Content area
Full text
Only after nearly a decade of deferral, and with some warm encouragement arranged by James Boswell, did Samuel Johnson set off for Scotland. Boswell had worried that his aging friend would be reluctant to forgo the urban pleasures of London, but the trip offered Johnson a unique opportunity to observe what he calls "the patriarchal life" of the Scottish Highland clan system.1 Yet by the fall of 1773, when Johnson finally set foot in Nairn ("the verge of the Highlands"),2 the ancient way of life he had hoped to observe was rapidly giving way to a market economy; he and Boswell had arrived "too late to see what [they] had expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life" (Journey, p. 46). Johnson was understandably disappointed but, as Mary Lascelles suggests, "what Johnson found . . . was to prove more engrossing than what he sought: a people in the throes of change, threatened with hasty innovation, and surrounded with evidence of the havoc which former innovation had wrought."3 The travel narrative that this expedition generated, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), provides a valuable record of Johnson's response to the extensive socioeconomic shift, the transition "from a natural to a money economy" (Lascelles, p. xxii), he observed in Scotland firsthand. By the age of sixty-four, when Johnson composed the Journey, he should have been, by his own estimate (Journey, p. 100), consolidating his opinions. His views throughout the text, however, appear surprisingly unsettled -his attitude toward this significant socioeconomic shift fluctuates throughout the narrative. Though he occasionally waxes nostalgic in the Journey, his equivocation concerning the socioeco- nomic transformation of the Highlands is not, as some critics have suggested, simply a product of his own fluctuating rationality. Generic conventions, rather than personal sympathies, ultimately engender Johnson's uncharacteristic ambivalence in the journey. Impelled, by his own precepts of travel writing, to base the journey closely on his own experiences, he commits himself to two analytic scopes that produce strikingly different images of Scotland. The lens of analysis Johnson employs in his narration varies with the availability and nature of the experiences he draws upon; he shifts from the general to the particular, from "notions" to "facts,"4 as his experiences...