This volume, first in the Yale Research Series of Boswell's journals, covers his emotionally eventful youthful travels through the German and Swiss territories, from mid-June 1764 (after his law studies in Utrecht) to New Year's Day, 1765, when he crossed the Alps for the next stages of his European tour, in Italy, Corsica and France. The volume is the Research Series parallel to Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, ed. F. A. Pottle (1953), whose annotation the editor, Marlies K. Danziger, has greatly deepened, expanded, supplemented and in many cases corrected.

This volume contains more than 150 letters, verse epistles and other items, following the young Boswell from his exhilarated association with the Edinburgh theatre to the end of his second visit to London, during which he had his life-changing first meeting with Samuel Johnson. Among his many and various correspondents are the Irish actor and elocutionist Thomas Sheridan, William McQuhae, later eminent in the Scottish church, and the rakish Alexander Montgomerie, who first introduced Boswell to the life of a London man of pleasure.