Containing a sketch of Dr Johnson’s visit to the Caledonian regions – and matters pertinent thereunto
When Sam received his pension, he declared that if it had happened twenty years earlier he would have gone to Constantinople to learn Arabic. At various points in his life he nursed fond notions of visiting Poland, India and China. The purpose of such travel was the study at first hand of people, customs and manners, and this required a daunting total immersion. In the Idler he wrote scathingly about mere tourists, whose ‘method of travelling’ equipped them only to be bores:
He that enters a town at night and surveys it in the morning, and then hastens away to another place, and guesses at the manners of the inhabitants by the entertainment which his inn afforded him, may please himself for a time with a hasty change of scenes, and a confused remembrance of palaces and churches; he may gratify his eye with a variety of landscapes, and regale his palate with a succession of vintages; but let him be contented to please himself without endeavouring to disturb others.
Were he to travel much himself, he thought, it would be to enlarge his mind and make useful discoveries; he hoped he might be able to bring back some wisdom that would benefit his compatriots.
The idea of his going to China to see the Great Wall was received by others with amused enthusiasm, for they knew, as he did, that it would be a momentous achievement – and that it would never happen. Less adventurously, he thought of a trip to Scotland, which he mentioned to Boswell as early as the summer of 1763, a couple of months after their first meeting. He was particularly keen to see the Hebrides, having as a child read A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, an account published in 1703 of a trip made in 1695. Its author, Martin Martin, had revelled in describing ‘isles . . . but little known, or considered . . . even by those under the same government and climate’. The resulting book was informative and sometimes fascinating, though also sometimes hard to follow – a sample sentence being ‘There is another coarser scurf called crostil, its of a dark colour, and only dyes a philamot.’1
Boswell was amused, if not entirely convinced, by a proposal that struck him as a ‘very romantic fancy’. But for Sam the point of travel was precisely, as he had written in his preface to Lobo’s Voyage, to correct ‘romantic absurdities’: one could improve on the information picked up through reading, anecdote and rumour. Going to the Hebrides was an opportunity to remedy misconceptions, replacing received images with immediate ones. Which is not to say that Sam’s interest in this trip was untouched by yearning. Islands have an intriguing doubleness: are they the last remains of a broken landscape or the seeds of a new culture? To visit an island is to indulge one’s fantasies of escape while also containing them, and for Sam, who mostly found such fantasies unsettling, islands seemed manageable and knowable, possessing both observable boundaries and rich possibilities. His vision of island life was, of course, coloured by his reading – Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and Robinson Crusoe, a portrait of self-sufficiency that was one of a handful of books he believed readers wished were longer.
Ten years after first discussing a Scottish trip, he and Boswell finally made the journey. As we have seen, they both wrote about it, and the difference between their accounts is illuminating. Their chosen titles are subtly different: Sam’s book, published in 1775, is A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and Boswell’s, published a decade later, is The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. If we turn to these two volumes, we find that Sam’s Journey gives very little indication of time and is instead structured by place, whereas Boswell’s Journal is a day-by-day narrative; Sam is reflective, a social and cultural historian, often disenchanted, whereas the comparatively well-travelled Boswell resembles a busy choreographer. ‘I am, I flatter myself, a citizen of the world,’ writes Boswell, the phrase not really covering up how callow he still is. He is half-aware, but no more than that, of the ridiculousness of promising an ‘account of the transit of Johnson over the Caledonian hemisphere’ – Scotland is huge, Johnson is a planet, the trip is an epic and recalls Captain James Cook’s recent observation of the transit of Venus. When he tries to muffle his boastfulness, he ends up sounding more boastful, and when he excitably claims that a mountain is ‘immense’ – proof that Scotland has some impressive sights – Sam corrects him, enjoying his own pedantic polysyllables, ‘No, it is no more than a considerable protuberance.’
There were differences from the moment Sam arrived in Edinburgh, on 14 August 1773. He and Boswell met at Boyd’s Inn at the head of the Canongate, where he took exception to a greasy-fingered waiter who plopped a sugar lump into his glass of lemonade. He threw the drink out of the window, and it fell to Boswell to keep the waiter from being hurled in the same direction. The English visitor would need some mollifying on other counts: he complained of the city’s stench (Boswell’s, too) and, even once persuaded that there was no need for the pair of pistols he had brought north with him, insisted on being armed with a mighty stick carved from oak.
