Samuel Johnson: A Journey to the Western Islands AND James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

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. 

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. 

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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. 

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Notes

Introduction

Johnson: melancholy, "Black Dog," 
Boswell: young, Romanticist

At the time of the journey, 1773, Johnson in his 60s; Boswell in his 20s. 

Macpherson (Scottish); Ossian, Earse

Johnson's recollection and Jacobites

• Stuart restoration 
• Jacobite rising of 1745: wiki.

The terms refer to two distinct events: the Jacobite Restoration, which was the reinstatement of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 under Charles II, and the Jacobite Uprisings, a series of unsuccessful rebellions from 1689 to 1746 that aimed to restore the deposed Stuart line (the "Jacobites") to the British throne after the Glorious Revolution. The "restoration" was a successful return to monarchy, while the Jacobite efforts were a series of failed attempts to reverse the 1688 deposition of James II and VII. 

The Clearances: wiki. 1750 - 1860 -- so in 1773, Johnson was right in the middle of it, but touring the islands would not have seen much (if any) of it.

The Highland Clearances were the forced evictions of tens of thousands of tenants in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, primarily between 1750 and 1860 . Landowners, seeking higher incomes, replaced small-scale farming with large sheep farms, displacing crofters who were often forced to emigrate overseas or move to the coastal areas for work in industries like fishing or kelp harvesting. The evictions were often brutal, with homes being burned and families separated, leading to starvation, hardship, and a massive wave of emigration.

Economy: in short, the Highlands and Island had begun to move from an economic system which was regulated by a sense of mutual obligations to one in which the relationship between landlord and tenant was expressed in cash. Through the Clearances and from the consequences of the failure of the 1745 uprising were very real. Page xvi. Mass emigration had already begun; in fact, Flora Macdonald and her husband left for America shortly after the Johnson-and-Boswell visit. 

Aphorism: "They make a desert and call it peace. Page xvii.

Iona: the crade of Christianity in Scotland where St Columba built a monastery, lived and died. Iona moved both men deeply. For Johnson: provoked what is surely the prime justification of travel, p. xvii.

Link here.

I often feel / sense exactly what  Johnson / Boswell sensed when they visited those holy places and the Highlands and the Islands of Scotland when I am walking at night (sometimes also during the day) on a beautiful night with clear skies and looking at the stars realizing that we -- on earth -- may be the only such intelligent life on a multi-colored rock -- in the universe. It is almost overwhelming what goes through my mind at that time. I am only able to hold that thought for seconds. It is so overwhelming, so powerful, I cannot hold that thought for more than a few seconds, certainly less than a minute.