The Great Drudge

To Londoners who happened to spot the notice in the Daily Advertiser one day in 1747, it must have seemed less an announcement than a boast: "There is now preparing for the press, and in great forwardness, in two volumes in folio, an English dictionary; etymological, analogical, syntactical, explanatory, and critical." Who could have undertaken such a gargantuan task? In 1755. when the two volumes came out, the world became aware that Samuel Johnson would forever be famous as Dictionary Johnson.

In its own day, few books caused a bigger stir than the Dictionary. But as the years passed and other dictionaries came out, the great book became overshadowed by the man. How good a dictionary was it? This week, on the sooth anniversary of its publication, Johnsonians could find the answers in two new studies: Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, by James H. Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb of the University of Chicago (University of Chicago Press; $5), and Young Sam Johnson, by James L. Clifford, professor of English at Columbia University (McGraw-Hill; $5.75).

Barbarous Language. Sam Johnson was not the only man to realize the need for such a book. While learned academies in France and Italy had both compiled dictionaries for their own countries, Britons, said Dryden in 1693, "have yet no English prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous." The best reference book around was Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary, but the Bailey brand of definition, e.g., a mouse: "an animal well known," was hardly adequate. Finally, a group of booksellers got in touch with Johnson, persuaded him to compile a dictionary within three years. "But, Sir," remonstrated a friend, "how can you do this in three years . . . ? The French Academy, which consists of 40 members, took 40 years to compile their dictionary." "Sir," replied Johnson, "thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; 40 times 40 is 1600. As three to 1600, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman."

Actually, it took Johnson a good deal longer than he thought. For nine years, balanced precariously in a chair with only three legs, he worked at his word lists in the garret of his Gough Square house. At first he had a lofty ambition: not only to rid the language of impurities, but to fix it permanently. "Our language," he wrote. "for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it."

State or Seat? To find the best illustrations for each word, he combed his own library, plowed through stacks of borrowed books. But he soon realized that to be a judge of correctness was no easy job. "So commonly," he noted, "but not always, we exhort to good actions, we instigate to ill we animate incite and encourage indifferently to good or bad. So we usually ascribe good but impute evil, yet neither the use of these words nor perhaps of any other in our licentious language is so established as not to be often reversed by the correctest writers." Even pronunciation sometimes stumped him. "Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat . . . Now here were two men of the highest rank, the one, the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other, the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely."

There were also troubles of another sort. His band of scribes were a loyal but tragic crew: one was often drunk, another eventually died of consumption, still another came close to starving to death. Meanwhile, Johnson's wife Tetty died, a semi-alcoholic, and Johnson himself was forever in need of money (he was once arrested for a -L-5 debt).

Furthermore, Johnson had hoped to have Lord Chesterfield as his patron, but found himself merely cooling his heels in the great man's anteroom. "Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain . . . without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor." A patron, Johnson bitterly declared in the Dictionary, is "one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery."

Convulsions & Hottentots. Even after the Dictionary came out, his worries continued. A critic named Thomas Edwards denounced the work as "a vehicle for Jacobite and High-flying tenets" and Johnson for "crouding" it with such "monstrous words" as "adespotick, amnicolist, androtomy." "Nearly one-third of this Dictionary," added Philologist John Home Tooke, "is as much the language of the Hottentots as of the English." Years later the smug and able Noah Webster observed that confidence in the Dictionary "is the greatest injury to philology that now exists."

The great book's weaknesses seemed destined to outlive its merits. By modern standards Johnson knew too little of early English to be a thorough etymologist, and as a grammarian he failed because he believed that "the syntax of this language is too inconstant to be reduced to rules." He defined both leeward and windward as "towards the wind," thought that pastern meant "the knee of an horse." Some of his other definitions were jawbreakers. A cough, said he, is "a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity," and a network is "anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." Though he hated the verbs to bang, to coax, and to cajole, he seemed to have an inordinate fondness for such polysyllabic wonders as ballotation (voting), balneation (bathing), and campaniform (to describe bell-shaped).

Longevity y. Immortality. In spite of these deficiencies, Johnson's achievement was unique. Though he was not a great innovator, he used the best techniques of his time to produce a dictionary unsurpassed for more than a century. In Britain, the book became the model for a slew of supplements. The Germans made it a basis for their own German-English dictionaries, and Voltaire urged the French Academy to follow Johnson's example. Though Johnson himself realized that he could never fix the language, he achieved another goal: to keep it as pure as possible and to give "longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal."

The greatest of all one-man English dictionaries, it was also a highly personal one, filled with Johnsonian humor. Oats, said he, are "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"; a lexicographer is "a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the significance of words." How great a drudge was Johnson? "I knew very well what I was undertaking," he told Boswell years later, "and very well how to do it,--and have done it very well." After 200 years, Johnson's verdict on Johnson still holds good.

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