James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson. Watch Dr. Curley discuss his latest book:

James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson. Watch Dr. Curley discuss his latest book:

This is a transcription, with commentary, of the lectures delivered by Sir Robert Chambers as Vinerian Professor of Law as they were preserved in the King's Manuscripts at the British Museum. Previously unpublished, they offer new insights into the development of English law, and they are of particular interest to eighteenth-century literary historians because many of the lectures were written with the unacknowledged assistance of Chambers's friend and mentor, Samuel Johnson.

Although Samuel Johnson's famed ramblings never took him more than five hundred miles from his London home, he was an indefatigable planner of distant voyages. Sharing with his fellow Englishmen that passion for investigating the unknown which had ushered in a momentous geographical revolution, Johnson became the original armchair traveler. His writings proclaim a boundless curiosity about the globe and demonstrate a pervasive preoccupation with travel in every conceivable form. Travel represented more for him than geographical movement; it was a symbol of intellectual growth in his life, his morality, and his society. While Johnson's biographers have all emphasized his fascination with exploration and discovery, no comprehensive study of his complex relationship to the epoch-making geographical advances of his century has heretofore appeared.

Thomas Curley's "Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel" offers new perspectives on this crucial and surprisingly little-known concern of the man and his age, when English literature brilliantly mirrored the widening frontiers of the British Empire. Drawing extensively on Johnson's entire canon, the works of his contemporaries, and a vast store of much neglected travel books, Curley places Johnson's love of travel and travel literature firmly in its literary and historical contexts.

Johnson's career began with the translation of a travel book, yielded numerous articles and essays on the subject in his middle years, and culminated in the publication of his own splendid description of the Highlands in "A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland." Keenly interested in geography, Johnson studied well over two centuries of travel literature to validate his own philosophy of human nature and to promote improved literary standards in what was then the second most popular genre in England. His masterpiece, "Rasselas," not only enshrined his recurring vision of man as perpetual explorer but also exemplified that fruitful interaction between travel books and belles-lettres so prevalent throughout Johnson's age.

"Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel" sheds new light on Johnson's career ambitions, his talents in moral observation and literary creation, and his inquisitive age. Johnson emerges in Curley's study as a truly representative writer completely captivated by the romance of Georgian travel and illustrative of the cultural impact of an expanding world picture upon the minds and letter of eighteenth-century Englishmen.