In which we ponder the making of a Dictionary – with thoughts on the true meaning of lexicography and the particular flavours of its solitude
On 18 June 1746, Sam had breakfasted at the Golden Anchor, an inn near Holborn Bar. There he had signed a contract with a group of publishers, led by Robert Dodsley, who believed that a new dictionary of English was desirable and could make them money. Dodsley had known Sam since his early days in London and thought him well suited to the task. On first hearing of the idea, Sam had been unsure if it was something he should pursue, but when at length he agreed to do so, he knew he was embarking on his most substantial venture. He imagined it would take three years.
The fee, to be paid in instalments, was 1,500 guineas (£1,575), the equivalent of perhaps £150,000 today. This at a time when a guinea might buy a smart new hat and a housemaid earned perhaps £10 a year. For London, Sam had been paid ten guineas, and for The Vanity of Human Wishes he received fifteen. True, these were poems, each fewer than 400 lines long, but now he was entering an entirely different league. For comparison: Henry Fielding received £700 for his novel Tom Jones (1749) and Adam Smith would get £500 for the first edition of The Wealth of Nations (1776), though he would ultimately make about three times that amount from it, while Edward Gibbon earned more than £6,000 from his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88).
The money promised to transform his life. Though never one of those people for whom money was the foundation of self-worth, he was mindful of its allure. The subject often occupied him in the Rambler. ‘Money has much less power than is ascribed to it by those that want it,’ he wrote; ‘few men are made better by affluence’, and ‘the rich and the powerful live in a perpetual masquerade’. But ‘no desire can be formed which riches do not assist to gratify’, and wealth is ‘useful . . . when it departs from us’. Insights into the disappointments of prosperity (‘no sooner do we sit down to enjoy our acquisitions, than we find them insufficient to fill up the vacuities of life’) were matched by insights into its potential to open doors (‘The most striking effect of riches is the splendour of dress, which every man has observed to enforce respect and facilitate reception’). He would tell Boswell that ‘you will have much more influence by giving or lending money where it is wanted, than by hospitality’. Affluence has the effect of ‘overpowering the distinctions of rank and birth’, and whoever has it ‘imagines himself always fortified against invasions on his authority’.
Feeling more confident about his finances, he took lodgings at 17 Gough Square, a minute’s walk north of Fleet Street. This red-brick house, which dates from the end of the seventeenth century, still stands, and strikes the modern eye as tall and sturdy. For Sam, it had obvious attractions. Close to his familiar haunts, it was conveniently near the premises of William Strahan, the Dictionary’s designated printer, and the single room on the top floor, which enjoyed good light, was large enough to serve as an office. Installed there, he could survey his task and the world at large with satisfaction; set up in the sort of property a respectable tradesman would have occupied, he seemed at last to have arrived as a professional writer.
Soon he began his research, reading widely and marking the books with a black lead pencil. For practical reasons he chose to confine himself to written sources, and he looked for illustrations of good usage; the list of headwords, rather than being something he drew up in advance, would grow out of these, and he arranged for them to be copied into notebooks. A skeleton text began to take shape. But obstacles lay ahead. The nature of language itself was a problem and, as he would eventually note in his preface to the finished volumes, ‘no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away’.
There is a false image of Dr Johnson the cast-iron prescriptivist, regulating language with unwavering certainty. The truth is a little different. In 1747, when he brought out his Plan of an English Dictionary, he spoke of his ambition to ‘secure our language’ and stop it being overrun with barbarous usage. He intended to arrest the language’s supposed decay, and pictured the period between the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the Restoration – that is, between 1558 and 1660 – as a linguistic and literary golden age, the purity of which was worth recovering. Yet even at this stage he was aware of the limits of his authority. Dodsley suggested he address the Plan to that influential taste-maker, the Earl of Chesterfield. Sam did so, and claimed that in considering the pure and proper use of words he would be ‘exercising a kind of vicarious jurisdiction . . . as the delegate of your lordship’. He was embarrassed by this posture of obsequiousness, but it was expedient: in the eyes of the public whose interest the booksellers hoped to attract, Samuel Johnson was nobody, but Lord Chesterfield was universally known, a diplomat and political operator with an appetite for supporting the arts.
