Accumulation in Johnson’s Dictionary

Late Sixteenth Century England witnessed 'Great excesse in shooes'. Modish footwear, warned the social reformer Philip Stubbes, caused much 'flipping & flapping up and downe in y^e dirte', with which its owners 'exaggerate a mountain of mire'. The complaint is voiced in The Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes's closely observed, vigorous attack, 'Made dialoguewise', on the greed and impiety of his contemporaries. The author implies (through his mouthpiece, Philoponus) that he scoured England for more than seven years amassing evidence for The Anatomie;¹ such dedication anticipates that of John Aubrey, supreme enthusiast for the particulars of everyday existence, who spent the 1670s and 1680s garnering scraps of biographical information for his 'minutes of lives'.²

Stubbes is one of three sixteenth century authors to exemplify the Oxford English Dictionary's first sense of the verb 'To exaggerate', a sense (now obsolete) which sums up the ways in which he and Aubrey (as well as the compilers of the OED itself) went about their work: 'To heap or pile up, accumulate: said with reference to both material and immaterial objects: also to form by accumulation'. Even while he is complaining about yet another pernicious result of consumerism – the material accumulation of dirt around his subjects' heels – Stubbes is busy practising a version of the same activity, forming his own mountainous compendium of bad behaviour, observed at first hand and supplemented by numerous references to the Bible.

Works styled 'anatomies' have a particular kinship with the activity of exaggeration in this older sense of heaping or piling things up. They set out to amass the numerous constituent elements of a subject or field in order to reassemble them in more or less ordered form. Consider, for instance, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), also cited under the OED's primary sense of 'exaggerate': 'What a deal of trouble, madness, pain and grief', he writes, quoting St Augustine, 'do we sustain and exaggerate unto ourselves, to get that secure happiness . . . which we peradventure shall never have'. The Anatomy of Melancholy itself embodies this tendency to accumulate 'a deal of' materials in a bid to militate against unhappiness; as Samuel Johnson remarked of this 'valuable' book (one of his favourites),³ 'It is, perhaps, overloaded with quotation'.⁴

To exaggerate, then, appears to be a good and a bad thing. Although the OED does not include, in its first definition of the verb, any hint of exaggeration's perceived excesses or departures from the truth, such suspicions are already beginning to manifest themselves in the work as Stubbes and Burton use it within their Anatomies. Both authors may practise, at the methodological level, a form of exaggeration, but each disparages acts of material or immaterial accumulation in the course of his work.

In The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747), Johnson wrote that 'no terrestrial greatness is more than an aggregate of little things . . . drops added to drops constitute the ocean'.⁵ He was describing, in advance, the Lockean method of exaggeration employed in the Dictionary of the English Language (1755) – composing a vast body of knowledge through the accretion of numerous petty particulars, especially particulars gathered from first-person sense perceptions. Exaggeration, in the sense of accretion, is closely related to the practice of copia – variation and plenitude, at the level of style and content – as it is described in Erasmus's rhetorical textbook, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512), On the twofold abundance of expressions and ideas. (Boswell remarked in 1773 on Johnson's 'copious exaggeration', meaning that his friend spoke both at length and 'rather strongly'.⁶) Tracing Erasmus's 'indefatigable elaboration of thought and locution' back to medieval homiletic and poetic theories of dilation, George John Engelhardt comments that De duplici copia

became for many decades the manual through which novices might learn to accumulate synonyms, examples, similes, adages, allusions, epiphonemes, and all the materia of disciplined expatiation, thus effecting . . . elegant copiousness of thought and language.⁷

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the potential to understand exaggeration as a serious intellectual activity had all but disappeared. Any sense...