Travel Classic: Tour of the Scottish Isles, 1924

On a military service during World War I, RW Chapman brought together two travelogues on one excursion of the Scottish Isles

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July 18, 2014

Rare in travel literature are twin classics that cover the same excursion. In 1773, Dr Samuel Johnson with his devoted biographer James Boswell set off on a visit to the Hebrides. Two years later Johnson’s book A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland was released. Johnson did not welcome the idea of competition during his lifetime and it was only in 1785, a year after his death, that Boswell issued his own version called The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The combined versions were eventually published by Oxford University Press in 1924 after being collated by R.W. Chapman during World War I. Chapman had edited them while manning a six-inch naval gun in Macedonia.

The raunchy Boswell makes much of Johnson dancing a reel on the Isle of Skye and meeting with Bonnie Prince Charlie’s helpmate Flora MacDonald. The good doctor also presented a book to a young lady who was claimed to be the inspiration for the ballad Four and Twenty Virgins Came Down From Inverness. I read recently that the diminutive island of Little Cumbrae has been gifted to Baba Ramdev. A former ecclesiast, Reverend Adams would have grandly prayed for “the inhabitants of Cumbrae and the adjacent islands of Great Britain”, had he heard the news.