http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/479950306

Samuel Johnson manuscripts

This collection consists of items in Johnson's hand, and early transcripts of his manuscripts. Highlights include a 77-page diary which Johnson kept sporadically from 1765 to 1784; a 1784 deed of his teapot to his servant Francis Barber; and the last known document in his hand, a pension receipt he signed on the day of his death in 1784. The collection includes partial drafts of many of his works, including Irene; Lives of the English Poets (biographies of Pope and Rowe); London; A Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language; and The Vanity of Human Wishes. It also includes his partial translation of Sallust's Catiline; annotations of documents by Giuseppe Baretti, Richard Bathurst, and Hester Lynch Piozzi; notes on theologians Samuel Clarke and Styan Thirlby; and documents he wrote on behalf of Mary Dunn Collier Flint, Henry Thrale, and the widowed mother of Joseph Hunt. The collection also includes significant early transcripts of documents authored by Johnson, such as several pages of extracts which James Boswell made from Johnson's lost earlier diary; Boswell's transcript of Johnson's annotations on Dalrymple's Annals of Scotland; and two fragments prepared by an amanuensis for Johnson's Dictionary. Most of the collection is in English, but a substantial portion is written in, or translated from, Latin.

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