Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary - Hardcover

Hitchings, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374113025 ISBN 13: 9780374113025

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

By the early eighteenth century, France and Italy had impressive lexicons, but there was no authoritative dictionary of English. Sensing the deficit, and impelled by a mixture of national pride and commercial expedience, the prodigious polymath Samuel Johnson embraced the task, turning over the garret of his London home to the creation of his own giant dictionary.

Johnson imagined that he could complete the job in three years. But the complexity of English meant that his estimate was wildly inadequate. Only after he had expended nearly a decade of his prime on the task did the dictionary finally appear - magisterial yet quirky, dogmatic but generous of spirit, and steeped in the richness of English literature. It would come to be seen as the most important British cultural monument of the eighteenth century, and its influence fanned out across Europe and throughout Britain's colonies - including, crucially, America.

Brilliantly entertaining and enlightening, Defining the World is the story of Johnson's heroic endeavor, 250 years after the first publication of the Dictionary. In alphabetically sequenced chapters, Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's adventure - his ambition and vision, his moments of despair, the mistakes he made along the way, and his ultimate triumph.

About this title

About the Author

Henry Hitchings received his Ph.D from University College, London. He has written for numerous newspapers and periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, the New Statesman and the Financial Times. Defining the World is his first book. He lives in London.

Reviews

What Simon Winchester did for the Oxford English Dictionary in The Meaning of Everything (**** Nov/Dec 2003), Hitchings does for its predecessor, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Hitchings’s delightful book is infused with details about the history of lexicography and the English language, and he places the dictionary in the context of Johnson’s difficult life and the fame that followed. Cleverly written (though Hitchings misses a few definitions here and there), Defining the World is organized much like a dictionary, with each chapter dubbed with a word from Johnson’s tome, including the definition. Hitchings documents Johnson’s arduous labor and the impact that the book continues to have on English language and literature.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

James Boswell's biography has preserved for the ages the reputation of Samuel Johnson, but the dictionary for which Johnson was known in his own time receives little attention therein, because Boswell did not meet Johnson until 1763, eight years after the dictionary's publication. Hitchings' sprightly book about the dictionary gives a full picture of Johnson during a difficult decade of melancholy toil. More than twenty English dictionaries preceded Johnson's, but his surpassed them all, and was itself supplanted only in 1928, by the first Oxford English Dictionary-which used nearly two thousand of Johnson's definitions. In alphabetically ordered chapters given Johnson's own headwords, from "Adventurous" to "Zootomy," Hitchings details the magnitude of Johnson's labors and the achievements of the dictionary, from Johnson's "scrupulous care over shades of meaning"-defining "world," for example, in sixteen different senses-to the inclusion of a hundred thousand illustrative quotations, culled from his voracious reading.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

The English language, like any other, is intrinsically mutable, subject to constant growth and change, some for better, some for worse, but all of it inescapable. Still, in this ever-shifting linguistic universe there are constants. Meanings and usages may evolve and alter, but their root definitions and their proper spellings are known quantities. How are they known? They are known because we can look them up in dictionaries, which provide the reliable foundation to which we can always return for information about how words are used, how they should be used, how they are spelled.

We take this for granted. Except on those rare occasions when new editions of existing dictionaries are issued -- the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster's, their many imitators and spin-offs -- we almost never think about dictionaries, never wonder how they are put together or who is responsible for them. The answer, of course, is that they are assembled and edited by very large committees, by lexicographers who labor in anonymity, credited in the finished product in long lists of contributors but otherwise unknown.

It is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise, given the immense size of the language, yet the first important dictionary of the English language was essentially the work of one man. Published in 1755, the Dictionary of the English Language contained some 42,000 entries, with definitions, etymologies and illustrative quotations, all of it the work of Samuel Johnson. Yes, he had, as Henry Hitchings writes in Defining the World, "six amanuenses, who attended to some of [the] more menial and mechanical aspects," but the dictionary itself was Johnson's. The labor occupied fully a decade -- Johnson at first thought he could finish it off in three years -- and took over his life. After its completion he, and the language, were never again the same.

