The State of the Language

Four recent books contribute in various ways to our understanding of and appreciation for the English language. Volume eighteen in Yale University’s ongoing edition of Samuel Johnson’s oeuvre is a magisterial volume edited by the eminent Johnsonians Gwin Kolb and Robert DeMaria. Students of English literature are accustomed to think of Johnson as prose stylist, poet, arbiter of literature, moralist, lexicographer, and legendary conversationalist; but few readers have taken notice of what George McKnight said eighty years ago in Modern English in the Making: “If the story of the English language has one leading character, a single hero, that hero is Samuel Johnson.” Kolb and DeMaria have ensured that students in the future will find it hard to overlook the linguistic component of the Johnson corpus.

Johnson on the English Language presents the first critical edition of The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747), the preface to the Dictionary (1755), “The History of the English Language” and “A Grammar of the English Tongue” that follow the preface in the frontmatter of the Dictionary, the preface to the first abridged edition of the Dictionary (1756), and the advertisement to the fourth folio edition of the Dictionary (1773). In an appendix the editors supply a facsimile of the original manuscript of “A Short Scheme for compiling a new Dictionary of the English Language” written in Johnson’s difficult hand and replete with his innumerable cancellations, corrections, and annotations, as well as those of two readers of the “Scheme.” A second appendix is a facsimile of an amanuensis’s fair copy of The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson’s holograph from which the fair copy was made having been lost) with corrections and comments in Johnson’s hand plus eight comments by Lord Chesterfield, to whom Johnson had submitted and addressed his Plan. The first facsimile is provided with a careful transcription by the editors; the amanuensis’s more easily legible copy is not. In tandem these facsimiles of two stages in the evolution of the Plan give readers an intimate and fascinating view of a Johnsonian text in the making.

In gathering these writings on the English language into a single volume the editors provide readers a coherent representation of Johnson’s perspective on the growth and status of English. The “Grammar” is supplied with a new reading context by mere typographical sleight-of-hand; in the Dictionary the grammar is presented as a series of topics set out in normal roman type followed by commentary in very small type. By reprinting it all in paragraphs in standard roman type the editors endow the text with the air of a consecutive grammatical treatise, and it reads well as such. Its value lies in the picture it grants to us of an informed intellectual’s conception of the language in the mid-eighteenth century. That conception falls far short, of course, of our understanding of the language today. The discussion of etymology amply displays eighteenth-century linguistic amateurism (English soon derived from Latin subitaneus, reach from praedari, chase from quaesitio, etc.), and many of the discussions of “etymology” are devoted to what we would call “sound symbolism.” There are odd pronouncements, obviously contrary to fact, as when he says, “Our adjectives and pronouns are invariable,” when in reality the former are inflected for degree and the latter for case and number. The standard authorities of the day—Lily, Wallis, Ben Jonson—are cited (with all their limitations) throughout.

“The History of the English Language” consists of little more than a chronological anthology of selections from English writers from the age of Alfred the Great to that of the Elizabethans. Sir Thomas More is quoted most extensively; Shakespeare receives not a mention. Such generalizations about language are offered as were characteristic of the opinio communis of the time: Hungarian is a Slavic language; Dutch and Frisian are derived from Anglo-Saxon; etc. The misconceptions and prejudices of the eighteenth century are on full display and are couched in memorable prose.

Each of the texts edited here is provided with an introduction that expertly...