Samuel Johnson: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the heart of England; James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. born in Edinburgh, Scotland; the heart of Scotland.

I first came across this book in the early 2000s. I forget exactly when; it gained more poignancy for me after I spent several weeks (months?) in northern England between 2002 and 2004. 

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The Book Page

Johnson's Boswell

Transition to Romanticism ("Johnson's Boswell") 

From a biography of Samuel Johnson.

• Johnson was the old man, the established writer.
• Boswell was just starting out.

“They (Samuel Johnson and Boswell) first met in the back parlour of Tom Davies’s bookshop on the afternoon of Monday, 16 May 1763.  

Johnson was born in 1709, so Johnson was 54 and Boswell was 24.  If Johnson had been born in 1680 and Boswell in 1710, the difference between them would merely have been the difference between youth and middle age; but since Johnson’s birth date was 1709 and Boswell’s 1740 they are separated by one of those seismic cracks in the historical surface. 

Boswell is a new man in Johnson’s world; he (Boswell) belongs to the epoch of Rousseau (Romanticism; whereas Johnson was still classical); all the attitudes that we associate with the end of the eighteenth century – the onset of ‘sensibility,’ the obsession with the individual and the curious, the swelling tide of subjective emotion – are strongly present in him. Where Johnson still belongs to the world of Aristotle and Aquinas, the world of the giant system-builders, Boswell inhabits the ruins of that world. Where Johnson instinctively proceeds by erecting a framework and then judging the particular instance in relation to that framework, Boswell is the sniffing bloodhound who will follow the scent of individuality into whatever territory it leads him. The fascination of their dialogue, that dialogue of mind, heart and voice round which Boswell organized his great Life, is that is it not merely between two very different men but between two epochs.  In its pages, Romantic Europe speaks to Renaissance Europe, and is answered.” – Samuel Johnson, A Biography, John Wain, p. 229 – 230.

But the book today -- November 14, 2025, actually two books, in one volume, from Everyman's Library, #253, c. 2002:

• Samuel Johnson:  A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the heart of England;
• James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. born in Edinburgh, Scotland; the heart of Scotland.

The journey, 1773, three years before the US Revolution (1776); August - November.