Did you know?

For most of his adult life Boswell was better known for his "Account of Corsica", which lead to the sobriquet Corsica Boswell, than for his friendship with Dr. Johnson.

Biographies

James Boswell mentioned thousands of people in his extensive journals and other writings. Read about an ever increasing number of those people, and about their relationship with Boswell, in our biographies section.

Literature

In our literature section you can read about the numerous books published by Boswell in his own lifetime, and about more than 40 other books about or related to Boswell published since his death in 1795.

Norton Nicholls - Correspondent of Thomas Gray

Norton Nicholls

Born 1742
Died 1809

Biography:

Son of Norton Nicholls, merchant, and Jane Floyer, dau of Lieut-Col Charles Floyer. Educated at Eton, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he met William Johnson Temple. Ordained in 1767, he became the rector of Lound and Bradwell, Suffolk (1767-1809). An able landscape designer (Link).

A close friend of the poet Thomas Gray in the poets' later years. Nicholls and Gray made an excursion through the Western Counties in 1770, which may be seen as parallel to Boswell and Johnson's tour of the Hebrides in 1773, and in some other ways, the relationship between the Gray and Nicholls seems to have resembled that of Boswell and Johnson. Nicholls wrote Reminiscences of Gray, which was together with some editions of the correpondence between the two.

Life with Boswell:

Temple introduced Boswell to Nicholls, an old Cambridge chum of his, on May 13, 1763. Boswell and Nicholls met a few times more before Boswell left for Holland in August of that year. They didn't meet again until Augustu 10, 1774 in Edinburgh. Nicholls's cousin Frances Floyer was married to John Francis Erskine, an old classmate of Boswell's at Edinburgh University.

Literature

The Correspondence of Thomas Gray and the Rev Norton Nicholls was published in 1843, and is often available via the AbeBooks used books search engine.