Boswell, again and again mm iss26

Boswell, Again (and Again)

By Mitchell Miller

‘[Johnson] How sir can you ask me what obliges me to speak unfavourably of a country where I have been hospitably entertained? Who can like the Highlands? I like the inhabitants very well.’

From the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Heretics Needy Scots were endemic to mid 18thcentury London. Some were genuinely destitute, ¾SXWEQ SJ .EGSFMXI [EVW XLI ½VWX WYVKIW SJ PERH clearance or pushed south by the invisible hand.

James Boswell was a dysfunctional example of the other type, the man on the make, whose 1763 visit was a vain search for patronage and position. Boswell was no Dundas. His attempts at military or political advancement came to nothing, not least because concerns literary and carnal proved too distracting, and his many existential perturbations led to as many unfortunate outbursts: … Mr Davies introduced me to him.

As I knew his mortal antipathy at the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’ However, he said, ‘From Scotland.’ Mr Johnson, said I ‘indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it …’

To which Johnson (it is of course, he) famously I\GPEMQIH ³7MV - ½RH XLEX MW [LEX E KVIEX QER] of your countrymen cannot help.’ For Murray Pittock, who has recently published a novellaslim introduction to James Boswell (2007), XLMW LIPTPIWWRIWW MW QYGL QSVI WMKRM½GERX XS his makeup than the scholars of England and

America have generally allowed or recognised.

Making great play of Boswell’s theatricality Pittock depicts a miscast player, unjustly isolated, deracinated and self-quarantined from the Scottish cultural mainstream. Some of this was his own doing, but much was down to the same longstanding denigration that has dogged his reputation as Johnson’s lapdog, no depiction more damning than that of the child ingénue, Fanny Burney: His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor, and his mouth opened to catch every syllable that he uttered; nay, he seemed not only to dread losing a word, but to be anxious not to miss a breathing.

This spongiform view of Boswell was successfully challenged by Frederick Pottle who made a convincing argument – based perhaps, on XLI %QIVMGER I\TIVMIRGI SJ RSR ½GXMSR EW E creative literary form – for Boswell’s gifts as an imaginative artist. In this primer, densely packed with information and analysis, Pittock takes this even further, discovering many layers of truth and representation in Boswell’s writings, a Boswellian ‘slipperiness’ or ‘ingenious transparency’. His factual reports are subtle performances and illusions of absolute frankness that could be taken as aesthetically sophisticated or somewhat sinister (or both), depending on your outlook.

In fact Pittock is willing to confront that most sacred cow of the Boswell industry, his profane delight in confessing his carnal exploits:

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… I am going to suggest what may be a heresy in Boswell Studies: that these and other prodigious sexual exploits may not have happened exactly as reported.

A good point when applied to the London Journal, where some of the juicier carnal episodes appeared. Boswell’s contemporary readership was Johnston of Grange, a young man of similar age and being a male in his early 20s, just as sexualised. What image would it give of Boswell to his crony if he recorded yet another night free and unsupervised in the great metropolis, ]IX VIXYVRMRK LSQI EPSRI ERH YRWEXMW½IH# Perhaps it has taken until now, and an era where concealment of sexual behaviour would almost seem a welcome relief, to be able to say that Boswell was likely to exaggerate both his potency and promiscuity? As Pittock says, it is true that Boswell does not ‘anticipate’ or stage QSQIRXW JSV XLI FIRI½X SJ LMW Journal (though his visits to Child’s, site of the entertaining Dialogues within the London journal were partly made in anticipation of an interesting snippet or set-piece), but there were weeks when he had to write retrospectively on the days he had missed, which raises very different questions.

Boswell did not deny this – he mentions many times in his Journal how he has fallen behind in his entries, or has failed to maintain certain resolutions. Pottle also acknowledges it in his introduction to the Penguin edition, but it is Pittock who takes him to task, noting there GSYPH FI KETW SJ YT XS ½ZI [IIOW 8LI VIWTSRWI to this has often been that the spongy Boswell took detailed memoranda along the way, rough-hewn straw for his bricks, that ensured the lapses in time did not represent lapses in reliability. This process of ongoing research is dramatised by Adam Sisman’s detailed account of his methodology as biographer in Boswell’s Presumptuous Task. Even while challenging the harsh assessment of Burney and subsequent ‘witless stenographer’ slurs, Boswell’s admirers still seem attached to the idea of an analogue brain that retained and recorded fact with almost freakish accuracy. Pittock’s position is slightly different. Boswell was no freak, he merely employed a ‘rhetoric of representation’ that has gone largely unnoticed. His diary entries might seem untreated and raw, but as with anything documentary in nature, applies principles of rhetoric and narrative arc – what in hard research is known as ‘data cleaning’, in everyday life, as ‘storytelling’. Those familiar with HSGYQIRXEV] ½PQ [MPP IEWMP] VIGSKRMWI XLMW JVSQ the deceptive purity of direct cinema or cinémavérité.

