The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  And then came the man whom Tobias Smollett called “Literature’s Great Cham”—one of the most eminent literary figures of all time—Samuel Johnson. He decided to take up the challenge before which so many others had flinched. And even with the critical judgment of the more than two centuries since, it can fairly be said that what he created was an unparalleled triumph. Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was, and has remained ever since, a portrait of the language of the day in all its majesty, beauty, and marvelous confusion.

  Few are the books that can offer so much pleasure to look at, to touch, to skim, to read.

  They can still be found today, often cased in boxes of brown morocco. They are hugely heavy, built for the lectern rather than the hand. They are bound in rich brown leather, the paper is thick and creamy, the print impressed deep into the weave. Few who read the volumes today can fail to be charmed by the quaint elegance of the definitions, of which Johnson was a master. Take for example the word for which Shakespeare might have hunted, elephant. It was, Johnson declared:

  The largest of all quadrupeds, of whose sagacity, faithfulness, prudence and even understanding, many surprising relations are given. This animal is not carnivorous, but feeds on hay, herbs and all sorts of pulse; and it is said to be extremely long lifed. It is naturally very gentle; but when enraged, no creature is more terrible. He is supplied with a trunk, or long hollow cartilage, like a large trumpet, which hangs between his teeth, and serves him for hands: by one blow with his trunk he will kill a camel or a horse, and will raise of prodigious weight with it. His teeth are the ivory so well known in Europe, some of which have been seen as large as a man’s thigh, and a fathom in length. Wild elephants are taken with the help of a female ready for the male: she is confined to a narrow place, round which pits are dug; and these being covered with a little earth scattered over hurdles, the male elephant easily falls into the snare. In copulation the female receives the male lying upon her back; and such is his pudicity, that he never covers the female so long as anyone appears in sight.

  Yet Johnson’s dictionary represents more, far more, than mere quaintness and charm. Its publication represented a pivotal moment in the history of the English language; the only more significant moment was to commence almost exactly a century later.

  Samuel Johnson had been thinking about and planning the structure of his dictionary for many years. He had been doing so in part to create a reputation for himself. He was a schoolteacher turned scribbler, known only in limited metropolitan circles as the parliamentary sketch writer for the Gentleman’s Magazine. He was eager to have himself better regarded. But he began the process also in response to calls from the giants—demands that something needed to be done.

  Theirs was a near-universal complaint. Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, the leading lights of English literature, had each spoken out, calling for the need to fix the language. By that—fixing has been a term of lexicographical jargon ever since—they meant establishing the limits of the language, creating an inventory of its word stock, forging its cosmology, deciding exactly what the language was. Their considered view of the nature of English was splendidly autocratic: The tongue, they insisted, had by the turn of the seventeenth century become sufficiently refined and pure that it could only remain static or else thenceforward deteriorate.

  By and large they agreed with the beliefs of the Forty Immortals across the Channel (though they would have been loath to admit it): A national standard language needed to be defined, measured, laid down, chased in silver, and carved in stone. Alterations to it then could be permitted or not, according to the mood of the great and the good, a home-grown Forty, a national language authority.

  Swift was the fiercest advocate of all. He once wrote to the earl of Oxford to express his outrage that words like bamboozle, uppish, and—of all things—couldn’t were appearing in print. He wanted the establishment of strict rules banning such words as offensive to good sense. In future he wanted all spellings fixed—a firm orthography, the correctness of writing. He wanted the pronunciations laid down—an equally firm orthoepy, the correctness of speech. Rules, rules, rules: They were essential, declared Gulliver’s creator.

  The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining. What is blue or yellow? physicists were then wondering. How hot is boiling water? How long is a yard? How to define what musicians knew as middle C? What, indeed, of the precise measurement of longitude, so vital to seamen? Enormous efforts were being made in this particular field at just the same time as the debate over the national language: A Board of Longitude had been set up by the government, funds were being disbursed, and prizes offered just so that a clock could be invented that would go to sea on a ship and be only almost imperceptibly inaccurate. Longitude was vitally important: So great a trading nation as Britain needed to have its ships’ masters know exactly where they were.

  And so the thinking of great literary men went—if longitude was important, if the defining of color, length, mass, and sound was vital—why was the same import not given to the national tongue? As one pamphleteer wailed, appropriately: “We have neither Grammar nor Dictionary, neither Chart nor Compass, to guide us through the wide sea of Words.”

  No dictionary had proved adequate so far, said Swift and his friends, but given the heights of perfection that the language had already achieved, one was now needed, and a dedicated genius must be found and applied to the task of making one. It would accomplish two desirable deeds: the fixing of the language and the maintenance of its purity.

  Samuel Johnson could not have disagreed more. At least he wanted to have no truck with ordering the language to remain pure. He might have liked it to, but he knew it couldn’t be done. As to whether he thought it possible or desirable to fix it, theses have tumbled by the score from academic presses in recent years, arguing variously that Johnson did want to or that he did not. The consensus now is that he originally planned to make a fix on the tongue, but when he was halfway through his six-year task, he came to realize that it was both impossible and undesirable.

