Harmless Drudgery?

Samuel Johnson: 'Sir, your book is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.' F. W. Bateson: 'I have chosen this particular example not because of the grossness of its inaccuracies but because of the general inadequacy it exhibits to meet scholarly requirements.'

In the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, the work that constitutes Johnson's greatest legacy to the English-speaking world – his Dictionary of the English Language – isn't included. Imagine, if you will, the collected works of Shakespeare minus Hamlet; of Voltaire minus Candide; of Flaubert minus Madame Bovary; of Mark Twain minus The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. You get the idea. When you collect an author's works, you don't omit the magnum opus. But one cannot really fault the editors for shying away from Johnson's huge dictionary of 1755. As they say, 'The body of the Dictionary falls outside the scope of the Yale Edition because of its vast size'.

Instead, the scholars who prepared the volume entitled Samuel Johnson on the English Language – Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Jr. – present an annotated version of all Johnson's writings incident to the dictionary: the original proposal for the great work (1747); pieces from the work itself (1755), namely the preface, the history of the English language, and the grammar of the English language; a preface to Johnson's abridgement (1756); an advertisement to the fourth folio edition (1773); and two appendices presenting facsimile reproductions of manuscript material (never before generally available to scholars). The editors rightly claim that 'this group of writings has never appeared in a single volume before' – although the more important ones have certainly appeared together in many editions.

The Kolb–DeMaria plan was excellent: collect the pieces, provide scholarly introductions, carefully note the variations among editions, and annotate the pieces with references to Johnsonian definitions, quotations from Johnson's correspondence, and other relevant materials. The execution, however, is pretty flawed – so much so that this first printing is unworthy of becoming the standard work in the field. This book is a marginally acceptable sixth draft of what should have been a ten-draft work. If emendations can be made in later printings, it might be adequate to meet scholarly standards.

Nowhere is the misbegotten execution more apparent than in the grossly inadequate credit given to James Sledd, one of the most distinguished linguists of the twentieth century. Although the commentary in the book is said to be 'unprecedented', an enigmatic footnote to the editors' 21-page introduction to Johnson's plan for his dictionary explains that, 'unless otherwise noted, the present discussion is drawn from Sledd–Kolb'. That's a 1955 book: James Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book. And so it is, often word for word. This massive borrowing leads to several problems. If the Kolb–DeMaria introduction to the Plan is in fact mostly a reprint of the Sledd–Kolb chapter of 1955, what has happened to the Sledd attributions? He is absent from the five long paragraphs of acknowledgements. Although he died in 2003, Sledd is absent from the specific paragraph devoted to the 'several scholars and friends whose deaths have deprived us of some of the pleasure we have in presenting this publication'. Sledd is not even given his full name in this book – not in the text and not in the footnotes – except in the table of short titles and the index. Every reference is to 'Sledd–Kolb', mostly in footnotes, and there are only thirteen of them (unlucky Sledd!) in this 506-page book.

This is no small matter. It appears that the better part of a 38-page chapter of Sledd–Kolb (published by Chicago) has been appropriated into this Yale edition, with grossly inadequate attribution to a co-author. How much...