The Authoritative Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson's authority has outlasted fluctuations of biographical and critical interest for more than two centuries, and appears permanent. His is one of the 'very few names' that 'may be considered as a lamp that shines unconsumed'.¹ Yet of the texts gathered in the three volumes under review, only the preface to the Dictionary is a monument to that authority. The others have been largely inaccessible, for various reasons: some are in Latin, some are facsimiles from rare documents, and some are here edited critically for the first time since their original appearance. The editors of these works have therefore had to surmount unusual difficulties in order to establish their claim on our attention and to place them among the better-known parts of the Johnsonian canon.

The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, written in 1747 as Johnson was beginning the undertaking which would secure his prominence among the authors of his day, laments the errancy of all human things: 'language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived' (p. 44). It is thus ironic that he became known to posterity as 'Dictionary Johnson', a sobriquet whose finality obscures the picaresque decade he spent with the English language. In Johnson on the English Language, Gwin J. Kolb and Robert De Maria Jr have provided readers without access to archival records a relatively full sense of the comic peregrinations that established Johnson's authority as a lexicographer and finally joined his name with his book.

The journey was in some cases actual, as when Johnson travelled to Oxford in the months immediately prior to the publication of the Dictionary. As the editors discover, he did not much consult the holdings there, though he did consult prominent scholars, such as Thomas Warton and Francis Wise (pp. 63–5). In other cases, the journey was conceptual. Kolb and De Maria identify one of the readers who commented on Johnson's early 'Scheme for Compiling a New English Dictionary' as Dr John Taylor, a close friend and also, as they mention, not without a certain novelistic relish, the 'bull-breeding king of Ashbourne' (p. 3). In the 'Scheme' Johnson proposes to organise his work according to etymology, classifying words as simple or compound, primitive or derivative. Taylor vigorously opposed this idea and reminded Johnson that 'a Dictionary has no more to do with Connections and Dependance than a Warehouse-Book. They are both mere Reportoriums, & if they are not such they are of no use at all' (pp. 394–5).

The comment illustrates the clash between received methods and Johnson's ambition. He understood better than Taylor how vital were etymology and usage; otherwise, to 'compile' a 'Reportorium' would result in a mere warehouse of a book. As Kolb and De Maria explain, he consulted English dictionaries, but he also turned to the critical works produced by Continental humanists. The authors and academies that issued these works were arbiters of the republic of letters, and their scholarship influenced life and thought outside the halls of academe. Johnson followed their example, establishing standards of purity that were linguistic but also scientific and theological. He culled his quotations only from those English authors who met these exacting standards, hoping that his illustrative passages would transcend the merely utilitarian aim of establishing usage and introduce readers to the principles of moral and intellectual life.

As these brief remarks suggest, the Dictionary did not spring forth from Johnson's head fully armed and born like its author to grapple with...