Samuel Johnson's Use of Scientific Sources in the Dictionary

SamuelJohnson's Use of Scientific Sources in the Dictionary M: Chris P. Pearce Boston University 'ore than ever before, we can studyJohnson's Dictionary both Lcomprehensively and in detail. With the CD-ROM version of the Dictionary (Johnson 1996) at our disposal, we can perform key word searches and wild card searches to find, for example, every instance of Johnson's use ofJohn Locke to illustrate a quotation, or every timeJohnson refers to a word as low. Yet, as Anne McDermott andJack Lynch recently pointed out, "despite the mountains of criticism" onJohnson and on the Dictionary, "much of die Dictionary remains unfamiliar, even to scholars" (Lynch and McDermott 2005, 2 ). Part of this unfamiliarity has stemmed from the years before the digital age, before the CD ROMs, when the Dictionary in its fullest original form was relatively inaccessible. Before the digital era, many scholars did not bother to look at the contents of the Dictionary much at all, tending to rely instead on Johnson's widely available Preface. By contrast, scholars like Robert DeMaria and Allen Reddick , with their "deep and sustained research into the book's content," have "inaugurated a new stage of serious study of the Dictionary" (Lynch and McDermott 2005, 2-3). Still, as McDermott and Lynch point out, "most of those who have written about the Dictionary are literary scholars, who tend to regardJohnson as a literary lexicographer" (Lynch and McDermott 2005). ft might also be said thatJohnson's Dictionary is often treated as a literary dictionary , ft has been read, for instance, as a unified text with themes, and as a text that "develop [s] a persistent [polemical] rhetoric" at the level of the entry (Reddick 1996, 164; see also Reddick 1998). The mostly literary Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 30 (2009) , 1 19-1 29 120Chris P. Pearce scholars who study the Dictionary not only read it with strategies more often applied to didactic treatises or rhetorical performances. They also tend to focus on Johnson's use of literary, political, legal, or theological sources. Literary and cultural studies scholars, including myself,just have not spent much time looking at the Dictionary's use of Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, orJohn Quincy, the dissenting Whig medical writer who "considered dried millipedes good for tuberculous lymphatic glands" (Moore 2004). Yet if we look a little more closely into the wayJohnson uses these long-neglected sources, we stand to gain a more complete view ofjohnson 's methods and broader aims in the Dictionary.Johnson's use ofscientific sources suggests, for instance, how his lexicographic choices are often shaped by his material, notjust shaped by him. But taking a more serious look atJohnson's use ofscientific sources will do more than that. It opens up for us an important part of the intellectual world thatJohnson himself, in working on the Dictionary, had to confront and contemplate more closely than he ever had before. The readingjohnson did for his Dictionary project imbued him with literature, but literature in the more capacious eighteenth century sense of the term, which, asJohnson's entry for literature suggests, included notjust "skill in letters," but "learning" in general. Even the word letters for Johnson can denote 'learning' itself, rather than stricdy belletristic pursuits.1 It is this scientific world of open-ended inquiry, alongside the realms ofphilology and belletristic criticism, that helped shapeJohnson's lexicographic voice and authorial presence in the Dictionary. It is this world that helped shape what W. K. Wimsatt has described as the often "Latinate, abstract, and sesquipedalean diction" that distinguishesJohnson 's prose style, a diction that suggests a "physico-philosophical core" of Johnson's "moral and psychological discourse" (Wimsatt 1948, xii-xiii) And, finally, it is this world — wherein the deepest secrets of nature are revealed only by the slow, sometimes tedious accretion of knowledge — that informsJohnson's passionate defense of bold pursuits of intellectual labor, his belief in the value of "general cooperation" for the accumulation of knowledge, and his apologias for the toiling drudge. In this study, I offer a partial but perhaps revealing view ofjohnson 's use ofscientific sources in the Dictionary. My claims are based on an 1 Unless otherwise noted, definitions from the...