In Time and Out of Time: Memory and Imagination in Johnson’s Highland Journey

Abstract

Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) has often been characterised as a curiously under-visualised travelogue—more striking for its silences than for its descriptive detail. Critics have long debated whether Johnson’s reticence stems from impaired eyesight, physical discomfort, or deliberate stylistic choice. This article argues that such readings overlook the deeper narrative strategies at work. 

Rather than a sparse record of a northern tour, the Journey emerges as a meditation on how travel is experienced, remembered, and narrated. Johnson eschews straightforward description, instead employing negation, ellipsis, and modal phrasing to register the uncertainties of perception. His prose layers immediate impressions with later acts of recollection, collapsing distinctions between lived experience and retrospective narration. This temporal fluidity—what Philip Smallwood has described as being ‘in time and out of time’—reveals Johnson’s scepticism about both memory and the reliability of knowledge gained through travel. At the same time, the Journey foregrounds imagination as an embodied and affective faculty: something that can be ‘heated’, ‘stroked’, or ‘struck’, mediating between external scenes and inner sensation. Rather than offering a confident empiricist survey, Johnson crafts a text marked by absence, instability, and embodied response—a travel narrative ultimately less concerned with cataloguing what is known than with probing what remains uncertain and elusive.