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Pittock also reminds us how important theatre was to Boswell, a truth hidden in plain sight but devastating in its implications. And yet theatre was banned in Presbyterian Scotland. The Kirkish centre within the Scottish establishment (‘ScotoLatinists’ like Boswell senior) thwarted Ramsay’s attempts to revive it in the 1730s, relegating drama to the law courts (Boswell as much as GSR½VQIH XLMW EPPS[IH LMQ XS ZMI[ WIXXPMRK JSV his father’s profession as more than a submission of defeat). This gives a very important clue as to why London was so dear to Boswell, why ritual so excited him, and why he was so innovative in adapting and containing theatrical conventions [MXLMR EPQSWX IZIV] EWTIGX SJ LMW WMKRM½GERX prose writing. Boswell may have been helplessly Scottish, but was never helpless. Fittingly, Pittock gives his coda over to the playwright James Bridie. As Bridie notes, the constrictions of his past gifted Boswell with a unique array of talents that could subjugate even the Great Cham to his devices: Boswell … chose the local demigod and lavished on him the affection that Pavlov must have lavished on his favourite laboratory dog.

For Pittock this rhetoric of representation (let’s not lower the tone by calling it ‘cynical’) is nowhere clearer than in his representations of his position as a Scot (though its degree depended greatly on whether Boswell was abroad or not – abroad he was much more sincere), and most importantly perhaps, of the most helpless and heathen Hume. Pittock’s own preoccupations with Scotland – especially Jacobitism, which he has done a great deal to rehabilitate if not as a viable theory of government, then as a political ideology worth taking much more seriously than either Marxist or liberal historians have been inclined. Pittock takes on the still-raging debate as to Johnson’s Jacobitism (American scholars, led by Donald Greene maintain with some ferocity that this was a cynical fabrication by his biographer – and there, we’ve gone and said it …) and gives a fair hearing to the idea that Boswell might have manipulated his account of Johnson to make the Cham appear more Jacobite than he was (and there is Boswell’s interest in Mary Queen of Scots, symbolic of the great ‘what if’ of Scottish history (Charles Edward Stuart represented another, but too recent, too raw)).

The conclusion that it was ‘less than high treason but more than a game’ might seem a little wishy-washy, but it only strengthens the case that Boswell’s rhetoric of representation played an important part in our received opinions,

especially as in the published works such as the Tour and the Life, WYTTVIWWMRK GIVXEMR IPIQIRXW SJ XLI SVMKMREP 17 WXVSRKP] HI½RIH XLI ultimate ‘truth’ of depiction. The image of Boswell as a euphemistic writer seems another example of revisionism turning black into white, but when Pittock expounds upon the notion of ‘Fratriotism’, a covert discourse on Scottish (and Irish) independence it starts to convince. Through recognising fraternal connections and EJ½RMXMIW PEVKIP] XLVSYKL &SW[IPP´W SRKSMRK EXXEGLQIRX XS 'SVWMGE (as described in The Account of Corsica), Boswell could make an argument for the independence of small nations without openly going against the union (over which Boswell, like many of his generation, seems to have been highly ambivalent, North British one day, hotly Caledonian the next). Corsica was a convenient analogy for the small country whose sovereignty needed to be protected EKEMRWX E PEVKIV TS[IV -X [EW E GEYWI XLEX GSYPH FI JSYKLX JSV [LMPI GSR½RMRK XLI 7GSXXMWL UYIWXMSR XS LMWXSVMSKVETL] 4MXXSGO´W WYVZI] SJ XLI TLIRSQIRSR MHIRXM½IW MX [MXL E RYQFIV SJ SXLIV [VMXIVW from the Celtic fringe, as part of the slow burn towards not so much the Protestant-led United Irish/Scotsmen movements of the late 18th-century, but the displacement of these concerns to other causes, most obviously the Jacobite, but also Thomas Cochrane and Bernardo O’Higgins’ efforts to liberate Latin America. ********* ‘Preserve a just, clear, and agreeable idea of the divine Christian religion. It is very clearly proved.You cannot expect demonstration.There is virtue in faith; in giving a candid assent upon examination. …Be steady to the Church of England, whose noble worship has always raised tour mind to exalted devotion and meditation on the joys of heaven.’

