THE opening and closing years covered in the fourth and final volume of this edition of the Life of Johnson manuscript find Boswell grappling with separation—including, ultimately, his own anxious separation from the enormous biographical task. Two occurrences of the word itself in the volume frame the enterprise, marking the end of the ‘long separation’ throughout 1780 and part of 1781 when Boswell was unable to visit Johnson (p. 57) and the ‘long long separation’ after 30 June 1784 when they parted from one another in London, for what would be the last time (p. 251).

Both of these separations left voids in the sort of biographical record that Boswell prized most highly: the presentation of Johnson's life ‘in scenes’ with conversation at their core, scenes largely witnessed and participated in by the biographer. To fill the first void he introduced a substantial assemblage of Johnsoniana provided by Bennet Langton. Filling the second void was less straightforward: unable to recount the final months of his subject's life on the basis of his own observation, he had to rely on other sources of information, including Johnson's letters to several correspondents—chronicling his declining health and (in Boswell's emphasis) courage in the face of suffering—and summaries or quotations from letters he received that narrated Johnson's last moments.

Organizing these letters, a simple matter (in first draft) of chronological arrangement, became complex once Boswell (in revision) took stock of the competing interests, expressed earlier in the volume, between ‘exact chronology’ and the ‘connection of subjects’ (p. 185). A deviation from chronology alleviated the frustration he encountered in handling part of the year 1783: ‘Too nice chronology is very troublesome’, he told the compositor in a marginal note, opting ‘to go on without the transitions backwards & forwards’ (p. 164 n. 1). In a similar approach to the latter half of 1784, he presented Johnson's letters to each of several recipients en bloc, without letter headings or sign-offs. The typesetting of each recipient's name only once, with the contents of successive letters collapsed into single paragraphs, was a separate expedient to address a concurrent complexity, the need to limit the number of pages by which the second volume of the Life outgrew the first.