The dictionary was published in the middle of the most extraordinary century English literature has known -- the time of the Enlightenment, of Henry Fielding and Alexander Pope and Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift and Samuel Richardson -- and may well have been its most majestic and enduring achievement. As Hitchings writes:

"The authority of Johnson's work has coloured every dictionary of English that has since been compiled. In the second half of the eighteenth century, and for most of the nineteenth, it enjoyed totemic status in both Britain and America. When British speakers of English refer today to 'the dictionary,' they imply the Oxford English Dictionary, while Americans incline towards Webster's. But for 150 years 'the dictionary' meant Johnson's Dictionary. To quote Robert Burchfield, the editor of the supplement to the OED: 'In the whole tradition of English language and literature the only dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank is that of Dr. Johnson.' Unlike other dictionaries, Johnson's is a work of literature."

That is no exaggeration. Not merely did Johnson draw upon an incredible variety of sources to locate and define words -- "He selected illustrations from poetry, drama and novels, from the Bible and the literature of divinity, from lawyers and antiquarians, from historians and politicians, from philosophy and physics, from educational primers and medical works" -- but he also wrote some of the most muscular, original prose the English language has known. Again to quote Hitchings: "Johnson's finest definitions remind us that he was a poet. They are succinct, accurate and elegant. He is especially skilled in explaining some of those abstract or intangible things that seem least amenable to definition. 'Conscience' is 'the knowledge or faculty by which we judge of the goodness or wickedness of ourselves.' A 'trance' is 'a temporary absence of the soul.' An 'imp' is a 'puny devil.' A 'rant' consists of 'high-sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought.' Anything described as 'tawdry' is 'meanly showy; splendid without cost; fine without grace; showy without elegance.' An 'expletive' is 'something used only to take up room; something of which the use is only to prevent a vacancy.' " Johnson could be witty and sly: "An 'uxorious' man is 'infected with connubial dotage.' A 'coquette' is 'a girl who endeavours to attract notice'; a 'cynic' is 'a philosopher of the snarling or currish sort.' " He could be deft: "Johnson neatly defines 'to strut' as 'to walk with affected dignity' . . . . A 'hope' is, among other things, 'an expectation indulged with pleasure.' " He could be vivid and playful: "A 'bedpresser' is 'a heavy lazy fellow'. . . . A 'giglet' is 'a lascivious girl'; an 'abbey-lubber' is someone who loiters in religious places 'under pretense of retirement and austerity,' and 'prickhouse' is 'a word of contempt for a tailor.' A 'fopdoodle' is 'a fool; an insignificant wretch.' "

Et cetera. Much in Johnson's dictionary is now obscure or outdated, but the dictionary can still be read with delight; when, about four decades ago, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection was published, reviewers and readers welcomed it as evidence that over more than two centuries Johnson's prose and wit had lost none of their power to inform and entertain. Though he is now known chiefly as the speaker of delicious and timeless aphorisms faithfully recorded by James Boswell in his monumental The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), he was chiefly a writer of the first rank: poet, dramatist, essayist, biographer and just about everything else. In 1746, though, when he contracted to compile his dictionary, he was comparatively unknown, a resident of a place called "grubstreet," subsequently defined by him as "originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet." He was married, not especially happily, to a woman much his senior and lived a hand-to-mouth existence that seemed likely to stretch into eternity. Then Robert Dodsley, a formidable bookseller, persuaded him to undertake the dictionary and set him on the path to the éclat he enjoys today.

Johnson seems to have approached the task somewhat lightheartedly, but that didn't last long. He soon realized that "compiling the Dictionary would be not just intellectually exacting but a physical labour, too . . . there would be large books to be lugged; a multitude of quotations would require painstaking transcription; quires of paper would have to be cut up into copy slips." Much of that labor was done by his assistants, but Johnson himself -- often in shaky health -- was at the center of it all, reading in prodigious amounts, recording words he encountered, placing everything in order, making sense of it all.