From Boswell’s ‘Inviolable Plan’ Heathens Historiography was of great interest to the Enlightenment thinkers. Hume advised Boswell to write a history of Scotland, not to extol its Corsican qualities but to explain why it no longer existed.

Boswell, notes Pittock, recorded this as a compliment, smiling through somewhat gritted teeth. James Boswell is most interesting when it uncovers intrigues against David Hume. The Boswell-Hume axis is comparatively neglected elsewhere; Boswell-Johnson, Boswell-Voltaire, Boswell-Earl Marischal, Boswell-Burke and Boswell-Rousseau have received much more attention. But, as Pittock shows, Hume’s bulky frame loomed large in Boswell’s consciousness and his nascent artistry as an ‘antiJohnson’, his treatment of the philosopher was typical of the difference between surface appearance and reality. On appearance, their relationship was cordial enough – Hume originated the assessment of Boswell as ‘very good humoured, very agreeable, and very mad’. Boswell regularly extols the virtues of Hume’s History of England when he reads it during the London Journal, but elsewhere Pittock suggests something much more underhand, detecting severe damnation of the atheist Hume in his faint praise, here discussing Hume’s suggestion he write a History of Scotland: In October 1774, Boswell records that Hume attempted to persuade him to write ‘The history of the Union … I might with great justice to my countrymen please the English by my account of the advantages by the Union … That we never gained but one battle but at Bannockburn … we did so ill even in rude feudal times … our great improvements are owing to the Union ...’

It seems that Boswell is crowing – and he is. But as Pittock points out: In his account of this conversation, Boswell hints at both at the idea that Hume is not above deliberately falsifying information in the interests of wider recognition (‘please the English’), an accusation also levelled at William Robertson …

And:

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… Boswell simultaneously implies that Hume’s ‘justice’ is unjust and that ‘pleasing the English’ has primacy. In any case why is the justice all Scotland’s and the pleasure all England’s? Why not justice for both?

8LI [EK´W ERW[IV MW XLEX XLMW TSWWMFP] VI¾IGXW the Boswellian psyche – justice was associated with the joylessness of Scotland, and pleasure lay in England a.k.a the literary circuit of London.

Boswell might also be rankled at the insult implied in Hume’s suggestion that while the greater country, England, should be the subject of his book, barbaric and backward Scotland is perfectly suited to a Boswell, and so comes close to suggesting Hume is not just a heathen in the religious sense. You can take or leave either this, or Pittock’s open question at your leisure. It is possible both he and I go a little too far in reading too much into the text, always a danger when said text exists for so long, inviting reinventions and new theologies. But Pittock is probably right both about Boswell’s attitude to Hume and his tendency to register distrust obliquely – a tendency that needs must colour our attitude to all of his literary output.

So by this stage Pittock’s Primer prepares us for an individual far more textured than a witless stenographer with the Platonic warning that he was ‘too much of an artist to be taken at his word’. If it misses a trick, it is in not confronting full on Boswell’s representations of women in his work, a pressing concern in all of the journals and one of the most sizeable elephants in the room vis-a-vis assessing his relationship with VMZEP .SLRWSR GSR½HERX ERH FMSKVETLIV 1VW Thrale. The entanglement with the actress Mrs Lewis (‘Lousia’) in the London Journal is just one episode deserving of a serious scholarly reassessment (far too many take Boswell’s version at his word) and would reveal much concerning sexual politics in the early modern era. But in other aspects, Pittock’s full-on revisionism illuminates other important facets of Boswell’s personality, and redresses some of the disrespect frequently shown to his religiosity. His infamous abortive attempt to take up Holy Orders and later, his inconsistent attitudes to liturgy and creed give the impression of insincerity – especially to a Scottish readership conditioned

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to dismiss Anglicanism as Protestant-lite. But Boswell’s concerns for his soul were always KIRYMRI LMW NSYVREP IRXVMIW ½PPIH [MXL ER IEVRIWX desire for reassurance against sceptical and deist thought. Indeed, the huge, comforting mass of Johnson provided much of this. His faith was – or seemed – to be constant, and as various episodes in the London Journal, Tour and LoJ attest, he along with Thomas Reid, possessed the intellectual WYFWXERGI ERH VLIXSVMGEP ¾SYVMWL XS ³HEWL XS pieces the sceptical cobweb’, woven to its most tensile consistencies by Hume.