They set out four days later – Sam in a roomy brown coat that had huge pockets like panniers, giving him the appearance of a collector expecting to accumulate a great many oddments. Travelling north, by carriage, the two of them followed the coast – St Andrews, Arbroath, Aberdeen – and then headed west to Inverness. From there they proceeded on horseback, and where necessary by boat. They were in the Hebrides for seven weeks, four of which were spent on Skye, before returning to the mainland, to Glasgow and the Boswells’ family home at Auchinleck in Ayrshire, and at last back to Edinburgh.
In the course of a tour that lasted until late November, Sam examined the landscape, its ruins and inscriptions, the country’s past conflicts and traditions. Along the way, he took in the heath where Macbeth met the weird sisters, admired caves and waterfalls, paused to appreciate the clear water of Loch Ness (full of salmon, trout and pike), and slept in a bed once occupied by Bonnie Prince Charlie as he fled after the Battle of Culloden. Wherever he could, he spoke with prominent locals, including Flora MacDonald, who’d aided the Bonnie Prince in his escape. Sometimes he had to make do with less rewarding company; on the island of Raasay he met a woman who seemed so inert it was as if she had been ‘cut out of a cabbage’. At least he had Boswell, ‘whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners’ were ‘sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel’. But there were days when the younger man, prone to pouty homesickness, needed reminding that these were the qualities expected of him. There were also spasms of rivalry. When they were on Skye, Sam raised eyebrows by saying that he had often thought of keeping a seraglio, adding that his companion, ‘if he were properly prepared’, would make a very good eunuch – a ludicrous notion, given Boswell’s priapic urges, and an embarrassing one.
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland contains the sort of particulars that devotees of travel writing adore: a woman near Loch Ness boiling goat’s flesh in a kettle, the detail that candles on the island of Coll have wicks made from tiny shreds of linen, Sam describing brogues as ‘a kind of artless shoes . . . that though they defend the foot from stones . . . do not exclude water’, and the taste of Hebridean labourers for whisky, with each of them swallowing ‘the morning dram, which they call a skalk’. It is also an account of disappointment. In a letter he sent from Skye to Hester Thrale, Sam reflected that ‘The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.’ He had headed north expecting to see ‘a people of peculiar appearance’ and ‘a system of antiquated life’. But he had got there too late. Since the Act of Union in 1707, and especially since the second failed Jacobite uprising of 1745, English influence had penetrated Scotland, dissolving its ancient culture. Legislation passed in 1746–47 had weakened the old clan system, replacing it with a market economy; now the Highland Clearances were under way, and many Scots were seeking better prospects in America. Sam found a society in the midst of upheaval, and acted like a conservationist. He speaks with feeling about the importance of community, the threat posed by rapacious landlords, the dangers of rapid social change and of meeting it with nothing more than apathy. In addition, he recognizes that reform, especially in the realm of law-making, tends to be fumbled.
Sam emphasizes the decline of Scotland’s monuments and its people’s learning. He claims that illiteracy and anti-intellectualism are rife, and refers to the ‘wide extent of hopeless sterility’ that has superseded the land’s ancient dignity (and the edifices that were once its markers). Skipping over the sights of Glasgow and Edinburgh – the latter ‘a city too well known to admit description’ – he is drawn to less familiar terrain, commenting that ‘to the Southern inhabitants of Scotland, the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo and Sumatra’. Here, as when he comments on his ‘delight in rarity’, he draws a link between his activities and the endeavours of Captain Cook and other contemporaries whose voyages opened a new age of discovery. He is curious about rough and obscure places, and in the extent to which their barrenness is the result of neglect, ignorance, poor record-keeping and an addiction to myth. At the same time, he is interested in disappointments of another kind: the traveller’s risk of feeling trapped or in peril, the scarcity of food and shelter, the impossibility of taking precise measurements, the obstructions and disruptions that prevent him from enjoying ‘extensive views’, and the constant challenge of being scientific while also identifying universal themes in what he sees. He thinks of travel writing as, in two respects, a literature of omission: a report of local deficiencies, struggles and errors, and an account of the traveller’s own failings. Although his trip was no washout, he articulates the travel writer’s vexing sense of mobility-as-futility – how hard it is to render the genuinely alien in terms that are both vivid and accessible, and how constrained one is by a narrative form that typically consists of departure, adventure and return.
