A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

In the autumn of 1773 Samuel Johnson, aged sixty-three, went to the Hebrides with James Boswell, and wrote this. It is less a travel book than a report on a society: the emigration already emptying the glens, the collapse of the chiefs into landlords and the tenants into rent, the state of the roads, the trees he kept not seeing, the economics of kelp and cattle, what people ate, and how the old order looked from inside the houses that still kept it up. He is polite about hospitality and unforgiving about evidence — the chapter on the Ossian poems, which he had gone partly to investigate, concludes that they are a modern forgery and says so plainly.

Johnson published the Journey in 1775. Boswell's own account of the same trip, the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, did not appear until 1785, after Johnson's death, and the two books have been read together ever since.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.