When finally published, the book was the proverbial doorstopper. "It was, in the first place, a large, cumbersome item, weighing around twenty pounds -- the same as a very big Christmas turkey." Eventually it would be bound in four volumes, but it was "still unwieldy." It "is the sort of book that has to be rested on a table or a lectern; it is not easy to lift a volume one-handed, and only a basketball player would be able to hold it up and open with a single hand." The initial press run was 2,000 copies ("Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge") and was "expensive to produce." It cost four pounds 10 shillings, a pittance now but a very large sum then, evidence that "for all Johnson's avowedly pedagogic aims, his market consisted at first of affluent, educated readers."

Despite its price, the dictionary was received enthusiastically and quickly began to work its way into the central place it has occupied ever after. It did have its critics -- some objected that Johnson's sources were primarily literary rather than popular, while others pointed out his frequent (and inevitable) errors -- but generally it was accepted as definitive, and Johnson was properly praised for the magnitude of his achievement. An abridged edition was published in 1756, making the dictionary cheaper and thus more widely available, and "the dictionary" took its place in the language.

My own copy of the Modern Selection vanished somewhere during 40 years of too many moves and disruptions, but the book is still in print, in a Dover paperback. I have ordered a copy, and so should you, for it makes a superb companion to Henry Hitchings's fine account of the dictionary's making and the man who made it. Also recommended is John Wain's Samuel Johnson: A Biography, the best one-volume life of the good doctor since Boswell's.

Quite simply, one can never get too much of Samuel Johnson.

Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

For the 250th anniversary of Dr. Samuel Johnson's most famous achievement, Hitchings's charming philology-as-biography shows Johnson to be no mere compiler of words but, as he himself put it, "a writer of dictionaries." Authoritative dictionaries for French and Italian were compiled by official academies, but English's first proper dictionary fell to a university dropout and failed provincial schoolmaster turned Grub Street hack—long before he became the Great Cham. The work began as a purely commercial venture at the suggestion of a bookseller-publisher, Johnson labored under less than ideal conditions, assisted only by a group of eclectic and eccentric amanuenses, and burdened by his wife's declining health and his own melancholia. In the end, his four-volume, 20-pound opus defined more than 42,773 common words and technical terms from all disciplines, supported with some 110,000 quotations drawn from English literature. Besides contemporary illustrations by the great Hogarth and Reynolds, Hitchings's book reproduces sample pages of Johnson's annotated reference material and the first edition of the dictionary. Though not as sensational as the bestselling account of another dictionary, The Professor and the Madam, British writer Hitchings's debut puts the scholarly labor in illuminating perspective along with its entirely human creator. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Americans may think of Noah Webster when they hear the word dictionary, but most other English speakers recall Samuel Johnson (1709-84), author of the most authoritative English lexicon before the Oxford English Dictionary nearly 200 years later. Indeed, as Hitchings informs us, Johnson's work remains authoritative in U.S. courts to this day, for the words of the Constitution most probably mean what Johnson said they did. That testimony to the longevity of Johnson's achievement comes late in a book whose chapters proceed in alphabetical rather than numerical order; that is, each is entitled with a word in Johnson's dictionary and uses one or more of his definitions of the word as an epigraph. Furthermore, each word is carefully chosen to indicate a theme in the chapter; for instance, the first chapter, "Adventurous," is about the monumentality and the ambition of Johnson's undertaking. As this procedure bespeaks, Hitchings yields little to Johnson himself, long considered one of the greatest English stylists, in verbal aptitude. The story he tells is multifaceted. It is a partial biography of Johnson, a history of English lexicography, a social history of the author's and the publisher's trades in eighteenth-century England, an account of the influence of Johnson's dictionary from its 1755 first edition on, and a critique of Johnson's method, style, and accuracy. Anyone who can get lost in a dictionary will devour this sparkling, heady brew of a book. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from Defining the World by Henry Hitchings. Copyright © 2005 by Henry Hitchings. Published in October 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

