DR JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World
by Henry HitchingsJ Murray £14.99 pp288SAMUEL JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language
edited by Jack Lynch
Atlantic £19.99 pp654
Samuel Johnson is the only famous writer who is better known for what he said than for what he wrote. Essays, poems, biographies, drama and fiction flowed from his pen, and they are all forgotten. Most people would be hard put to it to name even their titles. On the other hand, we all know who said that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, or that when a man knows he is going to be hanged it concentrates his mind wonderfully, or that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. Like most other Johnsonisms, these were published by Boswell after Johnson's death, and we can never be sure how far Boswell's Johnson was Boswell's invention.
Henry Hitchings's ingenious and fascinating book shifts the focus back to the indisputably real Johnson by combing through the 42,773 entries in his Dictionary for evidence of his beliefs, prejudices, hang-ups, cultural context and occasional ignorance. Jack Lynch's beautifully produced volume of selections from the Dictionary, including its moving preface, perfectly complements Hitchings, and both celebrate the 250th anniversary of Johnson's mighty achievement. The Dictionary was published on April 15, 1755, and had taken eight years to compile. Johnson worked almost single-handedly, employing only half a dozen raggle-taggle copyists chosen, with typical kindness, because they were poor and starving. By contrast the French Dictionnaire had, as Johnson enjoyed noting, taken 40 scholars 55 years. His was not the first English dictionary, but it instantly eclipsed its rivals and held the fort for a century and a half. It was Johnson's dictionary that Robert Browning read through in order to "qualify" as a poet, and that Becky Sharp, in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, flung into Miss Pinkerton's garden (actually it must have been one of the many abridgments, because even Becky could not have launched Johnson's two-volume, 20lb monster into the air).
To illustrate the meanings of words, Johnson supplied 114,000 quotations from books covering every branch of learning and going back to the 16th century. Nothing remotely comparable had been done before, and it made his dictionary into a superior prototype of the internet — a bulging lucky-dip of wisdom, anecdote, humour, legend and fact. Nobody but Johnson could have done it, because nobody had read so much. A bookseller's son, he had been ravenously turning pages since childhood. Sickly, half-blind and racked by strange tics and spasms that attracted ridicule, he read to escape the pain of life. He "tore the heart out of books", it was said, often returning them to their owners badly mauled. To compile the dictionary, he waded through acres of print, marking passages that clarified a word's meaning, then handing them to his little band of paupers who copied them out onto thousands of slips.
Thanks to these labours, his dictionary was the first to record not some lexicographer's ideal of what words ought to mean, but how they had actually been used. He seems, when he started out, to have entertained hopes that his dictionary would "fix" the English language and banish errors. But he quickly came to realise that languages live by changing, and he was the first to formulate the modern concept of lexicography as an endlessly evolving record of usage. For someone of Johnson's politics this must have been a difficult adjustment. A diehard Tory monarchist, he disliked change and hated busybody reformers. The devil, he told Boswell, was the first Whig. But throwing out dictatorial ideas of lexicography fitted in with his British love of freedom. Other countries, he observed, had set up academies to regulate usage, but "to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride".
Slavery repelled him. He took a freed slave, Francis Barber, into his house, and bequeathed him the bulk of his estate. His opinion of Americans ("I am willing to love all mankind," he confessed, "except an American") stemmed partly from the colonists' doublethink about freedom and slavery: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
Like his recognition of "general agreement" as the shaping force behind language, his inclusion of "low" words in the dictionary was a democratic gesture. Hitchings thinks his copyists may have done their bit by introducing their employer to the cant of crooks and cardsharps. "Giglet: A wanton", "Fopdoodle: A fool", "Dandiprat: An urchin", "Jobbernowl: A blockhead", and many more, flaunt their garish charms in Lynch's selection. Hitchings shows, too, how Johnson's definitions display aspects of his personality — the poet ("Puppet: A wooden tragedian"); the scientist, ("Network: Anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections"); the religious melancholic ("Obsession: The first attack of Satan, antecedent to possession"); the moralist ("Suicide: The horrid crime of destroying oneself"); the intellectual ("Stockjobber: A low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares").
His limitations are also exposed. "Sonata" is defined merely as "A tune", reflecting his indifference to music. He once remarked, at a performance by a celebrated violinist, "Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible." He was not good at predicting which words would survive. "To dumbfound", "ignoramus", "shabby" and "simpleton" struck him as substandard and probably ephemeral, whereas he commended "ultimity" (meaning "the last stage") and "to warray" (to make war) as useful additions to the language. National self-respect obliged him to draw the line at French words, so "bourgeois" and "champagne" are omitted, although current at the time.
Popular accounts of Johnson turn him into a lovable eccentric, which is a way of avoiding his brainpower. Hitchings will have none of this. He keeps drawing attention to the unremitting intelligence that Johnson's lexicographical labours demanded, not least in separating out the ramifying senses of common words. The dictionary's entry for the verb "take" distinguishes 133 meanings and has 363 illustrative quotations. Johnson's psychological observations reflect similar acuteness. True, he had his soft side, as his fondness for his cat Hodge testifies. But he would not have seen that as a weakness. Want of tenderness, he told Boswell, was a sure sign of stupidity. His insight into people, including himself, was sharp and hard, and schooled by poverty. He had to leave Oxford after a year because funds ran out, and when, later in life, he heard he had a reputation for being "frolicsome" there, he curtly demurred: "I was rude and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic."
He knew that poverty poisons the closest relationships. "Poor people's children never respect them," he told Boswell, adducing, as evidence, his disrespect for his own mother. Both remarks are worth pondering today. Our tendency to criticise the poor for their unhealthy lifestyles and dysfunctional families would elicit sharp retorts from Johnson. His morality is a corrective to our destructively unequal society, and it matters, in the end, far more than any dictionary. Hitchings's book, among its other excellences, never loses sight of that.
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