Frederick Albert Pottle was born on August 3, 1897, in Lovell, Maine, the son of Albert Quimby Pottle and Blanche Hortense Harriman, and grew up on a farm in nearby Otisfield. After attending school in Oxford, Maine, he graduated with a BA from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in 1917—an institution on whose Board of Trustees he later served from 1932 to 1959.
Shortly after graduating from Colby in 1917, Pottle enlisted in the United States Army and served during the First World War in the Medical Corps at Evacuation Hospital No. 8 at Petit Maujouy, near Verdun, France (an experience he chronicled in his 1929 memoir Stretchers: The Story of a Hospital Unit on the Western Front). Returning to the United States in 1919, he taught high school history and chemistry in Deering, Maine, for a year before entering the graduate program in English at Yale University in 1920. That same year he married Marion Isabel Starbird, a fellow Colby graduate who became his lifelong collaborator on the Boswell papers.
After earning his MA at Yale in 1921, Pottle taught as Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire from 1921 to 1923 before returning to Yale to complete his PhD in 1925 under Chauncey Brewster Tinker. He joined the Yale faculty as an Instructor in English in 1925, became Assistant Professor in 1926, and was promoted to Professor of English in 1930—becoming, at age thirty-three, the youngest full professor in Yale College. He served as Emily Sanford Professor of English Literature from 1942 to 1944 and was appointed Sterling Professor of English in 1944, holding Yale's highest academic chair until becoming Sterling Professor Emeritus in 1966. Following Yale's acquisition of the Boswell papers in 1949, Pottle served as Chair of the Editorial Committee of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell for thirty years (1949–1979).
Although best known for his half-century of work on James Boswell, Pottle was also a prominent scholar of the English Romantic poets, particularly Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth, and author of The Idiom of Poetry (1941; rev. ed. 1946). A popular lecturer and dedicated advisor at Yale, he remarked upon his retirement in 1966: "I should like to believe that I never showed intolerance of a slow student or failed to find time for a student in difficulties."1
Throughout his adult life Pottle was a committed Anglo-Catholic churchman. As his colleague Charles G. Osgood noted in his preface to Volume 1 of the Research Edition (The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1766–1767, 1966, p. xv), it was characteristic of Pottle's temperament that he remained equally sympathetic to figures as temperamentally distinct as Boswell and Wordsworth. Frederick Albert Pottle died at a convalescent home in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 16, 1987, aged eighty-nine.
Frederick Pottle was the central figure in twentieth-century Boswellian scholarship. His involvement began at Yale under Chauncey Brewster Tinker, for whom he wrote his 1925 doctoral dissertation on Boswell's bibliography, published by the Clarendon Press in 1929 as The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq.: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell.
In August 1929, following the sudden death of Geoffrey Scott—whom the collector Ralph Heyward Isham had engaged to edit the manuscripts recently acquired from Lord Talbot de Malahide—Isham invited Pottle to take over the editorship of the privately printed, limited-edition Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt.-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham. Between 1930 and 1934 Pottle edited Volumes 7 through 18 of the Malahide edition (and co-authored its 1937 Index), compiled with his wife Marion S. Pottle The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle: A Catalogue (1931), and edited with Charles H. Bennett the first edition of Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., Now First Published from the Original Manuscript (1936; revised Yale edition, 1961).
When Yale University acquired Isham's consolidated Malahide and Fettercairn collections in July 1949, Pottle was appointed Chair of the Editorial Committee of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, directing both the Trade Edition for general readers and the scholarly Research Edition. His 1950 edition of Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763, inaugurating the Yale Trade Edition, became an international bestseller and established Boswell's reputation as a major diarist independent of Samuel Johnson. Over the next thirty-six years, Pottle edited or co-edited eleven of the twelve journal volumes in the Yale Trade Edition, working successively with Frank Brady, William K. Wimsatt, Jr., Charles Ryskamp, Charles McC. Weis, Joseph W. Reed, and Irma S. Lustig.
Alongside the editions, Pottle wrote the authoritative biography of Boswell's first twenty-nine years, James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (1966; rev. 1985), which Frank Brady completed in James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–1795 (1984). Based on his 1978 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, Pottle also wrote Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers (1982), chronicling the survival, recovery, and editing of the archive from 1795 to 1981. His decades of work with Marion S. Pottle and Claude Colleer Abbott culminated posthumously in the three-volume Catalogue of the Papers of James Boswell at Yale University (1993).
Biographical, Bibliographical, and Critical Works on Boswell
- A New Portrait of James Boswell, with Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927).
- The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq.: Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929).
- The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt.-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham: A Catalogue, with Marion S. Pottle (Oxford University Press, 1931).
- Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay (New York: Viking Press, 1937), on Boswell's assistance to the escaped convict Mary Broad (Mary Bryant).
- James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Heinemann, 1966; revised printing, 1985).
- Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).
- Catalogue of the Papers of James Boswell at Yale University, 3 vols., with Marion S. Pottle and Claude Colleer Abbott (Edinburgh University Press and Yale University Press, 1993).
Edited Volumes of Boswell's Papers
- Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt.-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham, Vols. 7–18 (privately printed, 1930–1934), and Index to the Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle (1937).
- Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. with Charles H. Bennett (Viking Press / Heinemann, 1936; revised Yale edition, 1961).
- Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763 (1950).
- Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764 (1952).
- Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 (1953).
- Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766, ed. with Frank Brady (1955).
- Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, ed. with Frank Brady (1956).
- Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. with William K. Wimsatt, Jr. (1959).
- Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776, ed. with Charles Ryskamp (1963).
- Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, ed. with Charles McC. Weis (1970).
- Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782, ed. with Joseph W. Reed (1977).
- Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, ed. with Irma S. Lustig (1981).
- Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789, ed. with Irma S. Lustig (1986).
Other Selected Books
- Stretchers: The Story of a Hospital Unit on the Western Front (Yale University Press, 1929).
- The Idiom of Poetry (Cornell University Press, 1941; revised and enlarged edition, 1946).