ADVENTUROUS

1. He that is inclined to adventures; and, consequently, bold, daring, courageous
2. Applied to things; that which is full of hazard; which requires courage; dangerous

On 15 april 1755 the first great dictionary of English was published. Samuel Johnson’s giant Dictionary of the English Language was an audacious attempt to tame his unruly native tongue. In more than 42,000 carefully constructed entries, Johnson had mapped the contours of the language, combining huge erudition with a steely wit and remarkable clarity of thought.
In doing so, Johnson had fashioned the most important British cultural monument of the eighteenth century. Its two folio volumes tell us more about the society of this period—lustily commercial, cultivated but energetic, politically volatile yet eager for consensus—than any other work. They document the copious vitality of English and its literature, and Johnson’s spirit—by turns humorous, ethical and perceptive—presides over every page.
The appearance of the Dictionary marked the end of a heroic ordeal. Johnson had begun work on it full of bluff confidence; he thought he would get the job done in less than three years. It was not long, however, before he began to buckle beneath the magnitude of the task. His labours were absorbing, yet painful; he would eventually characterize them as a mixture of ‘anxious diligence’ and ‘persevering activity’. When the trials of compilation overtook him, so too did the black despondency that blighted his adult life. Johnson had to wrestle not only with the complexities of the English language but also, as we shall see, with the pangs of personal tragedy.
Although a tirelessly productive author, Johnson considered himself disgracefully lazy—believing that only Presto, a dog belonging to his friend Hester Thrale, might truly be thought lazier. His diaries are full of self-recrimination: assurances that he will work harder, along with detailed schedules to ensure that he do so. His schemes of work suggest at once a schoolboy’s hunger for self-improvement and a schoolboy’s slender acquaintance with the realities of what can actually be achieved. Yet if Johnson’s self-flagellating self-encouragement is striking, so are his working habits—hardly those of a diligent professional. ‘Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel,’ he was wont to claim. His nights were as often spent in jovial company as in the prison house of learning.
It is surprising, given Johnson’s oscillation between sociability and melancholia, that the Dictionary ever got written at all. Surprising, too, that it is so good. Johnson’s ability to complete the job despite the distractions he faced affords us a crucial insight into his character: the methods he employed, the means he used to deal with his depressions and disappointments, suggest the very essence of his working mind, the special character of his achievement.
The Dictionary captures, and to some degree pre-empts, its age’s passion for organization. The ambitious ordering of the arts was reflected in a vast range of manuals, taxonomies and histories—of painting, of poetry, of music, and of the nation. At the same time the desire to ‘stage’ knowledge—for both entertainment and public benefit—was evident at festivals such as the Shakespeare Jubilee, and in assembly rooms, theatres, lecture halls or new institutions such as the British Museum and the Royal Academy. 1 Like the colossal Encyclopédie of the Frenchmen Diderot and d’Alembert, which distilled the essence of the Continental Enlightenment, the Dictionary was a machine de guerre. It would become an instrument of cultural imperialism, and its publication was a defining moment in the realization of what was in the eighteenth century a brand new concept, namely Britishness.
The authority of Johnson’s work has coloured every dictionary of English that has since been compiled. In the second half of the eighteenth century, and for most of the nineteenth, it enjoyed totemic status in both Britain and America. When British speakers of English refer today to ‘the dictionary’, they imply the Oxford English Dictionary, while Americans incline towards Webster’s. But for 150 years ‘the dictionary’ meant Johnson’s Dictionary. To quote Robert Burchfield, the editor of the supplement to the OED: ‘In the whole tradition of English language and literature the only dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank is that of Dr Johnson.’ 2 Unlike other dictionaries, Johnson’s is a work of literature.
