The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life

by Henry Hitchings

  Feeling more confident about his finances, he took lodgings at 17 Gough Square, a minute’s walk north of Fleet Street. This red-brick house, which dates from the end of the seventeenth century, still stands, and strikes the modern eye as tall and sturdy. For Sam, it had obvious attractions. Close to his familiar haunts, it was conveniently near the premises of William Strahan, the Dictionary’s designated printer, and the single room on the top floor, which enjoyed good light, was large enough to serve as an office. Installed there, he could survey his task and the world at large with satisfaction; set up in the sort of property a respectable tradesman would have occupied, he seemed at last to have arrived as a professional writer.

  Soon he began his research, reading widely and marking the books with a black lead pencil. For practical reasons he chose to confine himself to written sources, and he looked for illustrations of good usage; the list of headwords, rather than being something he drew up in advance, would grow out of these, and he arranged for them to be copied into notebooks. A skeleton text began to take shape. But obstacles lay ahead. The nature of language itself was a problem and, as he would eventually note in his preface to the finished volumes, ‘no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away’.

  There is a false image of Dr Johnson the cast-iron prescriptivist, regulating language with unwavering certainty. The truth is a little different. In 1747, when he brought out his Plan of an English Dictionary, he spoke of his ambition to ‘secure our language’ and stop it being overrun with barbarous usage. He intended to arrest the language’s supposed decay, and pictured the period between the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the Restoration – that is, between 1558 and 1660 – as a linguistic and literary golden age, the purity of which was worth recovering. Yet even at this stage he was aware of the limits of his authority. Dodsley suggested he address the Plan to that influential taste-maker, the Earl of Chesterfield. Sam did so, and claimed that in considering the pure and proper use of words he would be ‘exercising a kind of vicarious jurisdiction . . . as the delegate of your lordship’. He was embarrassed by this posture of obsequiousness, but it was expedient: in the eyes of the public whose interest the booksellers hoped to attract, Samuel Johnson was nobody, but Lord Chesterfield was universally known, a diplomat and political operator with an appetite for supporting the arts.

  As Sam gathered the materials for the work itself, his understanding of the lexicographer’s role sharpened. When he began, he believed that a word could have no more than seven senses, but in time his reading demonstrated that this was wrong. Encountering words in the wild, he saw just how varied their lives could be. In the finished volumes, he distinguished 134 senses of the verb to take, twenty senses of up, and fourteen of time. Now he was awed by ‘the boundless chaos of living speech’; rather than occupying a vantage point outside the forests of language, he sat in their midst. He did not like everything he found there, and stuck usage labels on about 10 per cent of the words he documented, but only a handful of these, between 1 and 2 per cent, expressed an opinion – such as that a word or sense was ‘low’, ‘cant’, ‘ludicrous’, even ‘vicious’. His mission was to register language rather than debug it, and the heart of the Dictionary was his decision to provide quotations from other authors to illustrate words as they are actually used.

  This shift is culturally significant. In recognizing that no dictionary can ‘embalm’ language, in coming to appreciate English’s ‘exuberance of signification’, and in noting that some words are ‘hourly shifting their relations’, he rethought the nature of his project, and this influenced both the practice of lexicography and the wider public understanding of language. Previously, making a dictionary had been seen as a means of reform: the language could be sent to school, and indeed in 1712 Jonathan Swift had published a pamphlet proposing exactly this. By contrast, Sam was responsive to the variety he found during his research – the jaggedness and profusion of usage, which he did his best to register. None of this is to say that he gave up having views about how English ought to be written, but exposure to the realities of its uses meant that he had to relinquish some of the ideals he’d entertained when he set out.

