Gordon Turnbull (12:00)

Boswell’s candid autobiographical diaries are in one way or another always a record of travel.

What does travel mean? And why write about it?

250 years ago, in the rainswept autumn of 1773, James Boswell journeyed with the great English man of letters Samuel Johnson through the Highlands and Hebrides. Their accounts made this now-famous tour one of the most frequently retraced of literary journeys.

But in crucial senses, Boswell’s candid autobiographical diaries are in one way or another always a record of travel. As an Ayrshireman in Edinburgh, an Edinburgh man in Ayrshire, a Scot in London, a Briton on his continental European adventures (including Holland, Prussia, Rome, Siena, Genoa, Paris and Corsica), Boswell was never without the perspective of the stranger and voyager.

Gordon Turnbull, former General Editor of the Yale Boswell Editions, follows Boswell in his many travels, probing the questions Boswell’s journals raise about the very meaning and purpose of the human urge to get up and go.

In conversation with Margaret Boswell Eliott.

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