The sensitivity he brings to all of this, and indeed his enthusiasm for the journey in the first place, seem odd in light of his reputation for making pungently negative statements about Scotland. He was known for these before he went there, added plenty to the canon during his travels with Boswell, and continued in this vein for the rest of his life. The result is that one of the things he is most known for today is anti-Caledonian sentiment. Sometimes this was jocular, sometimes more combative; when the latter, it could feel like an exercise in demonstrating his candour. He told John Ogilvie, a Church of Scotland minister who went into rhapsodies over the majesty of the Scottish landscape, that ‘The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!’ When the soldier Sir Allan Maclean boasted of Scotland’s abundant rivers and lakes, he shot back that ‘Your country consists of two things, stone and water.’ The treelessness of Scotland was a recurrent theme, and when he lost his oak stick he rejected Boswell’s assurances that it had not been stolen, saying that ‘it is not to be expected that any man in Mull, who has got it, will part with it. Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece of timber here!’ Discussing the achievements of Lord Mansfield, a legal reformer who had been born in Perth but received most of his education in England, he joked that ‘Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.’ Most famously, in the Dictionary he defined oats as ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’
The disputed Dictionary definition was not inaccurate – after all, haggis, porridge and oatcakes are prominent features of Scottish cuisine. It also wasn’t original, deriving from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. But Sam’s continual needling of the Scots seems oafish; or rather, it seems like an oaf’s idea of what might pass for incisiveness. In common with many of his English contemporaries, he thought the Scots were an intrinsically savage race, remote from them in character and lifestyle, and yet believed that when they travelled south, as Boswell had, they were outrageously successful in fields such as law and medicine. In the 1750s, tensions increased as more and more Scots assumed positions of influence in England, and especially in London. Anxiety peaked when the Earl of Bute, a native of Edinburgh, held the office of prime minister in 1762 and 1763; his role in securing Johnson’s pension was, to his detractors, simply further evidence of his guile. This was a climate in which casual abuse could multiply. To many English people, if not most, the Scots were clannish, crafty, on-the-make, rude and prone to violence – the same charges levelled by twenty-first-century xenophobes at incomers of all nationalities.
What differentiated Sam from most of his fellow Scot-bashers was the tendency for his statements to be recorded, and unsurprisingly it was Boswell who did most to note them down. He also harboured a specific grievance against the Scottish world of letters, which hardened his antipathy. In the early 1760s James Macpherson, a young teacher with handy connections in Edinburgh literary circles, presented what he billed as a translation of Gaelic ballads by the medieval bard Ossian. These poems attracted huge interest, at first mostly positive. Sam considered them a fraud. Among those he regarded as having being ingloriously duped was the Scottish scholar Hugh Blair, who had been moved by their ‘vehemence and fire’ to compare the poems favourably to both Homer and Virgil; when Blair wondered if it was truly possible for any man in the modern age to have written them, Sam allegedly replied, ‘Yes, sir, many men, many women, and many children.’
Although his private comments about the Ossian poems got around, it was only in A Journey to the Western Islands that he went public with his views on the matter. Macpherson complained, belligerently, and Sam did not take this lightly. After all, Macpherson was physically imposing and nearly thirty years his junior. Sam tried to make peace through his friend William Strahan, who had recently printed a revised two-volume Poems of Ossian, but Strahan’s diplomacy failed, and when Macpherson continued to make threats, Sam wrote back sharply. ‘I received your foolish and impudent note,’ he began, and he carried on in that vein – ‘I will not desist from detecting what I think a cheat, from any fear of the menaces of a ruffian’, and ‘what I have heard of your morals disposes me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but to what you can prove’. Sam was disgusted by what he took to be the circulation of counterfeit antiquities – a crime against history. Modern accounts of Ossian vary, but it appears that about three-quarters of the poems are Macpherson’s fabrication. When Sam’s debunking of Macpherson met with anger and contempt, he had reason to be angry himself, as it seemed clear that anyone who blithely accepted the poems’ authenticity would draw false conclusions about Scottish history and identity.2 Yet he was nervous enough about Macpherson’s desire for violent revenge that he kept by his bedside a new cudgel, the head of which was as big as an orange.
On this occasion Sam, rather than intending insult, was trying to halt the spread of a fantasy. But posterity has treated his skirmish with Macpherson as a straightforward example of his hostility to Scots. He saw that this would happen: amid the Scottish excitement over the Ossian poems, criticism of any aspect of them, no matter what its grounds, was regarded as an attack on indigenous Gaelic culture. By the time he travelled to Scotland with Boswell, his anti-Scottish sentiment was proverbial, and A Journey to the Western Islands, read against this background, compounded the image of him as a smiter of all things Scottish, whether ancient or modern.
