The fourth and concluding volume in the Yale Research Edition's transcription of Boswell's working manuscript of the Life of Johnson, covering the final four years of Samuel Johnson's life from 1780 until his death on December 13, 1784.
Edited by Thomas F. Bonnell following the genetic transcription method established by Marshall Waingrow, the volume traces Boswell's drafts, insertions, and revisions made with Edmond Malone across the closing phase of Johnson's biography. It documents Johnson's completion of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-1781), his eyewitness observations of the Gordon Riots in June 1780, the death of Henry Thrale in 1781 and Johnson's subsequent estrangement from Hester Thrale upon her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi, Boswell's final meetings with Johnson in London and Oxford in 1781, 1783, and 1784, and Johnson's final illness and death.
Edited by Thomas F. Bonnell, Volume 4 of the Manuscript Edition was published in 2020 by Edinburgh University Press and Yale University Press, completing the four-volume sub-series begun with Volume 1 (1994), Volume 2 (1999), and Volume 3 (2012).