle's work as an editor are the same that inform The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. and his widely acclaimed biography, James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 (1966). Perhaps the most central of these principles is an essentially dramatic mode of presentation: wherever possible, Pottle allows his subject to speak for himself--a method not unlike Boswell's own in his journals and in his biography of Johnson. Thus, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. opens with a memoir of Boswell by Boswell himself; the annotations to the journals consist largely of relevant quotations from other sections of the journals and from letters, notes, and other Boswell manuscripts; and James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 begins with a translation of a sketch of his life that Boswell wrote to introduce himself to Jean-Jacques Rousseau."
Also, as Pottle argued in The Idiom of Poetry, a writer's life and work cannot be fairly evaluated without reference to the standards of his time and the social and literary context in which he wrote. In his biography Pottle goes to great lengths to supply the necessary background material and to assess Boswell's method and achievement with reference both to his own time and today. Pottle concludes that although the influence of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Richardson can be found in Boswell's work, his journal writing is creative, original, and decidedly modern--an assessment well substantiated by the sales Figures for Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763. He argues that Boswell's journals show considerable imaginative power and that they deserve to be acknowledged as substantial literary productions. He thus lays to rest the popular nineteenth-century view of Boswell as an idler whose literary reputation rests on a single book, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D."
Pottle's biography shows that Boswell was anything but an idler, and the structure of the book reflects the range and relative importance of Boswell's interests and activities. First and foremost, Boswell was a Scots aristocrat, so the book begins and ends with the issue of family and explores Boswell's family relationships and connections in depth. Second in importance to Boswell was his occupation as a lawyer, and Pottle's biography traces in detail the progress of his training and the growth of his career. Finally, although Boswell himself viewed his literary achievement as subordinate to his legal career, he remains important today primarily as a man of letters, and an assessment of the development of his craft and the nature of his achievement occupies a central position in Pottle's account of his life. These three major themes serve as keys to the interpretation of documents relevant to Boswell's life--most of them written by Boswell--and of the enormous assortment of factual material they contain."
As Pottle noted in the introduction to The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., one of the dangers a biographer must avoid is the amorphous chronicle of facts, offered without interpretation or imaginative insight. At the other extreme is the overly selective, impressionistic portrait of the subject's inner life as if controlled by a single ruling passion. Pottle avoids both dangers by employing a collocation of themes, by exploring "what life felt like to Boswell" and also how he appeared to others, and by using Boswell's documents as the foundation for his narrative. The biographer, Pottle says, must follow a rigorous scientific procedure: he "allows his imagination to form from only a partial reading of the evidence a trial impression of the personality he is trying to reconstruct. He then collects his facts with this tentative reconstruction always in mind. If the facts Fit, he uses them to Fill in the picture; if they won't Fit, he must modify his conception until they do." Thus, at every stage the impression of Boswell that Pottle presents is shaped by the facts recorded in the documents but is enlivened by Pottle's insight."
Pottle's analyses attempt to establish causal connections among events documented by Boswell. When missing documents have left periods of time or particular incidents obscure. Pottle offers conjectures to bridge the lacunae. In keeping with his scientific procedure, however, he is careful to let his reader know that what he is offering is conjectural and to document it as fully as possible, Pottle also pinpoints shifts of style and attitude in Boswell's journals and supplies the social and historical background of the narrated events. He acknowledges the generally poor quality of Boswell's early poetry; but he also points to the merits it does display and discusses the nuances of character and growth that it reveals."
One difficulty that Pottle handles admirably is the discrepancy between popularly accepted notions of Boswell's character and other, less sensational but equally important dimensions of his public self. The popular impression of Boswell as reckless, self-centered, ingratiating, and somewhat antisocial is based on easily dramatized anecdotes such as "his wrangling with his servant, his dog-beatings, and his whoring." But on the other side there are his "natural and almost constant power of being agreeable to others" and "his charm, his affableness, his good humour, his genuine good will," qualities that can only be discerned by penetrating and sympathetic inferences from the records of his inner life articulated in his journals and from rather sparse accounts of him by his contemporaries. Pottle never obscures or excuses Boswell's less appealing side and readily concedes that despite his intellectual and literary growth, Boswell retained the temperament and the drives of a "brilliant, egotistic, sensual boy." Boswell's profligacy must have been particularly difficult for Pottle, who described himself as an orthodox Christian, to come to terms with. Yet he demonstrates that Boswell was not amoral and that his actions often had to be accounted for to a sometimes exacting conscience. Though Boswell could behave irresponsibly, he was also, Pottle shows, subject to periods of intense self-searching, profound depression, and paralysis of will. What emerges from Pottle's scientific yet compassionate biography is a portrait of a complex character, with all of the intricacies and contradictions that Boswell's personal and literary growth entailed."
