Samuel Johnson's Unpublished Revisions to the Dictionary of the English Language (review)

REVIEWS SamuelJohnson's Unpublished Revisions to the Dictionary of the English Language. Edited by Allen Reddick [and others]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xxix + 425. $180. Allen Reddick's lavish facsimile ofJohnson's editorial revisions is a remarkable and valuable work of scholarship. It consists of 122 photographed sheets of the first edition of the Dictionary (1755) covering entries from Awry to Bystander. These pages were prepared for inclusion in a new edition, and work on them began shordy after the publication of the great folio in 1755. By the timeJohnson returned to his labors fifteen years later, these pages (with their additions and corrections) had been misplaced or were otherwise unavailable for use. Reddick has not only reproduced these images, he has supplied transcripts of the handwriting found in the margins in addition to excisions and corrections on the sheets themselves that showJohnson's intentions to reshape his text. Some, but not all, of this writing is inJohnson's hand. Serious study of the methods employed byJohnson in conceiving and executing his work began in a concerted way withJames H. Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb's Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book (1955). A substantial portion of their argument came from the inspection of two documents : "A Short Scheme for Compiling a New Dictionary of the English Language " and the so-called "fair copy" of the document that was published as Johnson's Planfor a Dictionary ofthe English Language (1747). Close attention to these documents (along with the marginal annotations made in them) did much to enable Sledd and KoIb to discernJohnson's changing ideas about the language and the concept of authority in the evolution of his work.1 In a remarkable instance of scholarly longevity and persistence, Professor KoIb (with Robert DeMaria,Jr.) hasjust published in the YaleJohnson a careful edition of writings called Johnson on the English Language (2005). In it are facsimiles of the two key documents used for the Sledd and KoIb (1955): 'These two documents were in the collection of Donald and Mary Hyde and were recently bequeathed to the Houghton Library at Harvard by Mary Hyde Eccles. They were a fascinating element in the display of dictionary material mounted at the Houghton for the 2005 meeting of DSNA. On behalf of those interested in these matters, I want to thank (again) David Jost, our past-president , for his efforts in mounting this exhibition. Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 26 (2005) Reviews207 the "Short Scheme" (with facing transcript elucidatingJohnson's famously bad handwriting) and a facsimile of the "fair copy" (needing no such transcript, they claim, since it was prepared by a professional scribe.) Notations and insertions on the "Short Scheme" are given in a contrasting typeface. Not available to Sledd and KoIb in 1955 was another major source for understanding the development ofJohnson's thought: sheets of the folio with slips pasted to them (covering the first part of the alphabet). This collection came to be called the Sneyd-G****l copy, the first name deriving from Ralph Sneyd, who purchased it from a London bookseller in the nineteenth century. It remained in his family until its sale at auction in 1927. It was then purchased by one of America's wealthy book collectors whose name I have listed after the hyphen and defaced here with asterisks. (Reddick gives the spelling in full.) G****l is partly erased from history here because he spent more than thirty years keeping the copy hidden from scholarship, and he had purchased it to begin with only to keep it out of the hands of another wealthy American who had purchased a bibliophilie treasure he had especially wanted. After they had nearly completed their work, Sledd and KoIb discovered the whereabouts of the copy. To that point they had only had available to them the single facsimile page reproduced in the 1927 auction catalog, and they persistendy and urgently pleaded with G****l to let them examine the entire work. G****l, however, "would give no assurance that further information concerning the Sneyd copy would be available in the foreseeable future" (Sledd and KoIb 1955, 235). By the...