MDDM Ch. 76 Their Famous Trip to the Hebrides

[Dave Monroe]

"'Now Dr. Johnson, along with Boswell acting as his
Squire, happen'd, in August of 'seventy-three, to be
crossing into Scotland as well, upon their famous Trip
to the Hebrides.'
   "'More likely,' snorts Ives, 'they didn't pass
within a hundred miles of Mason.'
   "'Yet (speculates the Revd), did they hesitate,
upon the Border, at some rude Inn, just before taking
the fatal Step across into the Celtick unknown?...'"
(M&D, Ch. 76, p. 744)

"A page of my Journal is like a cake of portable soup.
A little may be diffused into a considerable portion."

-- James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
with Dr. Samuel Johnson (1785) ...

http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/journal-selection.html

After Johnson's death in 1784, Boswell published THE
JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES (1785), which have
been compared to a picaresque adventure, where Johnson
is Don Quixote and Boswell has the role of Sancho
Panza.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/boswell.htm

By Boswell, published 1785. It is a narrative of the
journey taken by Boswell and Dr Johnson in Scotland
and the Hebrides in 1773, recording Johnson's
encounters with Boswell's family and eminent Scottish
literati, including W. Robertson, Dalrymple, Monboddo,
and Blacklock. It also describes Johnson's responses
to Scottish landscape and traditions, his sceptical
enquiries about Ossian (see Macpherson), and his
remarkable physical fortitude. Boswell's manuscript,
which Johnson and others read, was discovered at
Malahide Castle with other private papers and
published in 1936, ed. F. A. Pottle and C. H. Bennett;
it is longer by about a third than the earlier
publication.

http://www.xrefer.com/entry/371915

It is easy to understand why Johnson made him postpone
the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which was
intended as a supplement to his own Journey. He had
given “notions rather than facts”; but Boswell had
contrived to make the facts give Johnson. The
reproduction of his sayings and experiences was too
minute to be published during his lifetime, and was
more decently delayed till the year after his death.

http://www.bartleby.com/220/0835.html

Johnson died on Dec. 13, 1784. Boswell decided to
take his time in writing the Life but to publish his
journal of the Hebridean tour as a first installment.
In the spring of 1785 he went to London to prepare the
work for the press. The Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785) tops all
the others published later. It comes from the soundest
and happiest period of Boswell's life, the narrative
of the tour is interesting in itself, and it provides
us with 101 consecutive days with Johnson. The book
was a best-seller, but it provoked the scornful charge
of personal fatuity that has dogged Boswell's name
ever since. His intelligence was not really in
question. But he deliberately defied the basic
literary rule that no author who wishes respect as a
man may publish his own follies without suggesting
compensatory strengths of character. Boswell analyzed
and recorded his own vanity and weakness with the
objectivity of a historian, and in his Johnsonian
scenes he ruthlessly subordinated his own personality,
reporting the blows that Johnson occasionally gave him
without constantly reassuring the reader that he
understood the implications of what he had written.

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=16060

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70432&sort=date

And definitely see as well ...

http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~bosedit/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3644

Okay, yet another brief intermission ...



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