A dictionary and a cat
Hodge was »a very fine cat indeed«, said Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84) to his biographer James Boswell. In keeping with this praise, the monument on Gough Square shows not the great man of letters himself but the cat, sitting on its master’s dictionary next to a couple of oyster shells. Johnson personally bought the oysters, as his servants would have found it insulting to be sent to buy food for an animal, and Hodge would doubtless have been made to suffer.
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Address Gough Square 17, EC4A 3DE | Public Transport Blackfriars (Circle, District Line) | Hours Mon–Sat 11am–5pm, May–Sept until 5.30pm | Tip The house of the architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837) is an eccentric museum crammed full of art, furniture, ancient Egyptian treasures, personal mementoes – and two mummified cats (13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Tue–Sat 10am–5pm).
Johnson’s solid-looking house of red brick with large windows stands at the opposite end of the small square. Despite its sparse furnishings, the wood-panelled interior conveys a good impression of an 18th-century dwelling. Portraits of his friends, including one of Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, hang on the walls. Like other writers struggling to make ends meet, Johnson lived under the shadow of a possible visit by the bailiff or a spell in a debtors’ prison. This explains the spyhole next to the front door and the stout chain placed over an iron upright – its corkscrew form designed to prevent anyone from removing the chain by pushing a hook through the window. The metal bars in the fanlight were meant to stop children climbing in and opening up to burglars.
A brilliant conversationalist at the centre of a learned circle of friends, Johnson was also generous and humane. He paid for the education of his black servant, who was his principal heir, and accommodated a strange group of misfits and losers, from whose pleas and quarrels he escaped to the study at the top of the house. Here he completed single-handedly what was to be the standard dictionary of the English language for 100 years. A team of six clerks who worked standing at a long desk merely helped to copy out the definitions and quotes in a clear hand. The work contains 42,773 words, their meanings explained with the help of 114,000 quotes from a myriad of authors. The most famous entry reads »Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge«.
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