As Sam gathered the materials for the work itself, his understanding of the lexicographer’s role sharpened. When he began, he believed that a word could have no more than seven senses, but in time his reading demonstrated that this was wrong. Encountering words in the wild, he saw just how varied their lives could be. In the finished volumes, he distinguished 134 senses of the verb to take, twenty senses of up, and fourteen of time. Now he was awed by ‘the boundless chaos of living speech’; rather than occupying a vantage point outside the forests of language, he sat in their midst. He did not like everything he found there, and stuck usage labels on about 10 per cent of the words he documented, but only a handful of these, between 1 and 2 per cent, expressed an opinion – such as that a word or sense was ‘low’, ‘cant’, ‘ludicrous’, even ‘vicious’. His mission was to register language rather than debug it, and the heart of the Dictionary was his decision to provide quotations from other authors to illustrate words as they are actually used.
This shift is culturally significant. In recognizing that no dictionary can ‘embalm’ language, in coming to appreciate English’s ‘exuberance of signification’, and in noting that some words are ‘hourly shifting their relations’, he rethought the nature of his project, and this influenced both the practice of lexicography and the wider public understanding of language. Previously, making a dictionary had been seen as a means of reform: the language could be sent to school, and indeed in 1712 Jonathan Swift had published a pamphlet proposing exactly this. By contrast, Sam was responsive to the variety he found during his research – the jaggedness and profusion of usage, which he did his best to register. None of this is to say that he gave up having views about how English ought to be written, but exposure to the realities of its uses meant that he had to relinquish some of the ideals he’d entertained when he set out.
Clearly, then, his task was bigger than he had at first supposed, and he soon began to find ways of distracting himself from it. We all know how this goes, the irritatingly reasonable conversation one has with oneself: ‘I need to get the right tools. Mastering this one apparently unrelated subject will help me make sense of the larger task I’m facing. This isn’t an auspicious moment to start. I need to do this when I’m better rested and more relaxed. I need to wait till I’m in the same frame of mind that I was in the last time I made some progress. My levels of nervous energy are too high. I think I may have offended X by not being in touch with her for ages, so I must do something about that immediately. Speaking to Y will help clear this mental blockage. If I just get this other thing out of the way, I’ll feel liberated and ready. The muse isn’t with me. I think I might be getting sick.’ Sam’s own internal jabber will have been more freighted with melancholy and moral scruple, but the effect will have been the same. Deferring work is usually more tiring than doing it, and the fuzzy patterns of enervation make it possible to convince oneself that the deferral is the work.
It was while working on the Dictionary that he established himself as an essayist, with the Rambler. He wrote the pieces that appeared there to make some extra money and relieve the slog of lexicography. The immediacy of writing twice a week an essay of about 1,400 words, for prompt publication, could not have been more different from what he called ‘beating the track of the alphabet’. It is well-known that he defined lexicographer as ‘A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge’. His reasons for doing so tend to command less attention. The definition is treated as a droll gesture, a buried joke. But Sam didn’t really think he was a drudge (in his own explanation ‘One employed in mean labour; a slave; one doomed to servile occupation’). The Dictionary’s preface leaves one in no doubt of how important he considered his work, and in the course of his labours he pictured himself in many other and very different terms – as a sailor on the sea of words, an explorer, a collector, even an invader and conqueror, ransacking the recesses of learning. As for ‘harmless’, it’s fair to say that people who protest their own harmlessness are aware of their potential to cause harm; they are conscious that their actions have implications. Sam’s wry portrait of the drudging lexicographer is typical of the self-deprecation with which all serious people state their professions. Whereas someone doing a job of little consequence will often take enormous pride in their status (‘I am the assistant deputy director of customer experience’), and proprietors of one-person companies without apparent irony refer to themselves as CEOs, heavy hitters are less brassy. To understate what you do is to leave breathing space for excellence.
