ABSTRACT

From a perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a paradox is apparent in this short excerpt from Johnson’s 1775 account of his tour, with Boswell, through the Hebrides. This has to do with changing perceptions of ‘home’ and its ‘elsewheres’. In the 1770s, would-be emigrants listened to the tales of ‘fortunate islands and happy regions’ embodied in the idea of America – the New World. Such people sought escape from the drudgery of poverty and the narrow prospects of home in an uncharted future. Two hundred and thirty years later, many descendants of those emigrants find that they cannot live as they desire in the homes their ancestors built in that new world and, for them, the tales to which they are now prone concern the fortunate islands and happy regions of a past of imagined certainty and stability embodied in the idea of Scotland – the Old Country. For the critic, there is no doubt that such regions, whether of the future or of the past, are constructs of the imagination: mirror opposites, reflections of the inadequacies of the ‘here and now’. To merely dismiss such imagined worlds as utopian would, however, be careless, and our objective should instead be to seek to understand what aspirations these imaginings conceal.