The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr. Johnson's Guide to Life

The Dictionary was not only the culmination of a remarkable programme of reading, but also a treat for those who shared Sam’s sense that a reference book could be a work of literature. Dictionaries are, to paraphrase Umberto Eco, encyclopedias in disguise, and this one, besides its obvious role as a guide to English vocabulary, is an anthology of literary extracts, an educational primer, a history (or museum) of learning, and a time capsule that enables us to picture the age in which Sam lived. It is also full of hints about the story of its own making.

No definition in the Dictionary tells us more about that story than that of patron: ‘One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.’ This was a dig at Lord Chesterfield, who had neglected his role until shortly before the volumes’ publication. When at last he wrote the first of two pieces in support of the Dictionary, in November 1754, he explained that no one involved in its making had offered him ‘the usual compliment of a pair of gloves or a bottle of wine’. Dodsley, he added, had not ‘so much as invited me to take a bit of mutton with him’. His tone was embarrassingly trivial. ‘I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language,’ he condescendingly declared, to ‘Mr Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship’. Part of the problem was that he was so used to his role as a paragon of polite learning – a man flattered by anyone with a product to push – that he had become a parody of graciousness. In private, Sam expressed disgust: ‘I have sailed a long and painful voyage round the world of the English language; and does he now send out two cock-boats to tow me into harbour?’ At length, in February, he responded to Chesterfield in stinging terms. The contents of his letter soon got out, generating welcome publicity. It remains a masterpiece of controlled anger:

I have been lately informed by the proprietor of the World that two Papers in which my Dictionary is recommended to the Public were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the Great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

When upon some slight encouragement I first visited your Lordship I was overpowered like the rest of Mankind by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish . . . that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending, but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the Art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly Scholar can possess. I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

Seven years, My Lord, have now past since I waited in your outward Rooms or was repulsed from your Door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of Publication without one Act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before . . .

Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my Labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known, and do not want it.

I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

Sam’s letter is a trumpet blast: authors need no longer be subservient to vain benefactors. Yet it is also a more personal statement. When he tells Chesterfield that ‘The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind’, he is dismissing not the whole principle of patronage, but specifically Chesterfield’s failure to make good on his side of the bargain. Instead of being timely, his patron’s notice has been delayed ‘till I am known, and do not want it’. The key word here is known. When Sam signed the contract for the Dictionary, he was an obscure figure, but by 1755 he has a reputation and a public. He no longer needs to profess obedience to Chesterfield and to refer to himself as this lofty figure’s ‘delegate’. What’s more, he no longer thinks of English as something that can be fixed (screwed in place, that is, and mended), and that makes Chesterfield, with his enthusiasm for sending the language to school, seem like yesterday’s man, priggish and unenlightened. The antipathy would cause Sam to remark, ‘This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords’, and some twenty years later it would yield a memorably tart Johnsonian putdown: when Dodsley’s brother James published Chesterfield’s letters, which were meant to teach valuable lessons about self-reliance and the art of social success, Sam commented that they could inspire only ‘the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master’.

More immediately, Sam grasped that he was under an obligation not to his neglectful patron, but to the project’s commercial backers and to the public, as well as to himself. Yet after seeing off Chesterfield, he wobbled. In the weeks preceding the Dictionary’s publication his letters referred to its appearance and possible reception with a mixture of coolness and pride. They included snippets of Latin that, while coming naturally to someone of Sam’s erudition, still look revealingly pedantic. I’m reminded here of how I felt when waiting for the publication of my first book, which was in fact about the Dictionary. Waiting is a skill – one that I was then very far from having mastered (and something that in the thirteen years since I’ve in truth become only a little better at). Several emails from that time betray my fluttery state of mind and my need to make light of it. In one of them I refer to my book as a ‘tome’. I suppose I was trying to mask my anxiety with a bit of jokey formality, but the email’s recipient put me straight: ‘Your use of the word “tome” can fuck right off.’ Reviewing Sam’s phrasing, I think I can hear the same effortful note. When he writes that the Dictionary is ‘Vasta mole superbus’ (‘Proud in its great bulk’) and that ‘My Book is now coming in luminis oras’ (‘into the realms of light’), one detects something other than ironclad confidence. In reaching for a grandiose phrase, he is caught between mocking authorial pomposity and subscribing to it.

Sam found, as countless others have, that the moment when he was expected to feel pride instead proved disappointing. A sense of anticlimax attends the completion of any large project, and this seems especially true of books. Some authors, adept at self-promotion, can pretend that the work they have just completed and now set before the public is the most important thing in their lives. Most are unconvincing. Reaching the shore, Sam could look back on the way in which he’d first approached the journey: ‘I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature.’ These, he now knows, ‘were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer’. He sounds like the PhD student of cliché, who imagines that before embarking on their thesis they can devour acres of books, write a novel and learn a couple of languages, but discovers that the reality of scholarship is a little less sexy.

The preface to the Dictionary is eloquent and poignant. ‘I have protracted my work,’ Sam writes, ‘till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.’ Here we have the classic psychology of the envoi. Anyone who has toiled on a vast project will know that, no matter how much pleasure and relief they derive from its completion, self-doubt and despair accompany closure. For many people these will be dwarfish presences, easily brushed aside. But there is nothing strange about looking upon an achievement and thinking ‘Was it worth it?’, ‘Is it good enough?’, ‘Couldn’t I have got it done sooner?’ and ‘Will others care about this as much as I do?’ There is nothing strange, either, in sending one’s work out into the world frigidly rather than fervently – ‘Do I still care about this . . . as much as I did, or should?’ And of all the questions that shadow the end of a big task, none is more blue than the simple ‘What next?’

For Sam, the answer was especially glum: he fell sick, wheezing his way through an eight-week bout of bronchitis. He was experiencing what we now call ‘the let-down effect’, the physical low that we plunge into not during a period of strain, but once it has ended. On his sickbed he learned of a rumour that he had died. He would live for another twenty-nine years, but would be plagued increasingly by rheumatism, gout and dropsy. Persistent difficulties with breathing were matched by a fear of being crushed, and his Dictionary definition of nightmare – ‘morbid oppression during sleep, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast’ – is one of many images he conjures that relate psychological stress and the experience of physical stress. As his ailments multiplied, he waged an ever more furious campaign against them, dosing himself with all manner of purgatives and diuretics. Insomnia made him feverish by night and lethargic by day. He was bled for problems as diverse as flatulence, a cough and an eye inflammation.

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