Grove Koger

As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a delightful travel account by James Boswell (1740-1795), 9th Laird of Auchinleck.

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The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D (London: Charles Dilly, 1785)

James Boswell was a descendant of Robert Bruce and James II, yet his pride in being a Scotsman was tempered by a strong desire to cut an elegant figure in English society. He studied law at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but left the latter for a short visit to London in 1760, anxious to sample the great city’s low life and make a name for himself in its literary circles. At this time he met a number of distinguished figures, although his introduction to famed lexicographer Samuel Johnson did not occur until his second sojourn in 1762.

Johnson was, admits Boswell, “particularly prejudiced against the Scots,” but agreed after a long campaign on Boswell’s part to visit his friend’s homeland. Johnson joined Boswell in Edinburgh in mid-August 1773, and the two set off together a few days later on a journey that would tax the aging and corpulent Englishman. They traveled by coach up the east coast of Scotland and down the west coast, visiting the Inner Hebridean Islands of Skye, Coll, and Mull. The undeveloped country’s roads were few, its weather stormy, and its seas dangerous (although Johnson’s seasickness generally blinded him to the peril). Boswell and Johnson concluded their trip in late November, with the great man declaring himself well satisfied with what he had seen.    

Boswell’s account of the tour is based upon a section of the journal he had kept since youth. The work is urbane and mellifluous, concerned not so much with sights—which Boswell treats peremptorily—as with individuals and conversations. As its title suggests, it is also an account of Johnson himself, an immensely learned, opinionated, sharp-tongued figure who published a more conventional account of the same trip in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Boswell would devote another, more fully developed and more famous work to his friend in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791).

If you’d like to read more of the very readable Boswell, see: An Account of Corsica: The Journal of a Tour to That Island; and the Memoirs of Pascal Paoli (1768); London Journal, 1762–1763 (1950); Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764 (1952); Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 (1953); and Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766 (1955).

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