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Copyright by Christopher Patrick Pearce 2004 Copyright by Christopher Patrick Pearce 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Christopher Patrick Pearce certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: TERMS OF CORRUPTION: SAMUEL JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY IN ITS CONTEXTS Committee: ___________________________ Elizabeth Hedrick, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Sara E. Kimball, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Cable ___________________________ James D. Garrison ___________________________ Brian P. Levack TERMS OF CORRUPTION: SAMUEL JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY IN ITS CONTEXTS by Christopher Patrick Pearce, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2004 For Elizabeth Lehnertz ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Elizabeth Hedrick and Sara Kimball have made this dissertation much better than it would have been without their advice. I cannot thank them enough for their endless patience, encouragement, good sense, and good humor. The value of their contributions to my experience at the University of Texas and to my intellectual growth is immeasurable. I would also like to thank Thomas Cable, James D. Garrison, and Brian P. Levack for their support and their suggestions. I also thank my friends and family for their support and encouragement over the years. I could not have come this far without them. In particular, I thank my mother as well as my late father for their love and encouragement. I also would like to thank my father-in-law, Jay F. Lehnertz, for his wisdom, empathy, and humor. Most of all, I thank my wife, Elizabeth Lehnertz, for endless love and faith. v TERMS OF CORRUPTION SAMUEL JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY IN ITS CONTEXTS Publication No. ___________ Christopher Patrick Pearce, Ph.D The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisors: Elizabeth Hedrick and Sara E. Kimball This dissertation revises our understanding of one of the most important and controversial works on language in the eighteenth century. It provides the first rhetorically situated analysis of the Preface, and offers new ways to read the Dictionary that take into account the hermeneutic challenges it poses. I employ replicable interpretive strategies for future students of the Dictionary, and offer a novel, substantive reconstruction of Johnson’s philological methods and logic. By rhetorically situating the Preface, reconstructing the interpretive logic of Johnson’s philology, and recovering Johnson’s complex and changing understanding of language change, this study makes a significant contribution to Johnson studies and revises our understanding of Johnson’s place within the history of modern language study. Chapter 1, a rhetorical analysis of the Preface, reveals its importance as an early modern masterwork of scholarly self-fashioning in an age when self-promotion was both socially and morally awkward. This reading of the Preface moreover explains how and vi why we should limit its role in determining our views about Johnson’s ideas on language. Chapter 2 shows how Johnson’s etymologies, definitions, and usage notes—usually regarded as discrete acts—are most fruitfully read as complementary interpretive activities. By showing how the parts of Johnson’s entries fit together, and by recovering the overlooked connections between separate entries, I reconstruct the logic of Johnson’s philological reasoning. Chapter 3 shows that, contrary to all accounts, Johnson’s most common and most seemingly prescriptive term to describe language change, “corruption,” is not just a term of condemnation, but a term of conjecture and inquiry operating within a context of early modern scientific discourse whereby all sublunary change is viewed as “corruption.” As I demonstrate, Johnson’s use of the term “corruption” signals his participation in a paradigm shift regarding thinking about language change and shows how he has more in common with nineteenth-century historical philologists than we ever imagined. An Epilogue provides a theoretical framework for reading the Dictionary. This dissertation not only challenges the ways that literary critics, linguists, and historians of the English language read the Dictionary, it provides sound and replicable ways to read this controversial classic text. vii CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1, The Rhetoric of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary 21 I. Johnson’s Proud Folio: The Material and Rhetorical Contexts of 27 the Preface II. “Defensive Pride”: The Moral and Rhetorical Foundations of the 69 Preface in Johnson’s Rambler and Adventurer III. Johnson Enkrates: The Ethos of the Folio Preface 99 IV. The Rhetoric of the Preface and Johnson’s Views on Language 141 Chapter 2, Recovering the “Rigour of Interpretative Lexicography”: or, How to 148 Read Johnson’s Dictionary I. Introduction 148 II. Johnson’s Editorial Commentary in the Dictionary: Literature 158 Review III. Text and Metatext: The Structure of Entries in the Dictionary and 163 the Locations of Johnson’s Commentary IV. “The Structures and Relations of Words”: Reading the Dictionary 176 and its Philology across the Entries Chapter 3, Johnson’s Use of Corruption as a Linguistic Heuristic 203 I. Introduction 203 II. Johnson’s Uses of the Term “Corruption” 209 III. Types of Corruption, “Kindred Letters,” and William Holder’s 246 Elements of Speech Epilogue 276 Bibliography 302 Vita 311 viii Introduction Samuel Johnson has been called many things, but he has rarely been called a linguist. In fact, with his many descriptions of language change as “corruption,” Johnson is excluded from contemporary histories of linguistics, except as a negative example. If Johnson is, for James Boswell, “our great philologist,” he is for modern linguists an emblem of bygone prescriptivism.1 Modern treatments of Johnson associate him with the “doctrine of correctness,” the “authoritarian principle in linguistic criticism,” and the eighteenth-century “puristic movement.”2 The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics includes Johnson under its entry on “Prescriptive Grammar,” but excludes him from its entry on the history of linguistics.3 Generally, linguists only mention Johnson or eighteenth-century language study to demonstrate antiquated, wrongheaded, or even morally dubious approaches to linguistics. Leonard Bloomfield, pioneer of American structuralist linguistics and one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century, contrasts his own approach with the “failures” of “eighteenth-century scholars,” which for him include “the failure to distinguish between actual speech and the use of writing” and the conclusion that “languages are preserved by the usage of educated and careful people and changed by the 1 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-64), I, 187. All references to this text are designated hereafter as Life. When referring to multivolume standard editions of Johnson’s works I use Roman numerals. For all other multivolume works I use Arabic numerals, in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 2 Sterling A. Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 1700-1800 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1929); Harold Byron Allen, “Samuel Johnson and the Authoritarian Principle in Linguistic Criticism” (PhD diss., University of Michigan 1940); Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay?, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 8. 3 Lesley Milroy and James Milroy, “Prescriptive Grammar,” in William Bright, ed. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3:269. 1 corruptions of the vulgar. In the case of modern languages like English,” Bloomfield writes, “they believed, accordingly, that the speech-forms of books and upper-class conversation represented an older and purer level, from which the ‘vulgarisms’ of the common people had branched off as ‘corruptions’ by a process of ‘linguistic decay.’” For Bloomfield, the notion of language change as “corruption” or “decay” is a misconception that left eighteenth-century “grammarians” free to “prescribe fanciful rules” and prevented them from making use of linguistic evidence.4 Accurate linguistic analysis, according to this view, can only take place after exorcising morally laden terms like “corruption” from the linguist’s interpretive vocabulary. One can only become a linguist after casting off both the terms of corruption and the mistaken notions they signify. Johnson’s writings on language abound with such terms, of course, which include not only “corruption,” but also the closely related words “decay,” “degeneration,” “vitiation,” and “depravation.” Such terms, along with opposing terms of purity, like “undefiled” and “pure,” lend Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary a strong moralistic tenor and place it in what James and Lesley Milroy call the “complaint tradition” of writings on English.5 These terms of corruption suffuse the Preface, the most commonly cited source for Johnson’s views on language, and inhabit some of its best known and most widely quoted passages. The English language, Johnson writes, has been “exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.” Spelling should not be made 4 Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Henry Holt, 1933), 8; also quoted in Scott Elledge, “The Naked Science of Language, 1747-1786,”
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