A new itinerary added to the map

We’re excited to announce the addition of a new itinerary to our map viewer: Samuel Johnson and James Boswell’s 1773 tour to the Hebrides. This will allow us to visualize the ways in which these influential tours of Scotland overlapped and diverged, and of course, see how they line up next to a selection of historical maps provided by the NLS. Pennant and Johnson might have been less happy to see their travels presented side by side. Annoyed by a ‘fling’ at him in Johnson’s Tour, and perhaps by the competition it represented to his own Voyage to the Hebrides, Pennant asked his correspondent George Paton to look out for ‘any strictures’ on Johnson in the press, and wrote that he would not acknowledge Johnson in his own work: ‘for really he is not worth notice.’ Nonetheless, we hope that that this will be the first of several Curious Travellers crossovers between Pennant and Johnson, as we look at the impact they had upon later tourists as well as each other.