James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 was the first part of a projected two-volume biography; the second was to have been written in collaboration with Brady. But Pottle relinquished the sequel entirely to Brady, and it appeared as James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795 in 1984. Retiring from his teaching duties in 1966, Pottle continued to work daily on the Boswell papers, edited the last four volumes of the Yale trade edition, and wrote a history of the papers from Boswell's time to the present. The history had begun with a narrative published in the Heinemann deluxe edition of Boswell's London Journal in 1951 and had been revised and enlarged over the' years, but it remained unfinished while other projects dominated Pottle's time. Always more concerned with the dissemination of knowledge than with personal recognition. Pottle lent his manuscript to his colleague David Buchanan, who used it in writing his own history of the Boswell papers, The Treasures of Auchinleck (1974); in turn. Pottle acknowledged the assistance that Buchanan's study provided for his account, which finally appeared in 1982 as Pride and Negligence; The History of the Boswell Papers. The work meticulously traces the fate of Boswell's manuscripts, letters, proof sheets, journals, and other papers as they passed from his heirs to their successors, then to private collectors (notably Isham), and ultimately to Yale. The objectivity and precision displayed in Pottle's biography of Boswell are also clearly evident here, and he applies the same interpretive powers to his history of the papers as to his portrait of the man. He provides succinct characterizations of the people who handled the papers, such as Tinker; Isham; and Lord and Lady Talbot, Boswell's twentieth-century descendants, who are most to be thanked for the retrieval of the papers from obscurity. The book also engagingly describes Pottle's own involvement with the papers and provides a great deal of important autobiographical information."
The Pottles' younger son, Samuel, a successful composer and musician, died in July 1979. Their other son, Christopher, is a professor of engineering at Cornell University."
Pottle retired from the chairmanship of the Editorial Committee of the Private Papers of James Boswell in 1979 but continued to work on the papers until 1984. He was a trustee of the General Theological Seminary from 1947 to 1968. Colby College, for which he served as trustee from 1932 to 1959 and from 1966 to 1978, and as honorary trustee thereafter, honored him with a Litt.D. in 1941 and a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1977. He also received a Litt.D. from Rutgers University in 1951. From 1951 to 1971 he was Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1960, served on its research committee from 1967 to 1979, and received the society's Lewis Prize in 1975. Yale awarded him the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal in 1967 and the William Clyde DeVane Medal in 1969. For most of his career he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Provinciaal Utrechtsch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen. But Pottle, who died on 16 May 1987, will be remembered most for his excellence as a professor of English--many of his students are among the most prominent literary scholars in America--and for his comprehensive and authoritative works on Boswell.
After graduating from Colby in 1917 he volunteered as a surgical assistant with an evacuation hospital unit in France and Germany. On his return from the war he enrolled in graduate studies in literature at Yale. In 1920 he married Marion Isabel Starbird. They had two sons, Christopher and Samuel; and a daughter, Annette, who died in infancy. Pottle took honors in the Cook Poetry Prize competition in 1921; he received his M.A. the same year and took an assistant professorship at the University of New Hampshire while continuing his graduate studies at Yale. His interest soon shifted from the writing of poetry to a study of the Romantics, especially Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth.
Pottle's First book, Shelley and Browning (1923), already suggests the biographical focus, enthusiasm, and meticulousness characteristic of his later writing. Pottle uses his own youthful excitement about Shelley as a way of understanding what the discovery of Shelley's work must have meant to a similarly excited Robert Browning in the early stages of his poetic career. He establishes the identity of the volume that provided Browning with his first exposure to Shelley, and he uses linguistic evidence—a catalogue of parallelisms in Browning's and Shelley's poems—to demonstrate that the earlier poet's influence on Browning's conception and technique was profound. An appendix recounts the steps of Pottle's research and provides detailed descriptions of the volume of Shelley's poems that once belonged to Browning and of Browning's marginalia. Reprinted in 1965, the book remains a standard resource for students of Browning's work.