And yet, as Pittock reminds us, Boswell never missed an opportunity to contrast the notoriously monoglot Cham, disdainful of continental fads with his own ease in Europe, including connexions as celebrated as Rousseau and Voltaire.Yet for all this exuberance in his own experiences Boswell seems to have craved the solid moral centre Johnson offered. His JEXLIV´W ¾MRX] ;LMKKMWL 4VIWF]XIVMERMWQ SJJIVIH it, but was too suppressive and entailed too much paternal baggage. Tory High Church ritual allowed for theatre, for literature and for animal imitations – but with God reassuringly in place. Pittock goes along with the current view that Boswell’s Johnson was a highly complex construction that he criticised and subverted even as he lauded and celebrated. But although he was something of a conceptual plaything, Boswell valued Johnson throughout his life because he soothed and reassured him. ******* I do not think my love of form for its own sake is an I\GIPPIRX UYEPM½GEXMSR JSV E QER SJ XLI %VQ] [LIVI there is such a deal of form and variety of attitude.

From the London Journal

Editors New readers of Boswell [MPP ½RH EPP SJ XLI IWWIRXMEPW within Pittock’s book (though an index would help) and more than one original observation, including a fairly off-hand comparison between Boswell’s preoccupations and reality TV. Boswell was indeed a ghoul who rushed to the deathbeds of the famous, and became entangled with the criminal Mrs Rudd through much the

same curiosity as induces a couch potato to turn over to COPS or Police, Camera Action. Boswell lived in an age when hangings were popular entertainment and dissections at Edinburgh’s medical school but a more respectable species SJ GSGO½KLX FYX XLI EREPSK] MW JEMVP] ZEPMH &YX he might have done better than compare what Boswell offers to the withered mutations of the documentary tradition. Boswell’s vicarious art displayed many of the virtues found in some of the best examples of direct cinema/cinémavérité, not least in the ability to infuse reality with narrative devices and conventions so subtly, they go almost unnoticed.

To pursue these cinematic parallels further, Ronald Black’s To the Hebrides is a new ‘Director’s Cut’ of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, and Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles, with 20,000 words restored to the text, and a new form of topographical presentation. The symbiotic relationship of Boswell’s most accessible work to Johnson’s gazetteer is well known – most editions, including the standard Penguin, include both books. Boswell planned his journal as a companion to Johnson’s while they were still on the trip, and only held off publication until Johnson’s death to spare the doctor any immediate embarrassment. He also wrote it, or claimed to, as an apologia against those Scottish writers and commentators who has attacked Johnson’s opinionated re-assessment of Martin Martin’s original account of the Western Islands, and his even more opinionated assessment of conditions in The Highlands. But Black’s treatment brings the two texts even closer together. His approach is radical, breaking each of them up and placing them alongside each other chapter by chapter under the theme of place – ‘The Lowlands’, ‘The Highlands’, ‘Skye’, ‘Raasay’, ‘Skye Again’, and so on. He has also combined the now seminal Pottle academic reedit of material related to the Tour, rediscovered as part of the Boswell trove at Malahide Castle.

This was a much more extensive MS than the then published edition, containing many episodes which delicacy demanded be edited SYX [LIR &SW[IPP ½VWX [IRX XS TVIWW &PEGO LEW used Pottle’s more extensive version as a base (including an extra 20,000 words) and taken from the popular version of the Tour where useful. The resulting bulky paperback is thus ZIV] GPSWI XS E HI½RMXMZI IHMXMSR JSV XLI KIRIVEP reader.

Black’s may seem an invasive approach to the material, even impertinent, but Boswell has long been subject to editorial intrusions and

bowdlerisations. There were countless re-edits and counterfeits of the LoJ during the 19thcentury, often stripping the text down to the level of an almanac or compilation of Johnson’s sayings. Boswell edited to the last moment, and leaned heavily on Edmond Malone for corrections and advice. Furthermore, the crux of Boswell’s reviving fortunes is the London Journal, a product of selection from the store of papers revealed in Malahide’s catacombs – which have in turn provided so much material that modern scholars assess Boswell’s merits as much on these as The Life of Johnson. And all of them require an editor’s tender mercies – Boswell’s art, insofar as it recognised, depends a great deal on audacious and intelligent editors, Malone, Chauncey Tinker, Pottle … and now Black?

