Frederick A. Pottle, 89; Expert on 18th-Century Biographer Boswell

Frederick A. Pottle, probably the world’s most renowned expert on 18th-Century biographer James Boswell and a retired professor of English at Yale University, has died after a long illness. He was 89.

Pottle died Saturday at the New Haven Convalescent Home, Yale said in a statement issued this week.

From 1949 until 1979, Pottle was editor-in-chief of a still-ongoing project to publish the papers of Boswell, the British diarist and biographer of Samuel Johnson, the 18th-Century English lexicographer, essayist, poet and moralist.

At the time of his death, Pottle was chairman emeritus of the Editorial Committee of the Yale Boswell Papers, which has produced 13 volumes. An estimated 30 to 35 more volumes remain to be published.

The project consists of the editing and publishing of about 13,000 pages of the often ribald and profane Boswell letters and journals stored at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The first volume, published by McGraw-Hill in 1950, was the best-selling “Boswell’s London Journal,” which sold a million copies.

“I think it’s very comforting to know that this project is going to go on beyond my lifetime,” Pottle once said in an interview. “It provides a sense of continuity.”

A member of the Yale faculty since 1925, Pottle also was a specialist in the literature of 19th-Century England and known for his advocacy of the romantic tradition in poetry.

Pottle published “James Boswell, the Earlier Years 1740-1769” in 1966 and wrote six other books.