In response to Charles Dilly’s advice, in a letter dated 20 December 1784, ‘that I should announce my intention to publish the Life of Dr. Johnson’, JB wrote on 23 December ‘that I intend to publish in the Spring my tour with Dr. Johnson, a good Prelude to my large Work his Life’ (Reg. Let.). He used this phrase in an advertisement drafted shortly thereafter, in part to announce his intention to publish ‘The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides’, but also to outline several components he planned to feature in his eventual biography of SJ. Only in revision did he add lines characterizing the Tour. While the full advertisement has not been traced in print, the portion about the Tour appeared on the verso of the last page of text in A Letter to the People of Scotland (1785).

JB long ruminated on the features of the Life and their potential to entice readers. On 22 March 1786, he solicited EM’s opinion on the idea of prosecuting the publisher of ‘Peter Pindar’s Attack’ on him for fabricating a conversation in which SJ ‘spoke of me in the most contemptous manner’. A verdict against ‘the fellow’, he speculated, might lessen any harm done by his ‘falsehood’ in the long run, but the immediate publicity of the lawsuit would be beneficial as well: ‘consider if this would not give an opportunity to announce the Work in the most splendid manner. Erskine would expatiate upon it as not only to be the Life and Conversation of the first Genius, etc. etc. etc. but the History of the Literature and Literary Men during a considerable period’. No legal action was taken, yet the topics JB imagined the famously eloquent Thomas Erskine expatiating upon eventually made their way onto his titlepage. To the very end, as JB struggled to conclude the work (see p. 327 n. 7), he pondered the composition of the title-page. He asked EM for his thoughts on March 9, and again on March 12 — ‘Meantime the Title Page must be made as good as may be.’ — and EM on April 14 provided advice on its wording.