  Clearly, then, his task was bigger than he had at first supposed, and he soon began to find ways of distracting himself from it. We all know how this goes, the irritatingly reasonable conversation one has with oneself: ‘I need to get the right tools. Mastering this one apparently unrelated subject will help me make sense of the larger task I’m facing. This isn’t an auspicious moment to start. I need to do this when I’m better rested and more relaxed. I need to wait till I’m in the same frame of mind that I was in the last time I made some progress. My levels of nervous energy are too high. I think I may have offended X by not being in touch with her for ages, so I must do something about that immediately. Speaking to Y will help clear this mental blockage. If I just get this other thing out of the way, I’ll feel liberated and ready. The muse isn’t with me. I think I might be getting sick.’ Sam’s own internal jabber will have been more freighted with melancholy and moral scruple, but the effect will have been the same. Deferring work is usually more tiring than doing it, and the fuzzy patterns of enervation make it possible to convince oneself that the deferral is the work.

  It was while working on the Dictionary that he established himself as an essayist, with the Rambler. He wrote the pieces that appeared there to make some extra money and relieve the slog of lexicography. The immediacy of writing twice a week an essay of about 1,400 words, for prompt publication, could not have been more different from what he called ‘beating the track of the alphabet’. It is well-known that he defined lexicographer as ‘A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge’. His reasons for doing so tend to command less attention. The definition is treated as a droll gesture, a buried joke. But Sam didn’t really think he was a drudge (in his own explanation ‘One employed in mean labour; a slave; one doomed to servile occupation’). The Dictionary’s preface leaves one in no doubt of how important he considered his work, and in the course of his labours he pictured himself in many other and very different terms – as a sailor on the sea of words, an explorer, a collector, even an invader and conqueror, ransacking the recesses of learning. As for ‘harmless’, it’s fair to say that people who protest their own harmlessness are aware of their potential to cause harm; they are conscious that their actions have implications. Sam’s wry portrait of the drudging lexicographer is typical of the self-deprecation with which all serious people state their professions. Whereas someone doing a job of little consequence will often take enormous pride in their status (‘I am the assistant deputy director of customer experience’), and proprietors of one-person companies without apparent irony refer to themselves as CEOs, heavy hitters are less brassy. To understate what you do is to leave breathing space for excellence.

  Still, when he referred to his work as mere drudgery, he was expressing a sense of worthlessness. Even though people he knew were never far away, and often under the same roof, he regarded the Dictionary as a lonely undertaking. Its preface would characterize the mood of this period as the ‘gloom of solitude’, and the text bears witness to his morbid feelings of isolation. Deep into the intricacies of the project, he wrote a piece for the Adventurer in which he rejected the idea that solitude is ‘the parent of philosophy’; while it might provide the opportunity to increase one’s learning, the purpose of doing so was to share it with others. Allergic to ‘specious representations of solitary happiness’, he suspected that beyond the short term a reclusive life was conducive not to wisdom, but to lassitude. Impressed by Robert Burton’s simple direction in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘Be not solitary; be not idle’, he nonetheless modified it as follows: ‘If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.’ The principle was one he found it hard to put into practice, as solitude and idleness were such natural companions.

 
In The Lonely City, an investigation of what it means to be alone, Olivia Laing writes that ‘You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city.’ Though one may sense ‘the massed presence of other human beings’, it is no guarantee of not feeling isolated. Pondering the temper of this ‘absence or paucity of connection’, she reaches for a definition: ‘Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others.’1 The dictionary she has in mind isn’t Sam’s, but in the pages of his work we find pointed references to what she calls ‘paucity of connection’. In his entry for companion he quotes the poet Matthew Prior: ‘With anxious doubts, with raging passions torn, / No sweet companion near with whom to mourn.’ His entry for visiter [sic] quotes a letter from Jonathan Swift to John Gay, in which Swift complains, ‘I have a large house, yet I should hardly prevail to find one visiter, if I were not able to hire him with a bottle of wine.’ Under stagnant, he cites lines from his own play Irene that imagine being ‘buried in perpetual sloth, / That gloomy slumber of the stagnant soul’. Among the quotations for lone is one from Savage’s Wanderer: ‘Here the lone hour a blank of life displays.’ For solitariness, he quotes from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia: ‘You subject yourself to solitariness, the sly enemy that doth most separate a man from well doing.’ There is much more in this vein, and while it is easy to exaggerate the significance of any particular excerpt, the many quotations on this theme have a strong cumulative force.