The direction that Pottle's major research would take became clear when Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, a biographer of Boswell and a collector and editor of Boswell's papers, suggested that he undertake a bibliographical study of Boswell for his doctoral thesis. He agreed, in order to have Tinker as his supervisor. The thesis won the John Addison Porter Prize and earned Pottle his doctorate in 1925; that year he became an instructor at Yale, rising to the rank of assistant professor in 1926. Pottle's First published venture in the area of Boswell studies, written in collaboration with Tinker, was A New Portrait of James Boswell (1927), which traces a picture of Boswell to the Scots artist George Willison and establishes that it was painted in 1765 in Rome, while Boswell was on his grand tour.
Pottle's doctoral thesis was published in greatly revised form in 1929 as The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. In this volume Pottle laid the foundation for the biography that was to be published almost forty years later. Examining all available information, he establishes as fully as possible the publication history of each of Boswell's works, translations of it into other languages, and its significance in terms of Boswell's life, ambitions, and reputation among his contemporaries. This bibliographical study helped Pottle to formulate the principles of biography that he adhered to in his later study of Boswell's early years. Although many documents have surfaced since the publication of The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., its comprehensiveness and detail make it still the most authoritative reference work for Boswell scholars.
Stretchers, an account of Pottle's experiences with U.S. Evacuation Hospital 8 during World War I, was published in the fall of 1929, As in his biographical oeuvre, Pottle attempts here to recreate each experience as it was in the moment of its unfolding; wherever possible, he includes dialogue, letters, and journal entries. The result is a dramatic, often moving testimonial to the heroism and endurance of those who served in the war, both in battle and in the medical corps.
The same year brought Pottle the editorship of the Boswell papers, which was to become his central research project for the rest of his life. At the time, nearly all of the manuscripts, journals, and letters that had been discovered and released by Boswell's estate were in the possession of an avid American collector, Lt. Col. Ralph Heyward Isham. Planning to publish the papers in expensive, leather-bound, privately printed volumes, Isham had engaged the noted British architect, poet, and scholar Geoffrey Scott as editor. Soon after the publication of the sixth volume of Private Papers of James Boswell, however, Scott died. An unmailed letter to Pottle, commending The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., was found in the pocket of one of Scott's suits; Pottle was immediately chosen to succeed Scott as the editor of Private Papers of James Boswell and of a trade edition of the journals that Isham was projecting."
At the time he accepted the editorship. Pottle was already committed to full-time teaching duties at Yale for the 1929-1930 academic year; thus he commuted from New Haven to Glen Cove, Long Island, where he and his wife rented an apartment near Isham's home, to work on the editions. He later recalled this as a "crowded, exciting, and very happy period" in his life. He was promoted to full professor in 1930."
Despite the disorderly state of the Isham collection when Pottle entered the project, and despite his taxing schedule, he completed work on volumes 7, 8, and 9 of Private Papers of James Boswell in the summer of 1930. He interrupted his editing work to collaborate with his wife, a trained librarian, on a catalogue of Isham's collection for an exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York; members of the club received paperback copies, and a small edition of the hardbound volume, The Private Papers of James Boswell From Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt.-Col. Ralph Heyward Isham, was published by the Oxford University Press in 1931. Pottle once estimated that he and his wife spent nearly twelve hundred hours on the catalogue. In December 1930, after Isham moved with his collection to New York City, the Pottles took an apartment there. Pottle worked daily from January to September 1931 to bring out volumes 10 through 12 of the papers."
Arrangements were made the following year for photostats of the manuscripts, by then deposited at the New York Public Library, to be sent to Pottle at Yale. He continued to devote all his research time to them, while also serving as chairman of the Department of English during the 1932-1933 academic year. He began a graduate course called "The Boswell Papers," for which his students produced annotated, indexed editions of some of Boswell's manuscripts that remain valuable resources for scholars. By the end of 1932 volumes 13 through 16 of the papers were in print; volume 17 followed late in 1933 and volume 18 early in 1934. At Isham's insistence, Pottle then undertook an index to the papers; he completed it, with the assistance of Charles H. Bennett, Joseph Foladare, and others, in 1937."
