Samuel Johnson - A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Samuel Johnson had strong opinions about good travel writing. Few books, he writes, disappoint their readers more than the narrations of travellers. One of his essays satirizes the tedium of conventional travel writers who pass a desart, and tell that it is sandy; who cross a valley, and find that it is green. Why, he demands, should we care? Observation for the sake of observation serves no purpose.

And yet Johnson went on to publish his own travel narrative, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, in 1775. Ten years later his friend James Boswell published an account of the same journey, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. Were justified in expressing the same scepticism that Johnson did: why bother with these books now? After all, theyre no longer useful as guidebooks, if indeed they ever were. They tell us little about todays Scotland, its people, or its landscape.

Even after 250 years, though, these books have much to teach us. Johnson was convinced that the great object of remark is human life, and for him travel was about observing not natural features but humanity in all its variety. Every nation has something peculiar in its manufactures, its works of genius, its medicines, its agriculture, its customs, and its policy. He only is a useful traveller who brings home something by which his country may be benefited. Johnson, writing half a century later, echoes Defoe: To the southern inhabitants of Scotland, the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo or Sumatra (p. 71). When Johnson and Boswell set out to this unknown region they saw themselves as travellers not only through space but also through time: Johnson went looking for a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life (p. 46), Boswell set out to contemplate a system of life almost totally different from what we had been accustomed to see (p. 143). They hoped to find simplicity and wildness (p. 143).

They didnt find the wildness they expected, nor much of the primitive Highland culture. Instead they saw lairds who cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation (p. 132), a landscape depopulated because of mass emigration, a culture where the ancient Scottish plaid is rarely worn (p. 41). Modernity was encroaching even in the isolated Western Islands. They had arrived too late.

But they left fascinating records of what they saw. Their travel books are pioneering works of ethnographic description, marked by intense interest in sociology, politics, economics, history, theology, philosophy, and literature. They provide us with an immersive education in Scottish history and Anglo-Scottish relations in the wake of the Act of Union and the Battle of Culloden. Boswell gives us a remarkable account of conversation and friendship, albeit marked by moments of rivalry, frustration, and even anger, not to mention a healthy dose of Johnsonian curmudgeonliness. These are texts that manage to be historically rich and powerfully human all at once.

Samuel Johnson met James Boswell in May 1763, a decade before their Scottish tour. Johnson, then 53 years old, was one of the most famous men in England thanks to his poems, his essays, and his monumental