‘Mr Pennant Has Led The Way, Dr Johnson Has Followed’

In contrast to the positive Scottish reception of Pennant’s Tours, the 1775 publication of Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands caused a furore north of the border. This chapter develops two claims that have been largely underplayed in the copious scholarship on Johnson. The first is that the publishing success of Pennant’s tours were a major (albeit unacknowledged) inspiration for Johnson and Boswell, providing an important intertext for Johnson’s Journey. Secondly, it supports the view that Johnson was specifically motivated to discredit the authenticity of Ossian and the claims of Gaelic culture, as well as of his distaste for the Scottish enlightenment’s appropriation of Macpherson’s ‘translations’. Drawing on contemporary Gaelic scholarship, the chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of Johnson’s grasp of Gaelic culture, superstitions, and the Ossian controversy, as well as his ambivalent views on emigration, improvement, missionary activity, and the transformation of Highland society.

Old Ways and New Roads

The chapter explores the little-known Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London, written in the late 1720s and ’30s, almost certainly by Edmund Burt, a Government employee during the uneasy period of peace between the two Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745. It is proposed as an important, but often unacknowledged, precursor to many of the texts studied in the chapters that follow. The book’s urbane, Spectator-style spotlight on Highland manners, and pioneering descriptions of Highland travel and topography, mark a major departure from earlier accounts by John Macky and Daniel Defoe. Key sections explore Burt’s critical account of two Highland excursions travelling on the ‘old ways’ (i.e. traditional drove roads), and the final letter’s description of Wade’s road-building programme in the 1720s and ’30s, offering Burt a solution to the problem of Highland ‘backwardness’.

‘The Faery Ground for Romance and Poetry’

This chapter proposes that Scott’s romances appropriated elements of the Pennantian travel account, the exhaustion of which he had himself proclaimed in a devastating review of Sir John Carr’s Caledonian Sketches in 1809. At the same moment, he was busy inventing the textual conditions for the next wave of Highland tourism, based on the massive success of The Lady of the Lake and The Lord of the Isles, and his Highland novels Waverley and Rob Roy. The chapter explores the relations between Scott’s travel writing on the Highlands (especially his 1814 Pharos cruise) and the development of these verse romances and novels: his romantic ‘Highlandism’ cast a long shadow over the nineteenth century, especially his successful stage-managing of King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. This coincided with public controversy about sheep clearances on the Sutherland estates and elsewhere, and Scott’s own cautious refusal to be drawn into the political fray.

Conquering Caledonia

This chapter focuses on the influence of two ‘literary’ sources on eighteenth-century Highland travel: Tacitus’s Agricola and Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian. The historical analogy between Agricola’s victory at Mons Graupius and Culloden provided an ideological template for the final defeat of Jacobitism in 1746, explored here in travel accounts written by antiquarians, Hanoverian soldiers fighting in the Forty-Five, and post-war tourists like Bishop Pococke. The second part of the chapter argues that the popularity of Ossian after 1760 remapped Highland topography as a site of Caledonian resistance, stimulating enthusiasm for Gaelic culture which ironically coincided with official attempts to extirpate the language. Macpherson’s English ‘translations’ provided a new incentive for tourists to visit the Highlands, persuading them to collect fragments of ‘authentic’ Ossianic verse, and also inspiring a series of hallmarks sites for tourists in quest of ‘Fingalian topography’ like ‘Fingal’s Cave’ on Staffa and ‘Ossian’s Hall’ at Dunkeld.

Introduction

‘What, you are stepping westward?’ - ‘Yea’. -’Twould be a wildish destiny, If we, who thus together roam In a strange Land, and far from home, Were in this place the guests of Chance: Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,...

Scott on the Rocks

The final chapter explores transformations in writing about the Highland tour from Waterloo to the novelist’s death. It examines how ‘Scott tourism’, a new geological interest in Scotland’s ‘rocks’, and the ‘moral electricity’ of a second transport revolution coincided with mounting social and economic pressures on the Gaels. The first part of the chapter focuses on manuscript tours by Robert Southey, John Bowman, and John Keats: meanwhile, the publication of Daniell’s Voyage (1814–25) developed Scott’s poetic version in a visual idiom, while disguising some of the traumatic effect of improvement. The second part turns to geologist John Macculloch’s massive Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (1825), the real target of which was the romantic ‘Highlandism’ with which Scott’s name was associated. Manifesting a racialist disdain for the Gaels and a craven defence of clearance against the strictures of ‘romantic gentlemen’, Highlands and Western Isles is an appropriate terminus for this study of a century of tour writing.

‘Inhabited Solitudes’

Resisting a standard reading of William Gilpin as ‘appropriating’ Scottish landscape from a privileged metropolitan perspective, I discover a more radical and environmentally sensitive potential in Gilpin’s texts on the picturesque, developed in the writings of John Stoddart, and empowering for women tourists like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. As the literary masterpiece of all the texts studied here, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour in Scotland made a decisive break with the Pennantian tour as a ‘knowledge genre’ by developing a gendered version of her brother’s poetics of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. Her gift for natural description is linked to the picturesque tradition, and briefly compared with Coleridge’s extraordinary Highland Tour notebooks. Read in tandem with her less ambitious second Highland tour of 1822, Recollections also presents a lively and sympathetic account of a plebeian Gaelic world in a moment of historical crisis.

Thomas Pennant’s Highlands

Thomas Pennant’s two Scottish Tours stabilized the generic norms for writing about the Highlands in the period, for which reason they lie at the heart of the book. The Welsh traveller sought to appease Scottish public opinion by publishing a favourable account of a nation in the early throes of improvement, combining the personal authority of the informed traveller’s eye with the encyclopaedic protocols of enlightenment knowledge, gleaned from correspondence and pre-circulated questionnaires to Highland ministers, gentlemen, and naturalists. Pennant was the first traveller to offer an adequate visual documentation of Scotland: his 1772 Tour contains ninety-one engraved plates, many of them the work of his artist Moses Griffith. Notable here, especially in connection with the previous chapter, is Pennant’s ‘vision at Ardmaddie’ at the end of his 1772 Voyage to the Hebrides, when he is visited by an Ossianic spectre critical of Highland landlords for abandoning their duties of trusteeship in pursuit of personal profit.