Meanwhile, Pottle and Bennett brought out the first volume of the trade edition of Boswell's papers, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1773, Now First Published from the Original Manuscript , in 1936. In that same year Pottle was awarded his first honorary degree by the University of Glasgow.'"
Pottle's short but fascinating Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay (1937), originally delivered as a lecture to the Elizabethan Club at Yale in 1932, traces Boswell's relationship with Mary Bryant, a young convict exiled to Australia. Drawing on the journal of a British captain who met Bryant and recorded much of her story, Pottle tells of her marriage to a fellow exile, her escape with her husband and their two children, her recapture and imprisonment at Newgate, and her pardon through the advocacy of Boswell, who paid her expenses in London out of his own pocket and won pardons for four convicts who had escaped with her. Without idealizing her. Pottle offers a portrait that pays homage to her heroic spirit and demonstrates the depth of his own sympathy and imagination."
In July 1938, while on vacation in Maine, Pottle received a transatlantic call from Isham inquiring about a passage in Boswell's journal that might have a bearing on litigation over newly discovered papers. Within a few minutes Pottle was on his way, traveling three hundred miles by train to New Haven to locate the passage; after sending it by cable to Isham, he returned late that night to Maine."
During the 1938-1939 academic year Pottle took his first sabbatical leave, which he devoted to preparation of the trade edition of the Boswell papers. Pottle and his family temporarily moved to Cambridge, where he continued work on the papers in the Harvard College Library."
The Messinger Lectures that Pottle delivered at Cornell University in the spring of 1941 were published the same year as The Idiom of Poetry; the book was enlarged in 1946 with the addition of the Averill Lecture delivered at Colby College in 1942. Arguing for critical relativism, in anticipation of much later critics. Pottle maintains that every age derives critical standards for assessing the work of earlier poets from its own habits of taste, which are shaped by its social circumstances. He shows that only by allowing for the differences between the thought of earlier ages and one's own can one fully appreciate the literary legacies of the past. His use of analogies drawn from the sciences, especially relativity theory, shows a mind with exceptional flexibility and a wide range of interests and knowledge. The Idiom of Poetry provides a useful distinction between aesthetic and moral modes of critical evaluation, and even in upholding Christian orthodoxy as a basis for moral evaluation it is never narrow, dismissive, or dogmatic."
In 1944 Pottle was named Sterling Professor of English at Yale, and in 1945 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. On sabbatical leave in 1945-1946 he completed the trade edition of Boswell's papers and began work on a biography of Boswell. The latter project was to occupy him for the next twenty years."
In July 1949 Isham, under the pressure of failing health and waning finances, sold his collection of Boswell's papers to Yale for five hundred thousand dollars. An editorial committee was established to prepare the texts for publication, with Pottle as chairman. A research edition was planned, which was to include Boswell's journals, his correspondence, and a critical text of his manuscript for The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791). A trade edition was to include the material in Boswell's journals that would be of interest to the general reader."
The first volume of the trade edition, Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763 (1950), was immediately successful: by 1953 McGraw-Hill had sold 347,000 copies and William Heinemann in London had sold 111,000. It was reprinted in paperback in the United States in 1956 and in England in 1958 and 1966, and it was translated into Danish, Swedish, Finnish, French, Italian, and German. The second volume. Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764 (1952), though not as well received, was a favorite of Pottle's because he felt that he had constructed a coherent account of this period in Boswell's life from fragmentary materials."
For the 1952-1953 academic year Pottle was granted a sabbatical leave and received a second Guggenheim Fellowship. His first task was to prepare the next volume of the trade edition: Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 (1953). The remainder of the sabbatical was spent working on the biography. The third volume of the trade edition, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765-1766, edited with Frank Brady, appeared in 1955; the fourth, Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769, also edited with Brady, in 1956; the fifth, Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774, edited with William K. Wimsatt, in 1959; the sixth, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 1773 , largely reprinted from the 1936 edition that Pottle had prepared with Bennett, in 1961; and the seventh, Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, prepared with Charles Ryskamp, in 1963. Successive volumes of the trade edition were not produced as quickly, largely because of the demands placed on Pottle's time by the preparation of his biography of Boswell and his supervision of the research edition of Boswell's letters. Volume 8, Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778, edited with Charles McC. Weis, was published in 1970, and volume 9, Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778-1782, a collaboration with Joseph W. Reed, in 1977. Irma S. Lustig, a senior research associate in English at Yale, collaborated with Pottle on volume 10, Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782-1785 (1981), and on volume II, Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785-1789 (1986)."