  One of his predecessors, Benjamin Martin, explained why: “No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.” This dictum, which appeared in the preface to still another half-baked attempt at a proper dictionary just a year before Johnson brought out his own, might as well have guided the Great Cham through his entire construction.

  For all the heady talk among London’s intelligentsia, it was actually the free market that prompted Johnson to begin. In 1746 a group of five London booksellers (the famous Messrs. Longman among them) were seized with the idea that a brand-new dictionary would sell like hotcakes: They approached their favorite parliamentary writer, whom they knew to be both eager and broke, and made him an offer he could scarcely refuse: fifteen hundred guineas, half of it up front. Johnson agreed readily, with the sole caveat that he would seek as patron the man who was currently the arbiter of all that was good and worthwhile in literary England, Philip Dormer Stanhope, the fourth earl of Chesterfield.

  Lord Chesterfield was one of the most remarkable figures in the land: an ambassador, a lord lieutenant of Ireland, a friend of Pope, Swift, Voltaire, and John Gay. It was Chesterfield who had forced England to adopt the Gregorian calendar, and it was Chesterfield whose letters to his bastard son Philip, advising him on his behavior, became, when published, an indispensable vade mecum of good manners. His imprimatur on the dictionary would be valuable, his patronage of the project invaluable.

  That he promised the imprimatur but declined the patronage (except for handing Johnson a draft for a measly ten pounds) but then went on to claim a part in Johnson’s subsequent triumph became a source of well-publicized hard feelings. Lord Chesterfield, John
son was to say later, taught “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master.” Chesterfield had the elephantine hide of a true aristocrat, and brushed off the criticisms as good natured, which they were not.

  His early advocacy of the dictionary, plus the seven hundred and fifty guineas that the booksellers had placed in Johnson’s hand, nonetheless set the thirty-seven-year-old editor to work. He took rooms off Fleet Street, hired six serving men (five of them Scotsmen, which would come as some comfort to James Murray, who was from Hawick) as amanuenses, and settled down to the six years of unremitting drudgery that were to prove necessary. He had decided, as Murray was to decide a century later, that the best way—indeed the only way—to compile a full dictionary was to read: to go through all literature and list the words that appeared on hundreds of thousands of pages.

  It is an axiom that you have three overlapping choices in making a word list. You may record words that are heard. You may copy the words from other existing dictionaries. Or you may read, after which, in the most painstaking way, you record all the words you have read, sort them, and make them into a list.

  Johnson dismissed the first idea as far too cumbersome to be useful; he naturally agreed to the second—all lexicographers use earlier dictionaries as a starting point, to make sure they miss nothing; and, most significantly, he decided on the primary importance of the third choice, reading. Hence the taking of the rooms off Fleet Street, hence the buying or borrowing of books by the ton and the yard and the sack, and hence the hiring of the six men. The team of seven had been created to browse and graze through all existing writings, and to make a catalog of all that was swept into the team’s collective maw.

  It was swiftly realized that it would be impossible to look through everything, and so Johnson imposed limits. The language, he decided, had probably reached its peak with the writings of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Edmund Spenser, and so there was probably precious little need to go look further back than their lifetimes. He ruled, therefore, that the works of Sir Philip Sidney, who was only thirty-two when he died in 1586, would usefully mark the starting point for his search; and the last books published by newly dead authors would mark the end.

  His dictionary would thus be the result of a concerted trawl through just a century and a half of writing, with the odd piece of Chaucer thrown in for good measure. So Johnson took down these books and read, then underlined and circled words he wanted, and annotated the pages he had chosen; he then demanded that his men copy onto slips of paper the full sentences that displayed his chosen words; and these he then filed, to use when necessary, to illustrate the point he was making, the meaning of a word that he was trying to show.

  And it was all those quoted meanings, a demonstration of the multiplicity of subtle shadings of sense that can be encompassed by the simple arrangement of a group of letters, that prove the great triumph of Johnson’s dictionary. For while we might laugh at the quaint charm of his definition of elephant, or of oats (“a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”), or lexicographer (“a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words”), we can only be staggered by his dealing with, say, the verb take. Johnson listed, with supportive quotations, no fewer than 113 senses of this particular verb’s transitive form and 21 of the intransitive. “To seize, grasp or capture; to catch with a hook; to catch someone in an error; to win popular favor; to be effective; to claim to do something; to assume the right…to mount a horse, to flee, to perform what one does in removing one’s clothing….”

  The list is almost endless: It was a mark of Samuel Johnson’s genius that, armed with references from 150 years of English writings, he was able, and essentially single-handedly, to find and note almost every use of every word of the day. Not simply take; but other common coin like set and do and go and hundreds upon hundreds of others. Small wonder that once his project was well under way, and the trifling business of his creditors’ needs arose, he once barred the door to the milkman with his bed, crying from behind the door, “Depend on it, I will defend this little citadel to the utmost!”

