SOURCE: Wiltshire, John. “‘From China to Peru’: Johnson in the Traveled World.” In The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham, pp. 209-23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Wiltshire argues that Samuel Johnson had conflicting opinions about the importance of travel. Wiltshire notes that Johnson’s insistence that the universality of human nature made travel pointless is contrary to the great diversity of customs and material conditions he found during his own travels late in life.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.” Johnson made this famous declaration in 1777, but he had already said something similar to James Boswell on 11 October 1773 whilst they were both temporarily marooned on the island of Coll in the Hebrides. Boswell had commented that until their joint expedition, “You yourself, sir, had never...