Containing some essential points of information on the life of reading, whereamong are the most fugacious mentions of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu and even Mr Stephen King
Though written against a backdrop of sorrow, the Dictionary is a triumph – one not of innovation, but of execution. True, there are mistakes: a dabchick is not ‘a chicken newly hatched’, a pastern not ‘the knee of an horse’. Some definitions are unhelpfully imprecise: archery is ‘the use of a bow’, and to worm is ‘to deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue, which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad’. Sam omits words he had certainly come across in his reading, or even used himself: euphemism, irritable, literary, shibboleth, underdone. His spelling is occasionally inconsistent, and some of his etymologies are poor. As he would write to his friend Francesco Sastres, twenty-nine years after publication and a few months before his own death, ‘Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.’ Yet the entries are crisp and clear, and his definitions are confident. The ones that are well-known – such as ‘excise, A hateful tax levied upon commodities’ – are unrepresentative in being so opinionated, but many have a lovely succinctness: a thumb is ‘the short strong finger answering to the other four’, an embryo is ‘the offspring yet unfinished in the womb’, and a rant consists of ‘high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought’. Others raise a smile with their sheer briskness: a lizard is ‘an animal resembling a serpent, with legs added to it’, opera ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’, tree ‘a large vegetable rising, with one woody stem, to a considerable height’, and an orgasm simply ‘sudden vehemence’.
This is not to say that there are no innovations at all. Sam changed attitudes to the very idea of a dictionary: he made people think of it as a significant cultural object, and inspired others to compile new works of reference. He was the first lexicographer to make a creditable attempt to work on historical principles by exhibiting the development of words. His use of illustrative quotations to support his definitions was an inspired move. One of its effects was to make the Dictionary an encyclopedia of treasurable literary and historical nuggets, embodying a belief he set forth in its preface: ‘The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.’ Besides being educational, it is a work of literature, and by ‘showing how one author copied the thoughts and diction of another’, he created ‘a genealogy of sentiments’, which amounted to ‘a kind of intellectual history’.
The Dictionary was a triumph of reading, and it was reading of a persistent, dogged kind. ‘A man will turn over half a library to make one book,’ he told Boswell more than twenty years later, and this project bore out those words. The image is appropriately physical and unromantic; it makes me think of Sam rummaging his bookshelves or staggering across his garret room laden with chunky volumes. At their best books can be portable magic – the image, I believe, is Stephen King’s – but they’re not always very portable; sometimes the ones we need for work or some crazy self-imposed project possess not even a hint of occult charm, and instead of being succulent like a mango their contents are as tough as ashplant.
Sam’s was indeed a life of reading. A young person ‘should read five hours a day’, he would tell Boswell, and the prescription was one he often exceeded. He devoured books in his youth, as a student at Oxford, and constantly thereafter, though he was increasingly inclined to berate himself for not reading enough – a sure sign of someone who reads a great deal. The books he consumed were fuel for his writing; he wanted to comment or expand on them. Many were rousing or inspiring, but sometimes they affected his mind in ways less immediately positive: ‘Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, enables us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects, by condemning himself to perpetual darkness?’
One might expect him to be an advocate of systematic reading, but his approach appears more relaxed, even capricious. It’s fine to start a book in the middle, and you should read what you want, not what you feel you ought to read: ‘If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.’ The flipside of this is, naturally, that ‘What is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention’ – a statement that chimes with modern insights about the relationship between reading, pleasure and memory, not least the idea that when one reads with pleasure one’s avidity has an erotic quality, a sense of being on the very edge of reality and of our cognition being a function not only of the mind, but also of the body.
In descriptions of his behaviour, the parallels between reading and eating are apparent: Sam consumed books hungrily, chewing and digesting their ideas, sometimes swallowing them whole yet sometimes pausing to savour their sweetest parts and perhaps to roll a particularly delicious phrase upon his tongue. But he had a taste for dry, bulky fare, and the list of his favourite authors includes figures whose works one is now unlikely to find outside a university library: Hugo Grotius, Angelo Poliziano, Joseph Justus Scaliger. His appetite for the more solid and juiceless sorts of literature was strong. He was capable of ignoring the scenery in the Hebrides because he was utterly absorbed in an obscure 1619 treatise about ‘the nature and use of lots’ (i.e. using objects such as sticks or paper slips to choose a person for a job or resolve a dispute), and he surprised his university tutor by breaking a long silence with a quotation from Macrobius, a far from well-known Roman writer of the fifth century. In fact, Macrobius, with his broad range of interests that included astronomy, geography and the importance of the number seven, was a model of the kind of reader Sam wanted to be: an omnivore who could participate with rigorous intelligence in the arguments of every work he ingested.
The truth is that he read in different ways for different purposes. We all do so, but tend to have a limited awareness of this divergence. Robert DeMaria distinguishes Sam’s four approaches: he read curiously, entering into a ‘dreamlike state of enjoyment’ as he allowed himself to become completely engrossed in a book; perused texts for answers to specific questions that were preying on his mind; practised ‘hard reading’, the close and critical study of intellectually demanding material; and engaged in ‘mere reading’, which involved scanning a newspaper or some other ephemeral publication ‘without the fatigue of close attention’, for, as he remarked, ‘the world . . . swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read’.1 His attitude to reading is liberating and inspiring: he champions it, appreciates the range of forms it can take, and does justice to the truth of readers’ experience.
Boswell recalled his uncle describing Sam as ‘a robust genius, born to grapple with whole libraries’, and the choice of verb is apt, for Sam handled volumes unsentimentally. On one occasion Boswell found him putting his books in order, wearing ‘a pair of large gloves, such as hedgers use’. He certainly wasn’t one of those book lovers who purr over exquisite bindings. Although he did care about the quality of the ink and paper, he concerned himself far more with what was inside books, and sometimes his urgency in seeking out their choicest parts became a churlish roughness. He surrendered a handsome copy of Demosthenes’s speeches because he could see that it was ‘too fine for a scholar’s talons’. Garrick reported lending him a ‘stupendously bound’ volume of Petrarch and being horrified to see him toss it over his head onto the floor. In light of this, we might expect him to be addicted to inserting comments in his books, arguing with authors or their printers, but his marginalia are sporadic. Scribbling in the margin disrupts the flow of reading, and Sam usually prefers immersion to the herky-jerky progress of the chronic annotator. Or rather, he wants to do what he can to make immersion possible.
One of his liberating beliefs about reading is that you don’t have to persevere with a book that’s boring you. He drove home the point when asked about Elizabeth Montagu’s An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, which he had not read all the way through: ‘when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery’. Hester Thrale recorded his exclaiming ‘How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page!’ One of the reasons for this was the abundance of hack work. When volumes are cobbled together in order to make money, the results are often tawdry. In the Idler he wrote, ‘The continual multiplication of books not only distracts choice, but disappoints enquiry’, and his distaste for hastily produced dross persists in a remark commonly attributed to him, which even if it’s apocryphal captures his manner: ‘What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.’ His ideas about pleasure will be the subject of a later chapter, but in the context of examining what he has to say about its connection with reading, I’m put in mind of one of the fictional correspondents he introduces in the Rambler. In the midst of a discussion not of books but of wit, this character makes a simple, sharp statement about the chancy alliance between writer and audience, reflecting Sam’s profound experience of both sides of that relationship: ‘The power of pleasing is very often obstructed by the desire.’