Its influence has been especially profound among writers. As a young man Robert Browning read both its folio volumes in their entirety in order to ‘qualify’ himself for a career as an author. He was not the first to use them in this way. The eighteenth-century historian William Robertson read the Dictionary twice; while Henry Thomas Buckle, the reviled author of the once celebrated History of Civilization in England, worked through it diligently in order to enlarge his vocabulary; and Thomas Jefferson treated it as an anthology of quotations. In the 1930s, Samuel Beckett could add his name to the roll of revisionary users, gleaning from its pages a crop of strange terms—‘increpation’, ‘inosculation’, ‘to snite’. 3
Johnson’s was the dictionary in the eyes of authors as various as Keats and Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft, Carlyle, Ruskin, the Brontës and Trollope, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Samuel Smiles, George Gissing, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde. Even thought they had more recent dictionaries at their disposal, Hawthorne and Poe deferred to the authority of Johnson. Emerson thought Johnson a ‘muttonhead’ at definition, but consulted him all the same. Johnson’s magnum, opus was the dictionary for Darwin (he cites it in an essay on flowers) and for James Clerk Maxwell, who noted regretfully that it did not contain the word ‘molecule’.
Sometimes the Dictionary’s power could have startling results. In the summer of 1775 the toast of British high society was Omai, a young man brought back from Tahiti by Tobias Furneaux, a member of Captain Cook’s party. Quick to learn chess, Omai was rather less successful in his command of English, but apparently, having gathered from the Dictionary that ‘to pickle’ meant ‘to preserve’, he saluted Lord Sandwich, the Admiral of the Fleet, with the hope that ‘God Almighty might pickle his Lordship to all eternity’. The story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates quaintly the expansive afterlife of Johnson’s text.
Even its detractors could not escape its influence. More than sixty years after the Dictionary’s publication, Samuel Taylor Cole-ridge agitated about its deficiencies in Biographia Literaria, yet when he coined the verb ‘to intensify’, he conceded that while puzzling over its application, he had checked to see if it was in Johnson. Thirty years later, Vanity Fair testified to the work’s enduring power. When Becky Sharp leaves her ‘Academy for Young Ladies’, she is presented with a miniature copy of the Dictionary by its principal, Miss Pinkerton: ‘the Lexicographer’s name was always on the lips of this majestic woman, and a visit he had paid to her was the cause of her reputation and her fortune’. Becky is not impressed. ‘And just as the coach drove off,’ writes Thackeray, ‘Miss Sharp put her pale face out of the window, and actually flung the book back into the garden.’ The gesture is a symbolic overthrow of traditional, masculine authority, and of Englishness (Becky speaks French ‘with purity and a Parisian accent’, and adores Napoleon). It is signal evidence of what Johnson’s great work had come to embody.
The achievement of the Dictionary made Johnson a national icon. But as his reputation grew, public attention focused on the man—a constellation of quirks and quotable effusions—more than on his works. Soon after his death, in December 1784, the first biography was published. Many more followed, most notably James Boswell’s, which appeared in 1791.
These accounts, and Boswell’s in particular, have ensured that Johnson has become a magnet for reverent affection. This affection has been inspired by his memorable aphorisms (‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’) and bizarre mannerisms (collecting orange peel, pausing to touch every lamp post as he walked down Fleet Street, blowing out his breath like a whale). Readers recall with amusement his definition of oats—‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’—and his vast appetite—he called himself ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker.’ Hester Thrale, who likened him to both an elephant and a haunch of venison, reckoned he often ate seven or eight peaches before breakfast. His biographers have taken pleasure in charting the minute byways of his existence: his opinion of cucumbers, the precise number of bottles of port he drank, the size of his breeches, the names of his cats. Yet more broadly, the affection for Johnson stems from a peculiarly English or Anglophile fondness for anyone who can be thought of as a ‘character’, and it tends to be most deeply felt by those w...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374113025
• ISBN 13: 9780374113025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304