Still, when he referred to his work as mere drudgery, he was expressing a sense of worthlessness. Even though people he knew were never far away, and often under the same roof, he regarded the Dictionary as a lonely undertaking. Its preface would characterize the mood of this period as the ‘gloom of solitude’, and the text bears witness to his morbid feelings of isolation. Deep into the intricacies of the project, he wrote a piece for the Adventurer in which he rejected the idea that solitude is ‘the parent of philosophy’; while it might provide the opportunity to increase one’s learning, the purpose of doing so was to share it with others. Allergic to ‘specious representations of solitary happiness’, he suspected that beyond the short term a reclusive life was conducive not to wisdom, but to lassitude. Impressed by Robert Burton’s simple direction in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘Be not solitary; be not idle’, he nonetheless modified it as follows: ‘If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.’ The principle was one he found it hard to put into practice, as solitude and idleness were such natural companions.
In The Lonely City, an investigation of what it means to be alone, Olivia Laing writes that ‘You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city.’ Though one may sense ‘the massed presence of other human beings’, it is no guarantee of not feeling isolated. Pondering the temper of this ‘absence or paucity of connection’, she reaches for a definition: ‘Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others.’1 The dictionary she has in mind isn’t Sam’s, but in the pages of his work we find pointed references to what she calls ‘paucity of connection’. In his entry for companion he quotes the poet Matthew Prior: ‘With anxious doubts, with raging passions torn, / No sweet companion near with whom to mourn.’ His entry for visiter [sic] quotes a letter from Jonathan Swift to John Gay, in which Swift complains, ‘I have a large house, yet I should hardly prevail to find one visiter, if I were not able to hire him with a bottle of wine.’ Under stagnant, he cites lines from his own play Irene that imagine being ‘buried in perpetual sloth, / That gloomy slumber of the stagnant soul’. Among the quotations for lone is one from Savage’s Wanderer: ‘Here the lone hour a blank of life displays.’ For solitariness, he quotes from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia: ‘You subject yourself to solitariness, the sly enemy that doth most separate a man from well doing.’ There is much more in this vein, and while it is easy to exaggerate the significance of any particular excerpt, the many quotations on this theme have a strong cumulative force.
In an age that regarded the individual’s industry as the basis of national improvement, idleness seemed shameful. It’s natural to suppose that Sam felt guilty because he thought he was lazy. But there is an alternative reading: he was lazy because he was wracked with guilt. He had failed to keep resolutions, had allowed his faith and friendships to lapse, had wallowed in fantasy. Troubled by his offences and notions of the suffering they had produced, he imagined he would never complete the Dictionary. In a book-length ‘pathographic essay’ on Sam, Ernst Verbeek explains that ‘Postponement, difficulty in finishing things . . . and working in bouts, are characteristics of the sympathetic person’. Verbeek believes that ‘Johnson’s intelligence was an extension of his heart’, and sees in him a special ability ‘to displace himself affectively into another person, or into a situation’.2 His innate complexity of feeling caused his energies to veer off in many directions, and in Rambler 134 (dating from June 1751) he wrote about this, describing the emotional climate of slow, fitful work, which consisted of ‘false terrors’, ‘the seducements of imagination’, a tendency to dwell on ‘remote consequences’ or to ‘multiply complications’, and a readiness to be consumed with ‘reconciling ourselves to our own cowardice by excuses which . . . we know to be absurd’.
Many years later, reflecting on Alexander Pope’s slow and anxious progress in translating Homer’s Iliad, Sam would comment that ‘Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their terms of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted.’ All large projects involve unforeseen delays. I’m reminded here of Hofstadter’s Law, framed by the cognitive scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter: ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.’ This conjures up an image like the strange loops one sees in the graphic art of M. C. Escher: the eye follows a staircase down and down and down and down, only to find itself back at the starting point. But if Sam was experiencing a paradox of perspective, or no more than the illusion of progress, there were other factors retarding his progress that could easily be identified, and chief among them was grief.