Pottle's editions are notable for their creativity and workmanship. Although the series naturally follows the chronology of Boswell's life, Pottle made crucial decisions about the contents of each volume based not only on length restrictions but also on his perception of the successive phases of Boswell's experience and development; each volume thus represents a coherent segment of Boswell's life. To preserve chronology and continuity when manuscripts covering parts of Boswell's life had been lost, Pottle often had to supply reconstructions from notes, letters, memoranda, and other materials; Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764 was produced almost entirely by this means. Pottle's annotations provide essential historical and social detail as well as background on Boswell's life, and the introduction to each volume provides a useful characterization of the period covered and its importance for Boswell's life as a whole, the development of his character, and his progress as a man of letters."
The principles that guided Pottle's work as an editor are the same that inform The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. and his widely acclaimed biography, James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 (1966). Perhaps the most central of these principles is an essentially dramatic mode of presentation: wherever possible, Pottle allows his subject to speak for himself--a method not unlike Boswell's own in his journals and in his biography of Johnson. Thus, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. opens with a memoir of Boswell by Boswell himself; the annotations to the journals consist largely of relevant quotations from other sections of the journals and from letters, notes, and other Boswell manuscripts; and James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 begins with a translation of a sketch of his life that Boswell wrote to introduce himself to Jean-Jacques Rousseau."
Also, as Pottle argued in The Idiom of Poetry, a writer's life and work cannot be fairly evaluated without reference to the standards of his time and the social and literary context in which he wrote. In his biography Pottle goes to great lengths to supply the necessary background material and to assess Boswell's method and achievement with reference both to his own time and today. Pottle concludes that although the influence of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Richardson can be found in Boswell's work, his journal writing is creative, original, and decidedly modern--an assessment well substantiated by the sales Figures for Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763. He argues that Boswell's journals show considerable imaginative power and that they deserve to be acknowledged as substantial literary productions. He thus lays to rest the popular nineteenth-century view of Boswell as an idler whose literary reputation rests on a single book, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D."
Pottle's biography shows that Boswell was anything but an idler, and the structure of the book reflects the range and relative importance of Boswell's interests and activities. First and foremost, Boswell was a Scots aristocrat, so the book begins and ends with the issue of family and explores Boswell's family relationships and connections in depth. Second in importance to Boswell was his occupation as a lawyer, and Pottle's biography traces in detail the progress of his training and the growth of his career. Finally, although Boswell himself viewed his literary achievement as subordinate to his legal career, he remains important today primarily as a man of letters, and an assessment of the development of his craft and the nature of his achievement occupies a central position in Pottle's account of his life. These three major themes serve as keys to the interpretation of documents relevant to Boswell's life--most of them written by Boswell--and of the enormous assortment of factual material they contain."
As Pottle noted in the introduction to The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., one of the dangers a biographer must avoid is the amorphous chronicle of facts, offered without interpretation or imaginative insight. At the other extreme is the overly selective, impressionistic portrait of the subject's inner life as if controlled by a single ruling passion. Pottle avoids both dangers by employing a collocation of themes, by exploring "what life felt like to Boswell" and also how he appeared to others, and by using Boswell's documents as the foundation for his narrative. The biographer, Pottle says, must follow a rigorous scientific procedure: he "allows his imagination to form from only a partial reading of the evidence a trial impression of the personality he is trying to reconstruct. He then collects his facts with this tentative reconstruction always in mind. If the facts Fit, he uses them to Fill in the picture; if they won't Fit, he must modify his conception until they do." Thus, at every stage the impression of Boswell that Pottle presents is shaped by the facts recorded in the documents but is enlivened by Pottle's insight."
