Fossil Fish: Preserving Samuel Johnson within Hester Lynch Piozzi's British Synonymy

Fossil Fish: Preserving SamuelJohnson within Hester Lynch Piozzi's British Synonymy Il Lisa Berglund Buffalo State College "t is Hester Lynch Piozzi's fortune and misfortune ever to be .linked in the public mind with her most famous friend. Their intimacy assured the tremendous success of her first book, Anecdotes of the Late SamuelJohnson (1786), and that triumph paved the way for the positive reception of her edition ofJohnson's correspondence (1788) and for her travel book, Observations and Reflections Made during a Tour ofFrance, Italy and Germany (1789). When she decided to compose "a two-Volume Book of Synonymes in English, like what the Abbé Girard has done in French, for the use of Foreigners, and other Children of six feet high," however, Piozzi formally rejected "help from Dr. Johnson ," as she says in a 1793 letter to her daughter Hester Maria "Queeney" Thrale (Thraliana 1951, 2, 837; Piozzi Letters 22 August 1793, 2, 140). For a writer who had hitched her literary wagon to the star of Johnson's fame, refusing to followJohnson's model seems peculiar; for a lexicographer, perverse. Published in two octavo volumes in 1794, British Synonymy discriminates 1 180 words in 315 entries, which range in length from a single paragraph to a half-dozen pages. This format, "brief essays in which synonyms [are] discriminated," is, as Sidney I. Landau explains, typical ofsynonymies that predate Roget's Thesaurus ofEnglish Words and Phrases (1852) (Landau 2001, 135). Some entries concentrate on discriminating shades of meaning; into others Piozzi incorporates personal anecdotes or reflections on the political scene, particularly the revolutionary conflict in France. To help her intended audience of non-native speakDictionaries :Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 30 (2009) , 96-1 07 Fossil Fish97 ers to connect their reading of English literature to their forays into polite English conversation, Piozzi often uses quotations to discriminate shades of meaning, and her book becomes a repository of her favorite passages from Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Otway, Prior, Pope, and Dryden, among others. She also includes quotations from Italian and French authors, references to Scripture, and some original translations from French and Italian poetry. The book achieved a modest success, and a second edition was published the same year in Dublin. An abridged version, to which the publishers Parsons and Galignani added numerous illustrations of usage from English literature, appeared in Paris in 1804. Grammar and diction had long interested Piozzi, a fact that doubtless contributed to her earnestness in 1 765 to cultivate the friendship of Samuel Johnson. Before her marriage, she studied the work of James Harris after her mentor Dr. Arthur Collier presented her with the philologist's Hermes: A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar. Young Hester Salusbury's specially-bound copy was interleaved with blank pages, which the then 19-year-old enthusiast filled with marginal comments, observing in one note that grammar is "an interesting Science, & ofgeneral Utility" (Salusbury MS note in Hermes, interleaf facing 6). As a mother, Mrs. Thrale prided herself on teaching her children the correct use of the English language; Thraliana and her other diaries are replete with discussions of words. After her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi in 1 784, she found herself witnessing the particular kind of errors into which the complexity of English idiom betrayed her Italian husband and his compatriots. For example, in Observations and Reflections, Piozzi reports: It is the genius of the German language to degrade all our English words somehow: they call a coach a waggon, and ask a lady if she will buy pomatum to smear her hair with. Such is however the resemblance between their tongue and ours, that the Italians protest they cannot separate either the ideas or the words (Piozzi 1789, 368). Piozzi's decision in 1792 to compile a synonymy, then, responded to the recent stimulation of a lifelong interest. While it is true that Piozzi owed the beginning of her public literary career to her friendship with Johnson, even had she never met the lexicographer, a synonymy might have occupied her pen. As she wrote to Queeney on 19 December 1794: 98Lisa Berglund You may perhaps recollect YourFather's partiality for Abbé Girard's Work...