But we must not forget, especially in these times, that editing is almost always a political act – and that Johnson’s part of the book was a highly politicised publication. And we might suggest that this new version is no different.

Whereas previous editions subsumed Boswell into the English fold, keeping him apart from his compatriots and enfolded within Johnson’s press, Black’s new edition embraces Johnson to Scotland, not as the bête noire of tradition, but a friendly critic, even benefactor. To the Hebrides is QSWX HI½RMXIP] XLI TSWX HIZSPYXMSREV] ZIVWMSR Indeed, for all the effort that has gone into re-imagining Boswell’s text, it is Johnson’s that truly comes alive, through association with it.

Johnson’s chapters set out the schematic of the tourists’ travels and provides the wide view lacking in Boswell’s account focused as it is on the entertaining prospect of an urban literati stranded among ‘savages’. Johnson’s contributions endorse the increasingly sympathetic view of him as more disposed to generosity and compassion than his demeanour or reputation would suggest. His observation of the Highlands as it was is generally unprejudiced and perceptive.

He attacks the privations that squeezed crofters off their lands and into steerage, and is disdainful of the landlords’ excuses. Not least, he notes that Lowlanders seem as ignorant of realities in their northlands as anyone in England, a suggestion that raised the ire of many Liberal commentators, not least James Thomson Callender. Thomson Callender was a great supporter of the American colonies (Johnson was not), and so may have opposed Johnson’s assessment on entirely different grounds – an example perhaps of inverse fratriotism? Throughout the Journey and the Tour the parallel of the American Indian and the Scottish Highlander is both stated and implied.

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In propaganda terms, support in print for either variety of noble savage was unwelcome to political establishments either side of the Atlantic, both of which placed so much importance in expanding into their respective ‘badlands’. It is hard to imagine the impact of Johnson’s critique on the moral failings of the then progressive agenda, coming as it did from this most Tory of Tories. Boswell does give us a very strong indication of just how disturbing this was to London and Edinburgh in the Tour’s most famous episode, the bust-up between arch-Whig Lord Auchinleck and his guest that provided its dramatic and ideological climax.

But it is also extremely entertaining to read.

Boswell’s chapters as interwoven with Johnson ½PP MR XLI KETW ERH ¾IWL SYX XLI ITMWSHIW LMRXIH EX F] .SLRWSR 2S QSVI HS [I LEZI XS ¾MGO back and forth within texts, or lose ourselves within Boswell’s denser prose in an attempt to link his dirt with Johnson’s initial gloss. To be a little more high minded, Boswell’s text acts as a commentary on the process that informed Johnson’s conclusions – or, if you want to be nasty about it, glories in the irrelevances Johnson eschewed. Nevertheless, it reminds

us, constantly, of the personal dimensions that were everywhere informing Johnson’s thought and perception, the pursuit of knowledge as a process of construction and relative perspectives (not least the differences between Bozzy and XLI 'LEQ XLIQWIPZIW ;LMPI XLMW ¾IWLMRK SJ the bones has always been understood as the purpose of Boswell’s Tour (or at least, the higher purpose amidst others less lofty), placing the Tour and the Journey in such proximity to each other is at times positively po-mo.

To return to the certainties of literary history, Whig style, the Tour cemented once and for all the notion of Boswell and Johnson’s symbiotic relationship. As a reading exercise To the Hebrides presents a Boswell intent on extrapolating the work of his mentor and defending his reputation against sometimes angry Scottish commentators.

