The latest volume in the Boswell Research Edition contains James Boswell’s correspondence over many years with the overseers of his Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire. The letters and the wealth of primary material used to annotate them are a trove of information on the agrarian and social history of eighteenth-century Scotland.
The letters present Boswell in a light new to those who know him as a diarist, advocate, and biographer of Samuel Johnson. He appears here as one of the gentlemen improvers of largely agricultural southwestern Scotland on the brink of the Industrial Revolution. Accordingly, the volume offers an extensive case study of estate life and management during this important transitional period.