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For the century before
Johnson's Dictionary was published in 1775. there had been concern about
the state of the English language.There was no standard way of speaking or
writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the
chaos' of English spelling. Dr Johnson provided the solution.
There had, of course, been
dictionaries in the past, the first of these being a little book of some
120 pages, compiled by a certain Robert Cawdray, published in 1604 under
the title A Table Alphabetical! ‘of hard usual English wordes'. Like the
various dictionaries that came after it during the seventeenth century,
Cawdray's tended to concentrate on 'scholarly' words; one function of the
dictionary was to enable its student to convey an impression of fine
learning.
Beyond the practical need to
make order out of chaos, the rise of dictionaries is associated with the
rise of the English middle class, who were anxious to define and
circumscribe the various worlds to conquer - lexical as well as social and
commercial. It is highly appropriate that Dr Samuel Johnson, the very model
of an eighteenth-century literary man, as famous in his own time as in
ours, should have published his dictionary at the very beginning of the
heyday of the middle class.
Johnson was a poet and critic
who raised common sense to the heights of genius. His approach to the
problems that had worried writers throughout the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries was intensely practical. Up until his time, the task
of producing a dictionary on such a large scale had seemed impossible
without the establishment of an academy to make decisions about right and
wrong usage Johnson decided he did not need an academy to settle arguments
about language; he would write a dictionary himself; and he would do it
single-handed. Johnson signed the contract for the Dictionary with the
bookseller Robert Dosley at a breakfast held at the Golden Anchor Inn near
Holbom Bar on 18 June 1764. He was to be paid £ 1.575 in instalments, and
from this he took money to rent 17 Gough Square, in which he set up his
'dictionary workshop'.
James Boswell, his biographer
described the garret where Johnson worked as ‘fitted up like a counting
house' with a long desk running down the middle at which the copying clerks
would work standing up. Johnson himself was stationed on a rickety chair at
an 'old crazy deal table' surrounded by a chaos of borrowed books. He was
also helped by six assistants, two of whom died whilst the Dictionary was
still in preparation.
The work was immense; filling
about eighty large notebooks (and without a library to hand). Johnson wrote
the definitions of over 40,000 words, and illustrated their many meanings
with some I 14.000 quotations drawn from English writing on every subject,
from the Elizabethans to his own time. He did not expect to achieve
complete originality. Working to a deadline, he had to draw on the best of
all previous dictionaries, and to make his work one of heroic synthesis. In
fact it was very much more. Unlike his predecessors.Johnson treated English
very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of
meaning. He adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law
- according to precedent. After its publication, his Dictionary was not
seriously rivalled for over a century.
After many vicissitudes the
Dictionary was finally published on 15 April 1775. It was instantly
recognised as a landmark throughout Europe. This very noble work.’ wrote
the leading Italian lexicographer;‘will be a perpetual monument of Fame to
the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general
Benefit to the republic of Letters throughout Europe.' The fact that
Johnson had taken on the Academies of Europe and matched them (everyone
knew that forty French academics had taken forty years to produce the first
French national dictionary) was cause for much English celebration.
Johnson had worked for nine
years.‘with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of
the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter
of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness
and in sorrow'. For all its faults and eccentricities his two-volume work
is a masterpiece and a landmark, in his own words, 'setting the orthography,
displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the
significations of English words’. It is the corner-stone of Standard
English, an achievement which, in James Boswell’s words,‘conferred
stability on the language of his country'.
The Dictionary, together with
his other writing, made Johnson famous and so well esteemed that his
friends were able to prevail upon King George III to offer him a pension.
From then on, he was to become the Johnson of folklore.
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