  In an age that regarded the individual’s industry as the basis of national improvement, idleness seemed shameful. It’s natural to suppose that Sam felt guilty because he thought he was lazy. But there is an alternative reading: he was lazy because he was wracked with guilt. He had failed to keep resolutions, had allowed his faith and friendships to lapse, had wallowed in fantasy. Troubled by his offences and notions of the suffering they had produced, he imagined he would never complete the Dictionary. In a book-length ‘pathographic essay’ on Sam, Ernst Verbeek explains that ‘Postponement, difficulty in finishing things . . . and working in bouts, are characteristics of the sympathetic person’. Verbeek believes that ‘Johnson’s intelligence was an extension of his heart’, and sees in him a special ability ‘to displace himself affectively into another person, or into a situation’.2 His innate complexity of feeling caused his energies to veer off in many directions, and in Rambler 134 (dating from June 1751) he wrote about this, describing the emotional climate of slow, fitful work, which consisted of ‘false terrors’, ‘the seducements of imagination’, a tendency to dwell on ‘remote consequences’ or to ‘multiply complications’, and a readiness to be consumed with ‘reconciling ourselves to our own cowardice by excuses which . . . we know to be absurd’.

  Many years later, reflecting on Alexander Pope’s slow and anxious progress in translating Homer’s Iliad, Sam would comment that ‘Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their terms of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted.’ All large projects involve unforeseen delays. I’m reminded here of Hofstadter’s Law, framed by the cognitive scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter: ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.’ This conjures up an image like the strange loops one sees in the graphic art of M. C. Escher: the eye follows a staircase down and down and down and down, only to find itself back at the starting point. But if Sam was experiencing a paradox of perspective, or no more than the illusion of progress, there were other factors retarding his progress that could easily be identified, and chief among them was grief.

  14

  A chapter about Grief (for one word must serve where in truth no assemblage of words will be sufficient)

  Unlike Sam, Tetty had never really settled in London and had spent much of their married life in flight from its dirt. The house at Gough Square had promised to be a proper home, but sharing it with all the work on the Dictionary was intolerable. Once it had become apparent that she did not wish to stay there, Sam had rented a small property in Hampstead, which was then regarded not as part of London but as a genteel retreat from it. Breathing the better air of this hilltop spa community, Tetty was attended by nurses and expensive doctors. Sam visited her often, and it was at Hampstead, one morning in the autumn of 1748, that he wrote the first seventy lines of The Vanity of Human Wishes. During a bout of sickness, she returned to live with Sam in Gough Square. But then she was advised that it would be better for her to sleep in a more peaceful environment; she removed again to Hampstead, and when she complained about her lodgings, noting that the plaster beside the staircase was in many places damaged, the landlord ominously replied that this was ‘nothing but . . . the knocks against it of the coffins of the poor souls that have died’.

  Her own death came not long after this, in March 1752. She was sixty-three. Sam was devastated, floored by his grief, for it was impossible not to feel that he could have done more for her, especially while blundering through the early stages of the Dictionary. Prayers he composed in the weeks that followed speak of his ‘troubled soul’ and ‘tumultuous imaginations’, and he wrote of his hopes that her spirit would watch over him – ‘that I may enjoy the good effects of her attention’. He clung to the belief that mourning might awaken his conscience, and hoped not to ‘languish in fruitless and unavailing sorrow’, lest ‘idleness lay me open to vain imaginations’. In early May, he wrote of preparing for ‘my return to life tomorrow’, but it seems that he could not return so soon, and six months later he was pleading for help in overcoming idleness: he must ‘shun sloth and negligence’, cease to ‘lavish away’ his life ‘on useless trifles’, and learn not to waste time ‘in vain searches after things . . . hidden from me’.