  He finished amassing his list of the English word stock in 1750. He spent the next four years editing the citations and choosing the 118,000 illustrative quotations (sometimes by committing the heresy of changing quotes he didn’t like). Finally he completed the definitions of what were to become the 43,500 chosen headwords. He wrote some of these definitions from scratch, or else he borrowed substantial passages for others from writers he admired (as with elephant, which was partly the work of a man named Calmet).

  He did not publish the completed work until 1755, however: He wanted to persuade Oxford University to grant him a degree, believing that if he was able to add it to his name on the title page, it would do Oxford, the book’s sales, and himself—and not necessarily in that order—a lot of good. Oxford agreed; and on April 15, 1755, there appeared:

  A Dictionary of the English Language, in which the Words are deduced from their Originals and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers to which are prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar, by Samuel Johnson, A.M., in Two Volumes.

  The book, which went into four editions during Johnson’s lifetime, was to remain the standard work, an unrivaled repository of the English language for the next century. It was an enormous commercial success and was almost universally praised—particularly by the egregious Lord Chesterfield, who hinted that he had had rather more to do with the book’s making than he had. This enraged Johnson; not only did he mutter about whores and dancing masters, but he had up his sleeve the unkindest cut: Under the definition of patron he had written “a wretch who supports with indolence, and is paid with flattery”. But the noble Lord brushed this aside too, as Lords are wont to do.

  There were some critics. The fact that Johnson allowed his own personality to invade the pages may today seem pleasant whimsy, but to some who wanted the book to be supremely authoritative, it was irritatingly unprofessional. Many writers sniped at the limited authority of some of those whom Johnson quoted—a criticism that Johnson himself anticipated in his preface. Some found the definitions patchy—some trite, some unnecessarily complicated (as with network: “any thing reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections”). A century after publication the redoubtable Thomas Babington Macauley was to damn Johnson as “a wretched etymologist.”

  But, Macauley aside, many of the critics were probably just jealous, envious that Johnson had done what none of them could ever do. “Any schoolmaster might have done what Johnson did,” wrote one. “His Dictionary is merely a glossary to his own barbarous works.” But the writer was anonymous and quite probably a disappointed rival. or else a rabid Whig: Johnson was a noted Tory and wrote with what some thought a distinctive Tory bias. So the book was merely “a vehicle for Jacobite and high-flying tracts,” wrote one Whig, doubtless a diehard. One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. “No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers,” he replied, archly. “I find, however, that you have been looking for them.”

  Yet the accolades were many. Voltaire proposed that the French model a new dictionary of their own on Johnson’s; and the venerable Accademia della Crusca wrote from Florence that Johnson’s work will be “a perpetual Monument of Fame to the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general Benefit to the republic of Letters throughout all Europe.” “In an age of dictionaries of all kinds,” wrote a modern consideration, “Johnson’s contribution was simply primus inter pares.” And Robert Burchfield, who edited the four-volume supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1970s, had no doubts: Johnson managed to combine being both a lexicographer and a supremely literate man: “In the whole tradition of the English language and literature the only dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank is that of Dr. Joh
nson.”

  Throughout it all, under the rains of slings, arrows, plaudits, and encomiums, Samuel Johnson remained calmly modest. Not unduly so, for he was proud of his work but awed by the magnificence of the language he, with such foolhardiness, had chosen to tackle. The book remained his monument. James Murray was to say in later years that whenever someone used the phrase “the Dictionary,” as one might say “the Bible” or “the Prayer Book,” he or she referred to the work by Doctor Johnson.

  But no, Literature’s Great Cham would have said—in fact it was the words that were the truest monument, and even more profoundly, the very entities that those words defined. “I am not yet so lost in lexicography,” he says in his famous preface, “as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” His life had been devoted to the gathering in of those daughters, but it was heaven that had ordained their creation.

  5

  THE BIG DICTIONARY CONCEIVED

  Elephant (e·lĭfănt). Forms: a. 4–6 oli-, olyfaunte, (4 pl. olifauns, -fauntz), 4 olyfont, -funt, 5–6 olifant(e, 4 olephaunte, 5–6 olyphaunt, 4–7 oli-, olyphant(e. β. 4 elifans, 4–5 ele-, elyphaunt(e, 5 elefaunte, 6 eliphant, 5–6 elephante, 6– elephant. [ME. olifaunt, a. OF. olifant, repr. a popular L. *olifantu-m (whence Pr. olifan; cf. MDu. olfant, Bret. olifant, Welsh oliffant, Corn. oliphans, which may be all from ME. or OFr.), corrupt form of L. elephantum, elephantem (nom. elephantus, -phas, -phans), ad. and a. Gr. (gen. ). The refashioning of the word after Lat. seems to have taken place earlier in Eng. than in Fr., the Fr. forms with el- being cited only from 15th c.