In an extract from his introduction to our new anthology of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, David Crystal discusses the life and achievements of ‘Dictionary Johnson’
Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on the 18th of September,
N. S. 1709 [New style according to the Gregorian Calendar]; and his initiation into the Christian church was not delayed; for his baptism is recorded, in the register of St. Mary’s parish in that city, to have been performed on the day of his birth . . .
Thus James Boswell opens his account of the life of Johnson, one of the most dominant literary figures of the eighteenth century. The son of a provincial bookseller and stationer, he was one of two children: there was a younger brother Nathanael, who died at the age of twenty-five. A physical condition early affected him, as Boswell goes on to report:
Young Johnson had the misfortune to be much addicted with the scrophula, or
king’s evil, which disfigured a countenance naturally well formed, and hurt his
visual nerves so much, that he did not see at all with one of his eyes, though its
appearance was little different from that of the other. There is amongst his prayers
one inscribed ‘‘When my eye was restored to its use,’’ which ascertains a defect
that many of his friends knew he had, though I never perceived it.
He attended school in Lichfield until he was fifteen, spent a year at a school in Stourbridge, then stayed at home for two years. Boswell, in his opening chapter, takes up the story:
The two years which he spent at home, after his return from Stourbridge, he
passed in what he thought idleness, and was scolded by his father for his want of
steady application. He had no settled plan of life, nor looked forward at all, but
merely lived from day to day. Yet he read a great deal in a desultory manner,
without any scheme of study; as chance threw books in his way, and inclination
directed him through them.
There is an illustration:
He used to mention one curious instance of his casual reading, when but a boy.
Having imagined that his brother had hid some apples behind a large folio upon
an upper shelf in his father’s shop, he climbed up to search for them. There were
no apples; but the large folio proved to be Petrarch, whom he had seen mentioned,
in some preface, as one of the restorers of learning. His curiosity having been
thus excited, he sat down with avidity, and read a great part of the book.
This was evidently not the only occasion:
What he read during these two years, he told me, was not works of mere
amusement, ‘‘not voyages and travels, but all literature, Sir, all ancient writers, all
manly: though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod: but in this
irregular manner (added he) I had looked into a great many books, which were
not commonly known at the Universities, where they seldom read any books but
what are put into their hands by their tutors; so that when I came to Oxford, Dr.
Adams, now master of Pembroke College, told me, I was the best qualified for the
University that he had ever known come there.’’
Dr Percy, the Bishop of Dromore, told Boswell another story:
[W]hen a boy he was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he
retained his fondness for them through life; so that (adds his lordship) spending
part of a summer at my parsonage-house in the country, he chose for his regular
reading the old Spanish romance of FELIXMARTE OF HIRCANIA, in folio, which he read quite through. Yet I have heard him attribute to these extravagant
fictions that unsettled turn of mind which prevented his ever fixing in any
profession.
There are several anecdotes concerning his prodigious memory: He was uncommonly inquisitive; and his memory was so tenacious, that he never
forgot any thing that he either heard or read. Mr. Hector remembers having
recited to him eighteen verses, which, after a little pause, he repeated verbatim,
varying only one epithet, by which he improved the line.
Johnson went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, when he was nineteen, in October 1728, but was unable to complete his degree. Although his father had earlier been successful in his business, he lost most of his wealth after a failed venture in the manufacture of parchment, and was no longer able to support his son. Johnson was forced to leave Oxford in 1731, and the next year obtained employment as usher in the school at Market Bosworth, in Leicestershire. However, according to Boswell, he found the repetitive daily routine of the school ‘painful drudgery’, and left after a few months. He then spent some time with Thomas Warren, the first bookseller to be established in Birmingham. Warren found the young man a great help, both for his knowledge of literature and for his writing ability, and Johnson was able to contribute items to Warren’s newspaper.
Johnson returned home in 1734. He married a much older woman – a widow, Elisabeth Porter – then set up a private academy at Edial, near Lichfield, where one of his pupils was David Garrick, later a Shakespearian actor. But within two years he had decided to move to London. There he began to write for the Gentleman’s Magazine, and regular contributions to it became his main source of income. He also worked on the book catalogue for the Earl of Oxford’s Harleian Library. Copyright problems prevented
him from proceeding with an edition of Shakespeare, so he turned instead to lexicography. He was already familiar with dictionary-writing, having helped his friend Robert James compile his Medicinal Dictionary (1743-5). He also knew the work of Denis Diderot and the French encyclopedists, who were compiling their Encyclopédie at the time.
