1755
With his Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, Samuel Johnson set the standard for English lexicography for more than a hundred years. It was the first popular and comprehensive study of the English language, and the first to use literary quotations to illustrate the meanings of words. His work provided the starting point for the extensive, complex and scholarly study of language.
The mid-18th century, at the height of the Age of Enlightenment, was a time of enthusiastic list-making, referencing, and collecting of knowledge. Between 1754 and 1762, the Scottish philosopher David Hume published his magisterial six-volume History of England (originally entitled The History of Great Britain); the first Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared between 1768 and 1771; and in France, the Encyclopédie, advertised as a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts, was published over 21 years, starting in 1751. Johnson’s Dictionary fed this cultural appetite too, and, at last, provided a reference point for the English language that had been sorely lacking: elsewhere in Europe, major language-dictionaries had appeared in the previous century.
The Dictionary, which appeared in two volumes in April 1755, was the culmination of nearly nine years’ commitment by Johnson and his small team of clerks. It contained a total of 42,773 entries, supported by nearly 115,000 quotations from writers such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden and Jonathan Swift. It also included an authoritative grammar and a history of English. While there had been other dictionaries before, there had never been anything to match Johnson’s learning and meticulousness. The entry for the verb ‘to take’, for instance, ran to 8000 words over 5 pages, with Johnson identifying 134 different meanings of the word.
Johnson himself was not quite joking when he described himself regretfully as ‘a poet doomed at last to make a lexicographer’, but the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) later said of him: ‘Had he left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect – a genuine man.’ His life (1709–84) is almost better known than his writing, thanks to the work of James Boswell, whose Life of Samuel Johnson gave him a kind of immortality. During a career spent turning out essays, pamphlets and parliamentary reports, Johnson tried many literary forms. He wrote two long poems in imitation of the Roman satirist Juvenal, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), produced the journal The Rambler (from 1750) and the columns published as The Idler (in the late 1750s), as well as a prose romance, Rasselas (1759), written in the evenings of a single week to provide money to pay for his mother’s funeral. His play, Irene, was performed briefly in London, to a muted reception, and he was also responsible for a series of biographies, The Lives of the Poets, written in his seventies, which were originally planned as a series of prefaces to editions of each poet’s works. A collected edition of Johnson’s essays was published in 1781.
The Dictionary, occupying the middle part of his life and career, was originally commissioned in 1746 by a group of London booksellers and printers, who paid Johnson a flat fee of 1500 guineas, or £1575 (around £150,000/$300,000 today) in regular instalments to write it – a task which he optimistically estimated would take him about three years.
In fact, he took nearly three times that long. Although he employed a team of six clerks – at his own expense – the research, writing, and selection of the quotations was done single-handedly. The French Academy, by contrast, had devoted a team of 40 scholars, over some 55 years, to the completion of its Dictionnaire (1694) – a contrast in which Johnson took great pride.
In the Preface to his Dictionary, Johnson admitted that his attitude to his task had changed as he worked on it. Initially, he planned to bring order to the English language and set a permanent standard for its written form; but he was persuaded that such an undertaking was impossible. Even so, he still thundered against the ‘folly, vanity, and affectation’ of linguistic change.
Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.
A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, PREFACE, 1755
Soon after he started work on the magnum opus, he approached the British statesman Lord Chesterfield for patronage. Chesterfield was less than encouraging, and did not offer any meaningful support until the work was nearly complete. At that point he hinted that he would appreciate it if the book were dedicated to him. Johnson’s reply was devastating: ‘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.’
The two volumes of Johnson’s Dictionary, A–K in one and L–Z in the other, weighed around 20 pounds together – so heavy that many purchasers decided to have them bound into four volumes instead. For all its bulk, the quantity of words may seem restricted to the eyes of a modern reader; but the total of 42,773 entries was vastly more than any word-book had included before. For one thing, Johnson deliberately excluded vulgar or profane words, and he famously chided a lady who congratulated him on having done so for clearly having searched for them.
Johnson took the work on his Dictionary extremely seriously, but he also included a few jokes among his definitions – this one, for instance, was at the expense of the five Scots among his six-strong team of clerical helpers: ‘Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ He was not, though, above an ironic dig at himself: ‘Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.’
In other places, his political prejudices got the better of him, as in his definitions of the two principle political parties of his time: ‘Tory: one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig; Whig: the name of a faction.’ Or in the following: ‘Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.’
But perhaps the most pointed definition, considering Johnson’s quarrel with Lord Chesterfield, is this one: ‘Patron: one who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.’
Perhaps the book’s greatest and enduring triumph was its unrivalled collection of around 114,000 quotations. Over 4500 came from the Bible, and many from the Book of Common Prayer – Johnson intended his Dictionary to have both a moral and religious tone – but there were others from over 500 different authors. He included several from his own work, and some, labelled ‘Anonymous’, which modern scholars believe he made up himself for the purpose.
Wide circulation of the Dictionary was inhibited by its price – at £4 10s (£4.50, or about £450/$900 today) it was beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest citizens. It was warmly received, though, in the London magazines, and its reputation continued to grow over succeeding decades. Second and third editions and an abridged version appeared quickly, and in 1762 Johnson was awarded a state pension of £300 a year by King George III.
For the fourth edition of 1773, Johnson carried out substantial revisions, and the Dictionary remained the most authoritative reference book about the English language until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884, which clearly dwarfed Johnson’s endeavour in its number of entries: over 410,000. In the United States, where Noah Webster produced his own independent Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, Johnson’s influence remained inescapable. Webster claimed to dismiss his predecessor’s book, but simply lifted many of his definitions and quotations from it.
Johnson’s original aim had been to provide a lasting guide to written and spoken English – but as he worked on the Dictionary, he came to see that languages could not remain static. What he achieved, however, was to provide an unprecedented description of the language of his day, and he set a standard for future lexicographers. Anyone who cares about language owes an immense debt to Samuel Johnson.