The profusion of information about this particular point may seem to us unnecessary--it is of course controversial, and the controversy has lost much of its interest. But it shows in any case not only the great number of questions Boswell was willing to ask in order to find out exactly what had taken place and the scale upon which his investigations were conducted, but also the minute and detailed care with which he preserved the truth.
Boswell has himself said something of the labour it cost him to compile the 'Life':
The labour and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed, will hardly be conceived by those who read them with careless facility. The stretch of mind and prompt assiduity by which so many conversations were preserved, I myself, at some distance of time, contemplate with wonder; and I must be allowed to suggest, that the nature of the work in other respects, as it consists of innumerable detached particulars, all of which, even the most minute, I have spared no pains to ascertain with a scrupulous authenticity, has occasioned a degree of trouble far beyond that of any other species of composition. Were I to detail the books which I have consulted, and the inquiries which I have found it necessary to make by various channels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious. Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly.[4]
Something of all that Boswell meant by this can be seen more nearly in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's essay upon Boswell's Proof-sheets:
A delay was sometimes caused by his desire to 'ascertain particulars with scrupulous authenticity.' 'Sheet 777,' he wrote, 'is with Mr. Wilkes to look at a note.' ... A short delay is caused in ascertaining the number of years the Rev. Mr. Vilette had been Ordinary of Newgate. A blank had been left in the text. On the margin Boswell wrote: 'Send my note to Mr. Vilette in the morning and open the answer. Or inquire of Mr. Akerman (the keeper of Newgate) for the number of years. Get it somehow.' ... On page 505 of the second volume Boswell writes: 'I could wish that the forme in which page 512 is were not thrown off till I have an answer from Mr. Stone, the gentleman mentioned in the note, to tell me his Christian name, that I may call him Esq.' ... In the margin of the passage in which he quotes the inscription on a gold snuff-box given to Reynolds by Catherine II., he writes, 'Pray be very careful in printing the words of the Empress of _all the Russias_.' ... Opposite the long note where he quotes the anonymous editor of 'Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian,' he writes in the margin: '_This page_ must not be laid on till I hear from Dr. Parr whether his name may be mentioned.' Accordingly he wrote to him requesting 'to have by return of post if I may say or guess that Dr. Parr is the editor.'