Boswell's Journal of a tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson 1773

JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES WITH SAMUEL JOHNSON By JAMES BOSWELL

EDITED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT BY FREDERICK A. POTTLE AND CHARLES H. BENNETT

McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. hardcover with dustjacket, illustrated.
Dustjacket damaged.

To this modern edition of a book read and admired by millions for nearly two centu­ries, Frederick A. Pottle has added a new introduction, new illustrations and maps, and extensive notes and documentatian based in part on recent scholarly investiga­tions and in part an additional Boswell pa­pers discovered during the past thirty years.
James Boswell is best known for his Life of Johnson, but thejournal of his Hebridean tour with Johnson is a more informal and intimate book, considered by many to be the best of all his journals. This unexpur­gated version, unlike the heavily edited text published by Boswell, is focused on the au­thor himself rather than on Johnson. It is therefore a far more rewarding and pic­turesque volume for the present-day reader, permitting him, as Professor Pottle says, "to get continuously and explicitly back inside Boswell's heart and brain; not only to see the world of the tour with Boswell's clear limited vision but to feel it with his child­like and generous heart."
The Hebridean journal is also a first-rate travel book, written during the hundred and one consecutive days that Boswell and Johnson traveled, ate, talked, and often slept in the same room together. While Johnson lumbered across a Scotland pat­ently inferior for him to his beloved Lon­don, puffed about in the Highland heights to measure Druid ruins, dealt caustically with his fellow-voyagers, and made pointed jibes at Scottish fare and dinner-company, Boswell was carefully recording every word, every gesture, every adventure.
Readers for whom the Hebridean top­ography exerts a spell will find it systemat­ically treated for the first time in these pages. Many a reader will use this volume as a guide for a tour of his own in the foot­steps of Boswell and Johnson.
Boswell published a heavily edited ver­sion of this journal in 1785, making it into a Johnsonian memoir by deliberately sup­pressing much of his own part in the chronicle. In 1936, following the famous "cro­quet-box" discovery of much of his original journal at Malahide Castle, Professor Pottle and Dr. Bennett printed for the first time the narrative that Boswell actually wrote in 1773, restoring thereby the unique appeal that always inheres in his autobiographical writing. A great mass of further documents has been recovered since 1936. These make it possible to add some pages to the journal of 1773 and to print many amusing pas­sages which Boswell wrote on the tour but deleted in 1785 while he was putting the Tour through the press. The absorbing story of his close collaboration with Edmond Malone, who helped him cut and edit his journal, is recounted by Professor Pottle in his introductory pages.
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, as published here, will give new generatións of readers a most delightful and fresh portrait of those strangely matched friends - the Lexicographer of Gough Square and James Boswell, his ever­faithful companion.