Sir John Hawkins pointed out that ‘If he stigmatized Scotland as a country, and the Scots as a people, his compliments to individuals in some measure atone for it . . . and express the sense of gratitude proportioned to the favours he experienced.’ But stigmatizing the Scots could seem like one of his cherished pastimes, and his more generous observations – such as that Scotland would be any epicure’s choice as the best country in which to have breakfast – didn’t compensate for the ungracious ones. Boswell’s account of the 101 days that he and Sam spent together on their Scottish tour does little to dispel this impression of churlishness. He depicts himself educating Sam out of his prejudices, reforming the great man’s insularity with his own sophistication. In reality, he had another agenda: to show Sam off, as if to say ‘Look at this strange beast I have almost tamed.’ ‘To see Dr Johnson in any new situation is always an interesting object to me,’ he writes, sounding a bit like someone who parades a pet (or a child, or a gadget) with a view to testing what it can do. Johnson scholar Pat Rogers suggests that Boswell was looking for ‘interesting confrontations rather than scenes of harmony’ – good material for his account of the trip.3
Although the younger man undoubtedly enjoyed Johnsonian wit for its own sake, he also saw that there was a potentially lucrative public appetite for it. The first volume to be billed as Johnsoniana appeared in 1776, selling well and drawing Sam’s condemnation, in part because it attributed to him some lewd jests that certainly weren’t his. Boswell received further evidence of that appetite, as if he needed any, in 1781, when a volume called The Beauties of Johnson appeared, and then in 1785, when Stephen Jones published a volume with the title Dr Johnson’s Table Talk. Although the genre was an old one, Jones’s compendium had a particular seventeenth-century model, the polymath John Selden’s Table Talk (1689). The relish for this kind of book – for portable entertainment, like highlights from a dream dinner party – would continue for a couple of centuries after Selden, and one of its leading Victorian exponents, the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt, would in 1851 summarize its spirit and appeal: ‘Table-talk, to be perfect, should be sincere without bigotry, differing without discord, sometimes grave, always agreeable, touching on deep points, dwelling most on seasonable ones, and letting everybody speak and be heard.’4 While this doesn’t perfectly describe what either Stephen Jones or Boswell collected, or what Sam served up, it captures some of the appeal of Johnsonian utterance.
It was to Boswell’s advantage that each day they spent together was like a hatchery of aphorism, and during their Scottish travels Sam reflected on the way this appetite for the nuggety and the sententious was becoming a trend among writers and their audience: ‘I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.’ In the age of social media, his prediction is at last borne out. On Twitter, for instance, bumper-sticker wisdom abounds, to the extent that aphorisms are now regarded as ‘the Twitter of philosophy’ (the phrase occurs in The Philosopher’s Toolkit, a book by Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl). The pace of life – or the perception that life’s pace is constantly increasing – makes us susceptible to the allure of witticisms and pat answers.
The remark about writers of the future stringing together anecdotes and aphorisms can be taken as another little dig at Boswell, who, after all, was eager to construct a big book about Johnson along just such lines. But while that ambition, together with pride in his roots, explains Boswell’s desire to go on this lengthy trip, one of Sam’s particular motives for it is easily overlooked. The most detailed analyst of the two men’s journey, Pat Rogers, has the theory that it was ‘a sort of fugue, an act of wilful self-withdrawal’, which allowed Sam to reflect on large questions, and ‘the sparseness and remoteness of the landscape forced him to confront his own physical . . . inadequacies, as London seldom did’.5 When he set out for Scotland he was sixty-three – he reached his sixty-fourth birthday on Skye, and was keen to play the occasion down. We don’t now attach significance to that specific age, preferring to celebrate round numbers, but it was then common to think of sixty-three as the ‘grand climacteric’, an ominous waypoint in the journey of life. Herman Boerhaave had written about it, and Sir Thomas Browne had commented on the irrational suspicion of its ‘considerable fatality’. The notion persisted that it was a dangerous moment, and Sam, conscious of popular beliefs even if also dubious about them, thought of this as a time for taking stock. Among his journey’s purposes, one with which all travellers can identify was the wish to transport himself to a place where he could view with some detachment the usual patterns of his life.