Pottle's analyses attempt to establish causal connections among events documented by Boswell. When missing documents have left periods of time or particular incidents obscure. Pottle offers conjectures to bridge the lacunae. In keeping with his scientific procedure, however, he is careful to let his reader know that what he is offering is conjectural and to document it as fully as possible, Pottle also pinpoints shifts of style and attitude in Boswell's journals and supplies the social and historical background of the narrated events. He acknowledges the generally poor quality of Boswell's early poetry; but he also points to the merits it does display and discusses the nuances of character and growth that it reveals."
One difficulty that Pottle handles admirably is the discrepancy between popularly accepted notions of Boswell's character and other, less sensational but equally important dimensions of his public self. The popular impression of Boswell as reckless, self-centered, ingratiating, and somewhat antisocial is based on easily dramatized anecdotes such as "his wrangling with his servant, his dog-beatings, and his whoring." But on the other side there are his "natural and almost constant power of being agreeable to others" and "his charm, his affableness, his good humour, his genuine good will," qualities that can only be discerned by penetrating and sympathetic inferences from the records of his inner life articulated in his journals and from rather sparse accounts of him by his contemporaries. Pottle never obscures or excuses Boswell's less appealing side and readily concedes that despite his intellectual and literary growth, Boswell retained the temperament and the drives of a "brilliant, egotistic, sensual boy." Boswell's profligacy must have been particularly difficult for Pottle, who described himself as an orthodox Christian, to come to terms with. Yet he demonstrates that Boswell was not amoral and that his actions often had to be accounted for to a sometimes exacting conscience. Though Boswell could behave irresponsibly, he was also, Pottle shows, subject to periods of intense self-searching, profound depression, and paralysis of will. What emerges from Pottle's scientific yet compassionate biography is a portrait of a complex character, with all of the intricacies and contradictions that Boswell's personal and literary growth entailed."
James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 was the first part of a projected two-volume biography; the second was to have been written in collaboration with Brady. But Pottle relinquished the sequel entirely to Brady, and it appeared as James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795 in 1984. Retiring from his teaching duties in 1966, Pottle continued to work daily on the Boswell papers, edited the last four volumes of the Yale trade edition, and wrote a history of the papers from Boswell's time to the present. The history had begun with a narrative published in the Heinemann deluxe edition of Boswell's London Journal in 1951 and had been revised and enlarged over the' years, but it remained unfinished while other projects dominated Pottle's time. Always more concerned with the dissemination of knowledge than with personal recognition. Pottle lent his manuscript to his colleague David Buchanan, who used it in writing his own history of the Boswell papers, The Treasures of Auchinleck (1974); in turn. Pottle acknowledged the assistance that Buchanan's study provided for his account, which finally appeared in 1982 as Pride and Negligence; The History of the Boswell Papers. The work meticulously traces the fate of Boswell's manuscripts, letters, proof sheets, journals, and other papers as they passed from his heirs to their successors, then to private collectors (notably Isham), and ultimately to Yale. The objectivity and precision displayed in Pottle's biography of Boswell are also clearly evident here, and he applies the same interpretive powers to his history of the papers as to his portrait of the man. He provides succinct characterizations of the people who handled the papers, such as Tinker; Isham; and Lord and Lady Talbot, Boswell's twentieth-century descendants, who are most to be thanked for the retrieval of the papers from obscurity. The book also engagingly describes Pottle's own involvement with the papers and provides a great deal of important autobiographical information."
The Pottles' younger son, Samuel, a successful composer and musician, died in July 1979. Their other son, Christopher, is a professor of engineering at Cornell University."
Pottle retired from the chairmanship of the Editorial Committee of the Private Papers of James Boswell in 1979 but continued to work on the papers until 1984. He was a trustee of the General Theological Seminary from 1947 to 1968. Colby College, for which he served as trustee from 1932 to 1959 and from 1966 to 1978, and as honorary trustee thereafter, honored him with a Litt.D. in 1941 and a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1977. He also received a Litt.D. from Rutgers University in 1951. From 1951 to 1971 he was Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1960, served on its research committee from 1967 to 1979, and received the society's Lewis Prize in 1975. Yale awarded him the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal in 1967 and the William Clyde DeVane Medal in 1969. For most of his career he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Provinciaal Utrechtsch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen. But Pottle, who died on 16 May 1987, will be remembered most for his excellence as a professor of English--many of his students are among the most prominent literary scholars in America--and for his comprehensive and authoritative works on Boswell.