1755
BY THE MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Britain had a fair claim to being in the forefront of Europe’s economic, scientific and political progress. Culturally, however, there was a void. While Italy had long boasted its own dictionary, the Vocabulario degli Accademici della Crusca, and France had Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, England had no almanac of its vibrant and expanding language. In 1746 a group of London publishers pooled resources to correct the omission, entrusting the making of a national dictionary to Samuel Johnson, an opinionated 36-year-old journalist of untidy appearance with a gift for creating extremely neat definitions. Angling, he once said, was ‘a stick and a string, with a worm on one end and a fool on the other’.
The son of a struggling bookseller from Lichfield in Staffordshire, Johnson suffered in his childhood from scrofula, a tubercular disease of the lymph nodes contracted through infected milk. Popular belief held that the characteristic swellings, known as the ‘King’s Evil’, responded to the royal touch, and in March 1712 the two-year-old Samuel was taken down to London by his mother to be ‘touched’ by Queen Anne in one of the last of these ceremonies ever held. For the rest of his life Johnson wore round his neck the gold ‘touch piece’ the Queen gave him, but he was not blessed with a cure. A subsequent operation to remove the swellings left his neck visibly scarred.
Also pockmarked with smallpox, Johnson was tall and stout with a curious stoop – ‘almost bent double,’ commented the writer Fanny Burney. ‘His mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting as if he were chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers and twisting his hands. His body is in constant agitation, see-sawing up and down.’
Modern experts have diagnosed Johnson’s grunts and head-rollings as St Vitus’ Dance or Tourette’s Syndrome. His friends knew the kindly spirit behind this intimidating exterior, and nicknamed him ‘Ursa Major’ – the Great Bear – revelling in his sharp wit. ‘Let me see,’ he once remarked, when reminded that the French Academy’s forty members had taken forty years to compile their dictionary, while he was planning to write his, alone, in only three. ‘Forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.’
In the event the task took him nine years. Working with five assistants who scribbled away in the attic of his home on the north side of Fleet Street, he produced definitions of more than forty-two thousand words, laced from time to time with his own wit and prejudice:
. . . Lexicographer. A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.
Oats. A grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people.
The dictionary was an instant success, republished in many editions, and Johnson was honoured with academic distinctions – Oxford University made him a Master of Arts and Dublin gave him a doctorate. As ‘Dr Johnson’, he became the great man of letters of his time, founding, with the painter Joshua Reynolds, ‘The Club’, whose members included the playwright and novelist Oliver Goldsmith, the orator Edmund Burke, the actor David Garrick and the biographer James Boswell, whose famous Life of Johnson has preserved many of the great man’s sayings for posterity: ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully’ – and his comment on the contracting of a second marriage after an unhappy first one, ‘the triumph of hope over experience’.
Johnson’s own marriage to Tetty, a widow twenty years his senior, was a love match, and after her death he filled his home with an eccentric ménage of oddballs: the blind and bad-tempered poet Anna Williams; an unlicensed surgeon, Robert Levet, along with a former prostitute named Poll, all tended by a black servant, Frank Barber, who had arrived as a boy from Jamaica. Johnson cared for them all, and developed a fierce aversion to the business of slavery. ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies,’ was one of his toasts.
Johnson’s robust views do not always square with the standards of today. ‘A woman’s preaching,’ he declared, ‘is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ But his honesty disarmed criticism. Confronted one day by an indignant complainant who demanded how, in his dictionary, he could have defined ‘pastern’ (a horse’s ankle) as a horse’s ‘knee’, he offered no excuse – ‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.’