You Could Look It Up (26 page)

The answer came not from an academy, but from a group of publishers who set a lone scholar to work on the task. We do not know why a consortium of booksellers approached Samuel Johnson in 1746 with the idea of his writing a dictionary. He was an unlikely choice. Johnson came from the provinces, in Lichfield, not from London. He was prodigiously learned, but no academic—he spent just over a year at Oxford before a shortage of funds forced him to withdraw without even an undergraduate degree. He became a schoolmaster for a brief while, but no one could call him a success.

In 1737 he left the provinces to find fame in London as a scholar and playwright. He hoped his verse tragedy,
Irene
, though not quite ready, would be a hit when it appeared, and he planned to publish editions of neo-Latin poets. But the market for verse tragedy and neo-Latin poets was only slightly better in 1737 than it is today, and his dreams came to nothing. Miscellaneous journalism, with skimpy payments by the printed sheet, was all that was open to him. Johnson stuck at it for years, and he built a reputation as a decent scholar, but only among a knowing few. To top it off, he was a gawky bundle of nervous tics who twitched and spat as he talked (most likely he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome).

And yet, if the choice of Johnson was unlikely, it was also inspired. His memory was prodigious, and few could match his reading. He promised to deliver a complete dictionary to rival the French
Dictionnaire
in just three years. Disbelievers scoffed: forty scholars had needed forty years to produce the
Dictionnaire
. Johnson was ready with a gloriously brassy riposte: “This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.”
14

He did, in fact, miss his deadline. From contract to publication took not three years but nine—still an impressive proportion next to
the sixteen hundred man-years the French had taken. Johnson lived at that time on Gough Square in London (the only one of his London houses that still stands), and he worked nearly alone in his attic. He read through hundreds of books for his source material; when he saw a passage that illustrated a word, he underscored the appropriate word, wrote its initial letter in the margin, and drew vertical lines at the beginning and end of the relevant passage. A half dozen amanuenses took the books he marked and copied passages out by hand onto slips of paper, but he otherwise worked solo. These slips would become the raw material for his
Dictionary
, both the source of his quotations and the material that guided his definitions.

When the
Dictionary
finally appeared, several features made it a milestone. One has to do with the meanings. Although numbered senses had been used inconsistently in a few prior English dictionaries, Johnson took them further than anyone had before, and he was a master of distinguishing subtle shades of meaning:

He provided etymologies for every word, something the
Vocabolario
and
Dictionnaire
neglected, though he got many wrong, and sometimes confessed ignorance:
tatterdemalion
is from “
tatter
and
I know not what
.” At least as important, he backed up these definitions with quotations—somewhere in the neighborhood of 115,000 of them, drawn from English literature between the 1580s and his own time, with particular attention to Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, John Locke, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and the King James Bible. Quotations like these could be found in classical lexicons and the Italian
Vocabolario
, but no English dictionary maker had ever used them half as systematically as Johnson.

This may be the most significant difference between Johnson and
les Immortels
. The French
Dictionnaire
provided examples of words in use, but they were all made up by the Academicians: they knew what the
best usage was, even when it differed from what real writers had used. For Johnson, by contrast, the canon of great authors was his starting point, and this corpus-based approach was central to his conception of what makes a word a word: real words had to be found in actual literature. On the very few occasions when he included a word he had not found “in the wild,” as it were, he did it with reservation, clearly indicating that these words were provisional candidates by citing as an authority just “Dict.,” for “Dictionary”:

Many words yet stand supported only by …
Dict.
… of these I am not always certain that they are seen in any book but the works of lexicographers. Of such I have omitted many, because I had never read them; and many I have inserted, because they may perhaps exist, though they have escaped my notice: they are, however, to be yet considered as resting only upon the credit of former dictionaries.
15

The story of the composition of Johnson’s
Dictionary
is one of progressive disillusionment. The initial proposal was revised into publishable form and became
The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language
, issued in 1747. There Johnson expressed his intention to clean up the language—the same sort of thing would-be academicians had been calling for since the 1660s, and the sort of thing the Académie Française had done in the 1690s. He even viewed his task in quasimilitary terms. “When I survey the Plan,” he wrote,

I am frighted at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Cæsar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.

The metaphors are suggestive. Johnson saw himself as a Roman legionnaire preparing to invade an unruly Britain and impose imperial order and regularity on it—to take the Germanic barbarians and civilize them
with Latinate elegance and propriety. The language was a rebellious population: he would “civilize part of the inhabitants” and encourage someone else to “reduce them wholly to subjection.” This is strange language coming from Johnson, who later in life became one of his age’s most vocal opponents of colonial expansion.

Before long, though, he realized his intentions were misplaced. No one can hope to “civilize” a living language; it is pure foolishness to impose rules on it. He wrote of the way the academicians wanted to stop the language from changing: “With this hope … academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders.” His opinion of their success is telling: “their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride.”
16

This became much clearer as the
Dictionary
was approaching completion. Johnson had asked Philip Dormer Stanhope, the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, to serve as his patron, but the distinguished nobleman brushed him off. Once the book was ready to appear, though, rumor said it was going to be a blockbuster, and Chesterfield decided he wanted credit for supporting it. He therefore published a review before the fact, right before the
Dictionary
came out, insisting that “The time for discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary.” He attributed this sad state of affairs specifically to the lack of an authoritative dictionary: “I had long lamented that we had no lawful standard of our language set up, for those to repair to, who might chuse to speak and write it grammatically and correctly.” Johnson had provided the solution, and Chesterfield demanded that the world acknowledge his authority. “I will not only obey him,” Chesterfield vowed, “like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair.”
17
But Johnson, who might once have been flattered at the thought of being an emperor, almost certainly found the metaphor from the papacy too much to handle. He saw through Chesterfield’s ploy and wrote one of the nastiest letters in the English language, telling his lordship that his assistance was not wanted. Part of the vitriol came
from the shoddy treatment Johnson felt he had received: Chesterfield had refused to be bothered when Johnson needed the help. But part of it also came from Johnson’s recent thinking about the state of the language. Only a fool would, he concluded, “imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay,” and yet “With this hope … academies have been instituted.” Johnson realized that no academy can change the fact of language evolution, and even if it could, it should not. Language, he realized, develops on its own, and a lexicographer must “not form, but register the language.”
18

The
Dictionary
appeared in two folio volumes on April 15, 1755, not merely the largest English dictionary yet published, but as long as the first seven monolingual English dictionaries put together. Early reviews were strong, and the actor David Garrick wrote a poem celebrating his friend’s superiority to the French academicians and their dictionary, turning the
Dictionary
’s publication into an event of national moment:

Talk of war with a Briton, he’ll boldly advance,

That one English soldier will beat ten of France;

Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen,

Our odds are still greater, still greater our men …

First Shakespeare and Milton, like Gods in the fight,

Have put their whole drama and epic to flight;

In satires, epistles, and odes, would they cope,

Their numbers retreat before Dryden and Pope;

And Johnson, well-arm’d like a hero of yore,

Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more.

Sales of the expensive volumes were slow at first, but low-cost abridged editions put Johnson’s work within the reach of middle-class readers. Over the next few decades, the essential shelf of books in nearly every British home grew. At one time, every reader could have been expected to own at the very least a Bible, a
Book of Common Prayer
, and
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. In the eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s works were added to the list. And by century’s end, a dictionary—Johnson’s
Dictionary
—became a fixture in every literate household.