Genius Fan

It’s 250 years ago this year that the Eighteenth century’s literary celebrity Samuel Johnson published his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, an account of a three-month tour he made there in 1773 with his great friend James Boswell. It was actually published on 18 January 1775, and that same day in Edinburgh, Boswell received his own copy (though he had to wait until November 1776 before he received his gift copies, and then not the 25 he was promised but only 12). The book went to a second printing a month later in February 1775.

Boswell was dissuaded from publishing his own account by Johnson. He knew Boswell’s writing style, and had read pages from the journal he kept during their Scottish tour, and may have wanted to avoid comparisons. In fact, Boswell finally published his own The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LLD in 1785, a year after Johnson’s death. As you’d expect, this book is very much more readable and enjoyable than Johnson’s which has an ethnographic feel to it, full of observations and research about the character of the Highlanders, their clan system, clearances, the Scottish education system and so on. For readers who want the most up to date editorial on Johnson and Boswell’s accounts, I suggest you read: To the Hebrides: Samuel Johnson’s ‘Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland’ and James Boswell’s ‘Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides’. But any of the hardback versions from the 20th and 19th centuries are much nicer to hold and read.

Samuel Johnson: 18 Sep 1709 – 13 Dec 1784

Notes
Dr Johnson’s Printer: The Life of William Strahan, JA Cochrane (1964)
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, A Sisman, (2000)
To the Hebrides: Samuel Johnson’s ‘Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland’ and James Boswell’s ‘Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides’, (ed) Ronald Black, (2007)

Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Samuel Johnson (1775)

The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LLD, James Boswell (1785)