Sparkling tale of 1st great English dictionary
Sparkling tale of 1st great English dictionary
By Frank Wilson
Inquirer Books Editor
Defining the World
The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary
By Henry Hitchings
Farrar Straus & Giroux. 292 pp. $24
In 1999, a group of congressmen sued President Bill Clinton for continuing to bomb Yugoslavia without obtaining from Congress a declaration of war. Among the issues were the meanings of the words declare and war. As it happens, when the Constitution was written, the authority for determining their meaning would have been the dictionary of the English language compiled by Dr. Samuel Johnson - which was duly consulted.
This is but one of many fascinating bits of information to be found in Henry Hitchings’ delightful Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. Johnson is probably more read about than read these days (though his poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is well worth grappling with, and Rasselas - inspired, as was Candide, by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake - is at least as interesting as Voltaire’s book), but in his day Johnson was quite the celebrity.
When Johnson told James Boswell, his friend and biographer, that “I believe there is hardly a day in which there is not something about me in the newspapers,” he was simply stating a fact, not bragging.
The 36-year-old Johnson signed a contract in 1746 for 1,575 pounds (about $270,000 today) to produce a dictionary, thinking he could do the job in three years. He underestimated by six - the first edition was published in 1755.
Still, not bad considering that the Academie francaise and the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, both expressly founded to produce dictionaries, took 55 years and 30 years, respectively, to complete their tasks. And those were major collective undertakings. Johnson had the help of six amanuenses. However, as Hitchings makes clear, this was very much the work of one man, whose preferences, predilections, quirks and prejudices display themselves again and again.
There is, for instance, the very definition of lexicographer: “A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.” The definition of patron was custom-designed to describe Lord Chesterfield, whose patronage Johnson had once sought: “One who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with indolence, and is paid with flattery.” Chesterfield’s patronage had amounted to exactly one payment of 10 pounds.
The first edition of Johnson’s dictionary contained 42,773 entries, a fairly modest number given that at the time the language probably consisted of between 250,000 and 300,000 words. The original Oxford English Dictionary, by comparison, defined more than 400,000 words. But the OED had 2,000 contributors, took 68 years to complete, and was still not exhaustive.
Hitchings manages in this short book to weave rather seamlessly the details of Johnson’s life, character and career, his methods of going about his work, and the characteristics of his society. On one page alone we learn that tobacconist originally meant a tobacco addict, but by Johnson’s day had come to mean what it means today, a tobacco-seller; that japan was “a dark, hard varnish”; that there was a passion in those days for vases (which, Hitchings reminds us, was much to the advantage of one Josiah Wedgwood); and that the umbrella - which Johnson defined as a “skreen [sic] used in hot countries to keep off the sun, and in others to bear off the rain” - was something new (and the first Londoner to carry one was ridiculed for it).
On the same page we are reminded, in reference to the term modesty-piece (lace to conceal “the more exciting parts of women’s breasts”), of Johnson’s explanation as to why he resolved to stay away from the theater of his friend and former pupil David Garrick: because “the white bubbies and the silk stockings of [the] actresses excite my genitals.”
Hitchings’ account of the first great English dictionary sparkles on every page. Even the list toward the end of words whose meanings have sharply changed - a fake was once “a coil of rope,” a fireman “a man of violent passions” - goes far to demonstrate that Dr. Johnson’s dictionary remains a bracing tonic for the mind.
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Contact books editor Frank Wilson at 215-854-5616 or fwilson@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/frankwilson. Visit his blog at http://booksinq.blogspot.com/.