The original impetus for this study of the Celtic Revival in the age of Johnson occurred during my years as a doctoral candidate under Walter Jackson Bate at Harvard University. John Kelleher, then dean of Irish Studies in the United States, urged me to probe Samuel Johnson's ties to Irish intellectuals involved in the controversy over James Macpherson's fraudulent Scottish Gaelic poetry (1760–3) attributed to the legendary bard, Ossian. I carefully stored the suggestion in my memory for possible use in the future. In the meantime my curiosity turned to other Johnsonian matters of travel, empire, law, and politics. My graduate-school interest in Macpherson did bear some early fruit at Columbia University, where I finally tracked down a copy of William Shaw's rare anti-Ossian pamphlet, published in 1782 with Johnson's little-known assistance. In 1987 I spoke about their collaboration at conferences sponsored by the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh and contributed an essay to Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen University Press, 1987), edited by Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock. Having published on Ossian, I redirected my energies into two decades of scholarship focused on preparing the first biography of Johnson's friend, Sir Robert Chambers, and the first edition of Chambers's Vinerian Law Lectures, which Johnson helped to compose.

When I turned to completing this book, I was surprised to find that my essay on the Ossian controversy had provoked my own minicontroversy, with revisionist scholars bent on rehabilitating Macpherson's reputation.