It is also worth being reminded that if Johnson was Boswell’s Pavlovian poodle, then Boswell went to considerable lengths to understand his pet. Repeatedly, Boswell used this ‘dry run’

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of the LoJ to put himself in his friend’s place and see from the same direction. He did not succeed very well (at best, he has considerable empathy) and the excitement and newness of the Highlands and Islands distracted both of them (we get a much closer reading of Johnson when back in ‘civilisation’) but the effort seems to have brought them closer together. The signs of symbiosis can be as blatant as these, or Black’s restructure. They can also be subtle for example, Black numbers his endnotes continuously between either text, giving a sense of coherence and continuity between both writers and the debates to which their respective books contributed. There is thus a slightly misleading sense of common purpose between the two, and Pittock is absolutely correct when he describes the dialogue between Johnson and Boswell as one way, the former being long dead by the time the Tour was published. Boswell talked to Johnson, and of Johnson, but Black’s new treatment cannot make this a conversation between them – at best, the two of them present something of a united front to the wider literary community. Next year Birlinn will release another paperback, To The Western Islands, based on the Highland response to Johnson

and Boswell’s accounts of their famous tour XLEX [MPP TVIWYQEFP] KS JYVXLIV MR GSR½VQMRK XLI ³XSYVMWXW´ RSX EW KPSVM½IH LSPMHE]QEOIVW FYX empiricists engaged in important social, political and economic debates of their time.

These recent publications (I am happy to say) have made something of a liar of me. In issue 24 of The Drouth I argued that Boswell represents a curious absence in Scottish literary historiography, yet James Boswell and To the Hebrides indicate a renewed willingness to IRKEKI [MXL LMW GSRXVMFYXMSR XS E WTIGM½GEPP] Scottish literary and political tradition. It was a complex one, often contradictory and very QSHIVR ¯ LI MW MR QER] VIWTIGXW XLI ½VWX major Scottish writer to document and detail the tricksy role of the union in a developing Scottish psyche, one that mixed up certainties of religion, state and privilege. It was a union his anglophilia seems to implicitly support and yet it was a union that routinely rejected him. Those Scots who had climbed the ladder to London

UYMGOP] [MXLHVI[ MX [LIR XLI] &SW[IPP EXXIQTXIH XLI ½VWX VYRKW 8LI &VMXMWL QMPMXEV] XLEX IQFVEGIH the Scottish hunger for broader horizons and greater rewards could give him no commission. His dalliance at the English bar was a disaster. Whether or not he was a fratriot or a Jacobite, Boswell was a poor excuse for a unionist. These ironies are teased out in a well known scene from the 0SRHSR .SYVREP 8[S 7GSXXMWL SJ½GIVW IRXIV E XLIEXVI XS FSSW ERH NIIVW GEYWMRK &SW[IPP´W JIIPMRKW ERH sensitivities to come gushing out; ©X[S ,MKLPERH SJ½GIVW GEQI MR 8LI QSF MR XLI YTTIV KEPPIV] VSEVIH SYX ³2S 7GSXW No Scots! Out with them!’, hissed and pelted them with apples. My heart warmed to my countrymen, my Scotch blood boiled with indignation. I jumped up on the benches, roared out, ‘Damn you, you rascals!’, hissed and was in the greatest rage. I am very sure at that this time I should have been one of the most distinguished of heroes. I hated the English; I wished from my soul that the Union was broke and that we might give them another battle of Bannockburn. …[I] asked them of what regiment they were. They told me Lord John Murray’s and that they had just come from Havana. ‘And this’ said they, ‘is the thanks that we get – to be hissed when we come home…’But,’ said one, ‘If I had a grip o yin or twa o the tamd rascals I sud let them ken what they’re about.’

We see everything all at once from all directions, going from cross border pantomime catcalling to constitutional politics, XS 7GSXXMWL LMWXSVMSKVETL] XLI TEWX ¾EXXIRMRK MRXS XLI TVIWIRX via Bannockburn – the entirety of Scottish achievement, according to Hume), to Empire, and then rueful bewilderment at England’s inability to show its paternal approval for demonstrations of loyalty. There are times when the only way to get Boswell is to develop a healthy appreciation of GYFMWQ =SY GSYPH EPWS VIEH 4MXXSGO ERH ¾MGO XLVSYKL &PEGO These books represent a wider shift to recognise and reMRGSVTSVEXI XLSWI [VMXIVW WIIR EW WS %RKPM½IH ¯ XLEX MW WS 8SV] ¯ XLI] LEZI FIGSQI XLI FSRE ½HI LIEXLIRW [MXLMR XLI Scotlit tradition, the Scotts, Buchans, or Bridies excluded from the post-MacDiarmid, post-70s literary canon. Boswell’s post-devolutionary, post-modern rehabilitation seems to be secured – a heretic, but one of ‘us’.

Murray Pittock, (2007), James Boswell, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Aberdeen.

Ronald Black (ed), (2007), To the Hebrides, Birlinn, Edinburgh.

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