The Odd Couple

Dr Johnson and James Boswell were an unlikely duo, but their landmark accounts of the post-Jacobite Highlands still entertain and inform today

- JUDY VICKERS

IT was 250 years ago this month that an unlikely pair set off on the road trip of a lifetime.

Dr Samuel Johnson was the celebrated 63-year-old dictionary author who had clawed his way up from poverty and debt. He was now Britain's most revered man of letters with a pension from the King. Tall, bulky, blind in one eye, partially deaf and with tics which would be posthumously diagnosed as Tourette's, he was a committed Tory and didn't think much of Scotland or the Scots.

James Boswell was 30 years his junior, an Edinburgh lawyer, the son of a judge and heir to the family's estates of Auchinleck in Ayrshire. A drinker and a womaniser, he is most famous for devotion to his older friend, which would culminate in his celebrated biography.

Their trip, to the post-Jacobite Highlands, would spawn two books: Johnson's shorter travelogue A Journey Western Islands Of Scotland and Boswell's gossipy The Journal Of A Tour To The Hebrides. Both were hugely popular, are still in print and have inspired plays, films and TV series, with their picture of clan-based society already fading into romantic history.

It was improbable that the two became friends at all. Boswell told the story that when he was introduced to Johnson as a Scot, he, rather pathetically, said, "I do indeed come from Scotland but I cannot help it," to which Johnson replied, "That, sir, I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help." Eleven years later, the pair embarked on a long-planned tour of the Hebrides - the idea inspired by a book Johnson had read as a child - Johnson arriving in Edinburgh in August 1773, Boswell full of boyish glee to have enticed his friend north.