He produced a ‘Short Scheme for compiling a new Dictionary of the English Language’ on 30 April 1746, and on 18 June signed a contract with a consortium of booksellers. Work began immediately: the first of his amanuenses, Francis Stewart, was paid an advance of three guineas, and began work on midsummer day. An elaborated plan of the dictionary appeared the following year. Johnson approached Lord Chesterfield, secretary of state, as a patron, but received little support from him, so when Chesterfield sent two eulogistic but condescending papers to the World at the end of 1754, a few months before the Dictionary’s publication, Johnson responded with a letter which has become renowned for its scornful rejection of their content.
The work had occupied seven years, with little financial support other than the booksellers’ advance. It took Johnson some three years to read his source works and mark the citations to be used. He underlined the word to be illustrated and wrote its initial letter as a capital in the margin. The beginning and end of the extract were identified using vertical strokes. These were then copied by his amanuenses on to slips of paper and filed alphabetically. Only after all slips were collated did he begin to draft definitions. Definitions and quotations were then pasted on to large sheets of paper, and these were sent for printing.
The first seventy sheets (A to Carry) were printed by the end of 1750, and further sections were slowly printed over the next three years. He was perhaps surprised by the amount of space the entries took: letter A comprises 137 folio pages (40 x 25 cm), and by the end of letter C the book had reached 477 pages – 43 per cent of the first volume. At that rate the whole dictionary would have made three or four folio volumes. Later letters show greater economy in coverage and treatment. Even so, the two volumes together comprise 2,261 pages, exclusive of the 51 pages of preliminary matter (the Preface, an outline History of the English Language and an outline Grammar).
The work was complete by 1754, and an edition of 2,000 copies appeared on 15 April 1755, priced £4. 10s. A few weeks later there was a second edition, published in 165 weekly sections at sixpence each. A third edition of 1,024 copies was published in 1765, to coincide with Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare. And in 1771 he began a major revision of the work, which was published as the fourth edition in 1773. Other editions followed after his death. The work dominated British lexicography for over a century, continuing to be reprinted until the 1880s. It only began to lose its authority with the arrival of the ‘new’ English dictionary, edited by James Murray, the first part published in 1884, and the forerunner of the present-day Oxford English Dictionary.
Although the Dictionary took up an enormous amount of time and energy, Johnson nonetheless managed to continue with his literary work. Indeed, creative writing proved a welcome relief. In 1750, as Boswell put it, ‘he came forth in the character for which he was eminently qualified, a majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom’, introducing a periodical which he named The Rambler. He published it without interruption every Tuesday and Saturday for two years, until it closed, on Saturday 17 March 1752. It was the day which also saw the death of his wife.
After the Dictionary was published, Johnson continued as a literary journalist, and received financial security from a pension granted by George III. He met his biographer, James Boswell, in 1763, and in 1764 founded the Literary Club, where many of his famous conversations took place. Later major works include the eight-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays and a ten-volume Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets.
In June 1783 he suffered a stroke, which temporarily robbed him of his speech but left him able to write. A letter he wrote to Harriet Thrale three days later (19 June) reports the event, incidentally including a typically Johnsonian procedure:
On Monday, the 16th, I sat for my picture, and walked a considerable way with
little inconvenience. In the afternoon and evening I felt myself light and easy, and
began to plan schemes of life. Thus I went to bed, and in a short time waked and
sat up, as has long been my custom, when I felt a confusion and indistinctness in
my head, which lasted, I suppose, about half a minute. I was alarmed, and prayed
GOD, that however he might afflict my body, he would spare my understanding.
This prayer, that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in Latin verse.
The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good: I made them
easily, and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties.
He died on 13 December 1784, and was buried a week later in Westminster Abbey. He had received a master of arts degree from Oxford in 1754, and was granted an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin in 1765, and another doctorate by Oxford in 1775. Thus he received the title by which he has come to be most widely known: Dr Johnson. But perhaps, for the present book, it is more fitting to refer to him by the other name which he received at the time: Dictionary Johnson.