  He wrote these words for himself, but his friends could see the intensity of his suffering, and it puzzled all who had regarded the marriage as an embarrassment. The couple’s spiritual kinship had been closer than others had realized. But to those who’d doubted Tetty’s worth, it suggested not so much hidden depths of feeling as Sam’s hidden shallows, an unexpected weakness. It is worth emphasizing that his grief, rather than being taken as evidence that there was more to Tetty than met the eye, was seen as a guilty, mawkish reaction to the end of a low and unworthy union. We can never fully understand what happens inside the privacy of other people’s relationships, but most of Sam’s friends, admirers and biographers have assumed that whatever happened in this one was indelicate or shameful – and best ignored.

  Sir John Hawkins felt that there was something bogus in Sam’s emotional response to the loss. The melancholy that took hold of him was, concedes Hawkins, ‘of the blackest and deepest kind’, but reading, he thinks, played a large part in this. Sam had been exposed to sombre theories about what happened to the souls of the departed, and he had also absorbed other people’s ideas about what grief was meant to look and feel like. Hawkins claims that ‘if his fondness for his wife was not dissembled, it was a lesson he had learned by rote, and . . . he knew not where to stop till he became ridiculous’. He adds, breathtakingly, that for his own part he never met or even saw Tetty.

  It hasn’t helped the marriage’s reputation that Sam did not attend Tetty’s funeral. This took place at Bromley in Kent, a place with which she’d had no connections; it was chosen because Sam’s friend John Hawkesworth, a writer he’d got to know through Edward Cave, lived there and was able to make the necessary arrangements. Reflecting on the matter, Sam must have found this expediency pitiful. Surely he ought to have done more to ensure a respectful and appropriate burial? But at the time the practicalities were beyond him, and later he was nagged by the memory of this omission. He did not visit Tetty’s grave till Easter Day the following year, and it would be more than thirty years before he had a memorial stone laid there.

  This can be interpreted two ways: as a sign that Sam didn’t care, or as evidence that he was prostrate with g
rief. The latter is far more likely. But real grief, as opposed to the tropical and spectacular variety performed by impostors who treat outdoor sadness as a competitive sport, can make us look like we care far less than we do. There is a gulf between the experience of distress and other people’s expectations about how we show and manage it, between the disorientating effects of loss and the conventional rituals of grieving.

  What happens when we are bereaved? First there is a period of numbness. Then we crave the touch of the person we have lost, and the word ‘lost’ is apropos, as we believe that we can find them. We are angry. We are on edge. We keep seeing reminders of the past – of when we weren’t alone, of when we were complete. We feel the illusory presence of the departed. We feel we have been deserted. We may also believe we have lost some status; the world defines us differently, and the difference is unfavourable. We feel empty, and there is silence.

  In Max Porter’s sad and gorgeous Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), a crow appears to a bereaved husband and takes on multiple roles: among them friend, spectre, crutch, symptom, analyst and babysitter. The husband plays roles, too: blinded by ‘other people’s performances of woe’, he becomes a ‘list-making trader in clichés of gratitude’, a ‘machine-like architect of routines’ for his now-motherless children, and a scholar of orbiting grievers’ moods and gestures. Loss makes him an anthropologist, a documentarist, an artist, and when he draws his dead wife’s picture, her ribs appear ‘splayed stretched like a xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her bones’. Grief is a project, says the bereaved husband in Porter’s book, and it is one for the long term. We think we have put it behind us – have not so much banished it as forgotten its face – and then it returns, black-feathered, and perches in our room, staring down at us with gimlety precision. Of course, Sam didn’t associate grief with this malign, anarchic comic-book bird, which Porter has adopted from the poet Ted Hughes’s volume Crow (1970). But he too experienced it as a dark, insidious presence, blocking out the light, and among the images coined by Porter none seems more apt here than that of the grieving husband’s house being ‘a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers’.1