SAMUEL JOHNSON, the great writer and lexicographer who was born 300 years ago this month, was English through and through. But for the title by which he is known to posterity – “Dr Johnson” – this country can claim at least some of the credit. It was Dublin’s Trinity College that first conferred him with an honorary doctorate in 1765: a decade before Oxford, where his formal education had ended prematurely more than 30 years earlier, gave him a second one.
Not that Trinity was especially premature in recognising his genius. He was already famous by then, largely thanks to his dictionary, published in 1755. And in fairness to his alma mater, that same year saw Oxford award him an honorary MA: a down-payment on the doctorate to follow. In any case, the rush to honour him was belated, all round: a point he made exquisitely in one his shortest but best-known pieces: “A Letter to Lord Chesterfield”.
Johnson had inherited erudition from his father: a bookseller with the weakness fatal to members of his profession of being better at reading the merchandise than retailing it. Consequently, Johnson Jnr inherited poverty from him too. In his short spell at Oxford he was known both for brilliance and for looking like a tramp. But when his father died, early in second-year, so did the university career.
Adding to his impoverishment, childhood illnesses left him a legacy of physical ailments including facial tics, poor eyesight, and hardness of hearing. He suffered from depression too. So for these and other reasons Johnson was a failure as a teacher. Condemned to live off literature, he had the further misfortune of being a writer during an era (in England at least) when the powerful disregarded the arts as a means of influencing votes and public opinion; favouring more direct methods, such as bribery.
As Alasdair Gray writes in The Book of Prefaces,his overview of 1,300 years of British and Irish literature, the 1730s and 1740s were a time when even a popular writer like Henry Fielding "sometimes pawned his coat to buy a dish of tripe".
Johnson’s money supply was shorter still. “By translation and hackwork,” says Gray, “[he] lived for 10 years, at times homeless and sleeping in church porches, as did thousands then, while increasingly known as one of England’s greatest scholars.” It was against this background that, in 1747, Johnson began work on what would be the first English dictionary. In recognising that his language needed such a thing, he was more than 100 years behind King Louis XIII, who had founded the Académie Française, with 40 paid scholars, to do something similar for French. Johnson thought the English establishment too might have an interest in standardising their language, and even paying for the work. And he was given reason to have high hopes for Lord Chesterfield in particular: who instead let him down badly.
Chesterfield’s first mistake was to fob him off with a paltry £10, forcing Johnson to fall back on the £1,575 raised for the project by a consortium of London booksellers. With only six assistants, he spent eight years on the work, much longer than planned. As the dictionary finally neared publication, Chesterfield compounded his earlier stinginess by writing rave reviews in advance, and otherwise hinting that he should be the subject of a dedication on the fly-leaf.
The sheer gall of this was too much for Johnson: who nevertheless filtered his anger through several layers of irony and sarcasm before pouring it into a letter that, 250 years later, remains a masterpiece of controlled indignation.
Here, for example, he reflects on the meaning of the word “patron”: “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached the ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it.”
The solitude he referred to was that following the death of his wife in 1752. And Johnson returns to the theme in the dictionary’s foreword, in the process also deftly defending himself in advance against critics: “I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds,” he wrote. “I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”
In the event, the book earned mostly praise, then and ever since. And although many English dictionaries have followed, very few are as entertaining as his. Which said, not many lexicographers allow their prejudices, politics (Tory in his case), and sense of humour to leak onto the page, as Johnson did.
Most famous of his definitions was the one for “oats” as something fed to horses in England and humans in Scotland. Shortening the version offered to Lord Chesterfield, he also defined “patron” as “commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery”. And after a more prosaic explanation of the term “pension”, he added, as a swipe at the governing Whigs: “In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling to betray his country”.
Thanks to the Tory King George III, he too won a state pension in time, and so lived out his days in something like comfort. But nobody could have accused Johnson of taking himself too seriously. Witness his definition of “lexicographer” – “a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing [. . .] the signification of words” – and his sample sentence featuring the adjective “dull”, viz: “To make dictionaries is dull work”.