Annotated Copies of Early Editions of Johnson’s Dictionary: A Preliminary Account

The notice of the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary in R. C. Alston’s Bibliography of the English Language remarks that ‘it has not been possible to examine every copy, so that no attempt can be made to list annotated copies (of which there must be many)’.¹ Nor was the listing of annotated copies part of the great task undertaken by J. D. Fleeman in his bibliography of Johnson. What follows is a preliminary account of twenty-one annotated copies of eighteenth-century editions of the Dictionary, drawing on autopsy, on photographic reproductions, and (inevitably in the case of the several lost and unlocated copies) on published records. It is therefore nothing like the full list of personally inspected copies which Alston admitted was beyond even his powers. Making such a list would be a book-length project. However, the information which is gathered here is of obvious interest, and it has not been gathered elsewhere. Several publications have, indeed, identified multiple annotated copies of early editions of the Dictionary. The first of these was Henry Todd’s intro- duction to his first enlarged edition of the Dictionary, published for Longman, Rees, and others in 1818, in which he commented on five anno- tated copies which had been made available to him as he worked (3, 8, 15, 19, and 20 in the list below); further comments on some of these copies were made by Robert Latham in his revision of Todd’s edition, of which the first volume was published in 1866.² W. P. Courtney’s bibliography mentioned all those which were known to Todd, and a total of three more (2, 4, and 13 in the list below).³ The two-part study ‘Projected English Dictionaries, 1755–1828’ by Allen Walker Read, one of the most able twentieth-century historians of English lexicography, gathers necessarily brief references to eleven annotated copies in its final footnote, adding three to Courtney’s list (6, 16, and 17).⁴ The notice of Johnson in the Index of English Literary Manuscripts identifies seven of the annotated copies listed below (1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 10, and 13), and one other (the Bannister copy mentioned immediately before the list).⁵ Finally, Alston’s sadly truncated Bibliography volume on manuscripts identifies four of the copies listed below (1, 2, 4, 13) and the Bannister copy.⁶

By ‘annotated copies’ I mean those whose text has been marked up with critical or informative additions, not those which simply bear an ownership or presentation inscription or the like. J. D. Fleeman’s Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson lists seven copies presented or bequeathed by Johnson himself, two of them unlocated (one of these, Hill Boothby’s, has since been identified); to them can be added an eighth, with a bookplate recording its presentation by Johnson to the orthoepist Thomas Sheridan.⁷ Fleeman regretted that ‘several fascinating items have had to be excluded’ from the handlist, giving as an example Lord Chesterfield’s copy of the first edition of the Dictionary, then in the collec- tion of Mary Hyde and now at Harvard, and adding that ‘they will in due time find their memorial’.⁸ They could not be memorialized in his Bibliography: ‘To individual copies’, he wrote there, ‘are added brief details of interest and significance. Some provenances are quoted’—for instance Lord Chesterfield’s and Adam Smith’s copies of the first edition, John Johnston of Grange’s of the fourth, and Robert Burns’s of the ‘fourth’ abridged edition are identified—‘but my notes have been desultory’.⁹ In this respect, too, a full reckoning would have to be part of a systematic census of copies.

Two early inscriptions which go beyond the marking of ownership but do not criticize or supplement the text may be mentioned briefly at this point. The first is by Boswell, on a fragment of a copy of the third edition (1765): ‘Matthew Henderson found this in a Littlehouse at Edinburgh & twitted me with my Great Friend’s...