‘The Transit of the Caledonian Hemisphere’: Johnson and Boswell in an Age of Discovery

Abstract

This chapter approaches both travel narratives — Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides — in the context of the excitement generated by overseas discoveries, and especially by the voyagers of exploration in the 1760s and early 1770s. Both Johnson and Boswell had many personal contacts with central figures in this activity, including Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, and Constantine Phipps. It was not only the Pacific expeditions which aroused the intense curiosity of educated Europeans, though these were the most dramatic examples of the tendency at work, and had the most obvious literary sequel in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville. The chapter argues further that the European travels of Giuseppe Baretti and Fanny Burney left an obvious mark on the Hebridean narratives.