It was wonderful how well time passed in a remote castle, and in dreary weather.

I've neglected the Scottishness of Boswell and Johnson's visit to Scotland.  The point of the trip was, after all, to see Scotland, romantic Scotland - clans and storms and two-handed swords and the like.

They visited at an interesting time, when parts of the Highlands were emptying out because of mass emigration to America, and when the English laws meant to prevent a repeat of the 1745 Jacobite uprising* had really done their job.  The political and military power of the Highlander chiefs had been destroyed, the modern world of laws and trade had penetrated the farthest Scottish outposts, and the old way of life was dying.  Johnson wanted to see feudal Scotland, but he only got a glimpse.  It was nearly gone.

But they did stay in Dunvegan Castle (see the post's title, from Boswell, 17th September), and met Flora MacDonald, one of the rescuers of Bonnie Prince Charlie.  Johnson in fact slept in the same bed as the Young Pretender.  They listened to Gaelic poetry, heard traditional songs, and watched traditional dances.  Actually, the corpulent Johnson watched - Boswell danced.

Johnson was famous for his endless curiosity.  He asked about everything - how shoes were manufactured, whether islands had rats or rabbits, why Scotland had so few trees (sort of a running joke with Johnson), how oat cakes were made.  This is just before his praise of Scottish breakfasts, which "must be confessed to excel us."  Unfortunately, "[t]hey pollute the tea-table by plates piled with large slices of cheshire cheese, which mingles its less graceful odours with the fragrance of the tea."

Plus, the travelers visited caves and ruined churches and Celtic stone circles and all of the stuff that any of us would visit.  They were tourists.  I've never been to Scotland, except in books.  Johnson's and Boswell's books are good ways - the only ways - to visit a part of Scotland that has vanished.

*  See Waverley (1814) for the details.

My mind was filled with many ideas of London, which relieved me from care.

The Life of Johnson (1791) is such a big brick of a book.  Unless the reader is lucky enough to find the postern unlocked, long books, really long books, require strategies and schedules and siege tools and, sometimes, explosives.  I say this as someone who has read Clarissa and Gibbon and Vasari and War and Peace, and who has been eying The Tale of Genji.  It's not just a matter of time.  I understand that.

One reason Boswell's The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1885) is so useful is that it is a secret passage into The Life of Johnson.  Actually, as it stands now, it is a section of The Life.  Biographer Boswell takes Johnson's life up to August 1773 and then refers readers to the earlier book, which they all would have read anyways.  After a testimonial or two about how very, very good that book is, we find Johnson back in London, "ready to begin a new journey" (letter of Nov. 27, 1773).

So we see why I so strongly urge readers new to Boswell, or to Johnson, to read the Hebrides journal first.  It is not an annex to the bigger book, but an essential piece.  Technically, it is written very much in the manner of The Life.  Boswell requires several hundred pages to bring Johnson's life up to the crucial date of May 16, 1763, when Boswell met Johnson:  "I shall mark what I remember of the conversation."  He continues the practice, every chance he gets, for the next twenty years.  The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides is the most concentrated period, ninety-four days in a row.  The reader who finds Johnson too platitudinous or Boswell too toadying - well, I don't know what to tell him.  No, I do - stay away from The Life of Johnson.  For the reader who finds Boswell and Johnson genial, there are thousands of pages more.

Many thousands.  mel u has called his reading of the complete set of Bowell's journals one of the great reading experiences of his life.  I know what he means.  I sometimes struggled, after finishing a volume, to not immediately start the next one.  The whole thing now reads like an impossible modern novel.  The central character, so to speak, is a brilliant creation, so to speak.  Boswell is a high-spirited depressive, a vain man who is not afraid to look ridiculous, alternately ambitious and lazy, a genuinely loving bad husband.  Wanting celebrity himself, he spends his life collecting celebrities.  Bizarrely, completely improbably, this results in one of the monuments of English literature, and, in the journals, an additional shelf of worthwhile books. 

The first journal, the London Journal, is fortunately the best one.  It's a young-man-in-the-city classic (the post's title is from Dec. 1, 1762).  Free from his father, free from his studies, Boswell goes to the theater, dines, chases celebrities, chases a job, and chases women.  The Sex Scene (what? Jan. 12, 1763) is hilarious.  "The description is faint [not that faint!]; but I surely may be styled a Man of Pleasure."

It was here, in the London Journal, that I first met Boswell.- Johnson I already knew.  It seems odd, but since then I have read maybe three times as many pages of Boswell than of Johnson, many of them admittedly about Johnson.  But still. 

Boswell and Johnson for the non-Boswellian and non-Johnsonian

I could not have asked for a better first entry to the Scottish Literature Challenge than this post on James Boswell's The Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides (1785) by mel u at The Readling Life.  His post fills in a lot of the background of Boswell and Samuel Johnson's travels through Scotland and the Hebrides.  It reminded me that my recent reading of the book, like his, was a little different than that of many readers.

Mel and I both read the books as longtime friends of Boswell, and I do not simply mean that we were both rereading.  I'll start speaking just for myself here.  When I first read Johnson's book, I had already made my way through hundreds of pages of Johnson (the Oxford Major Works), plus a half dozen volumes of Boswell's journals, which include many detailed recollections of Johnson.  Johnson's voice and personality and quirks were well known to me.  Boswell's, too.

A reader approaching Boswell without this background - for which there is no need! - may be surprised at what he finds.  In this book about travelling in the Hebrides, why, exactly, is there so much discussion of London stage-acting, or the quoibles of Oliver Goldsmith, or Dr. Johnson's opinions about a book of sermons?

Johnson's account of the trip, Journey to the Western Islands (1775), is a more typical 18th century travel book.  He intersperses the chronological journey with historical and moral observations.  Although I think the book is a first-rate way to encounter Johnson's writing, the book is not really about him.  He is contributing to our knowledge of the world and our understanding of the way we live through the details of the lives of the Hebrideans, the materials from which their spoons are made and the price they get for the kelp they gather. 

A younger Boswell had written a travel book of his own, the Account of Corsica; The Journal of a Tour of that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli (1768), which made him mildly famous.  I have read part of this book - the good part, I am tempted to say, the part after the semi-colon in that odd title, the modern part, the part that is not about Corsica at all, but about Boswell.  Dr. Johnson thought so, too:  "Your History is like other histories, but your Journal is in a very high degree curious and delightful."*

By 1773, the time of the Hebrides trip, Boswell better understood his true gifts.  "Sir, you have but two topicks, yourself and me.  I am sick of both,"**  Johnson once groused.  The Hebrides journals has three topics, but the Hebrides are perhaps the least important.  The book is Boswell's first publication of what he called "Johnsoniana."

Marieke at The Lady Fern has said that she would like to read Boswell soon.  I hope she does.  She has been to many of the islands in the books.  She may or may not be so interested in the Johnsoniana.  But that makes me all the more interested in what she, or other readers, think of the travel portions of these old travel books.

A commenter at The Reading Life pointed out these barely believable National Geographic photos of the Hebrides, by photographer Jim Richardson.  I should mention that many of the photos are of the Outer Hebrides, so are not in Johnson's or Boswell's books.

*  Life of Johnson, September 9, 1769.

**  Life of Johnson, May 1776.