Johnson and Bosell The Transit of Caledonia [Hardcover]

This is the first comprehensive treatment of Johnson and Boswell in relation to Scotland, as revealed in their accounts of their trip to the Hebrides in 1773. Locating the famous journey both within the context of travel writing in the decade of Cook's Pacific voyages, and in an intellectual, cultural, and literary context, Rogers explores the motives of both men in making the Grand Detour in the face of the anti-Scottish feeling of the period.

The Boswell-Johnson adventure has never been seen as clearly before as Rogers has now revealed it. --Times Literary Supplement

[The author] offers an eleant study of currents and of undercurrents in the travellers' separate accounts of their journey to the Western Islands...Take Rogers' study for the very good book it is, question it here and there, argue with it at need, but above all be grateful for the imaginative light it throws on the mythic-seeming journey and on those mythic-seeming voyagers whose travels still haunt some of our waking dreams. --The Albion