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  • Chapter 14 - Johnson and Travel

  • Edited by Greg Clingham, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
    Published online:
    22 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022, pp 191-203

  • Summary

    Samuel Johnson’s lifelong interest in travel and travel writing aligns neatly, in many ways, with his empiricist metaphysics. When we travel, we compare our assumptions and preconceptions against the real world and track the inevitable incongruities. But Johnson’s enduring interest in travel also reveals a more complex engagement with the material world – and Lockean empiricism more broadly – than we often recognize, and his attitude toward the genre is more complicated, more critical and probing, than we might expect. With reference primarily to Rasselas and A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, this chapter examines how Johnson leverages travel to combat habituation; enable comparative knowledge, which produces meaning and value; and assess our bodies and minds as we perceive, digest, and retain knowledge. Facilitating a comparative intellectual paradigm, and foregrounding epistemology, travel is, for Johnson, a critical posture that underpins his thinking far beyond his travel texts.