The Creators of Information in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Creators of Information in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Melissa Patterson A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Melissa Patterson 2015 The Creators of Information in Eighteenth-Century Britain Melissa Patterson Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2015 Abstract In twenty-first-century accounts of how knowledge was transmitted at second hand in the early modern period and the eighteenth century, the idea of information has played a crucial role. “Information” refers to the content that was compiled and stored on paper and shared in reference books and periodical sheets. My thesis argues that eighteenth-century Britons understood printed information through the lens of cultural discourses that privileged engagements with books that we would now call “literary.” By re-thinking the transmission of information as a textual object in eighteenth-century Britain, I argue, we can better understand the complex ways in which information was credited, acquired, and shared. I show how the author-function played a role in the public sharing of information in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson’s rhetoric of personal sacrifice in the “Preface” and Plan of an English Dictionary (1747), I argue, should be contrasted with the methods of Johnson’s rival, Nathan Bailey. Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721-1802) offers an example of the failure of compiled information to gain cultural authority without authorial control. I argue that Jonathan Swift’s satires on textual criticism, cryptanalysis, and scientific languages can be seen as critiques of mechanical reading “devices” that extracted information from texts. A direct challenge to informational uses of language was offered at the end of the eighteenth century in the work of Johnson’s friend, Hester Lynch Piozzi. Piozzi’s English-language reference work, British Synonymy (1794), showed how direct engagement with the “redundant” material of language ii provided a knowledge of texts that was difficult to communicate but necessary to observe. I suggest that the mediation of public information in eighteenth-century Britain was balanced in important ways by literary discourses that argued for the importance of the specific ways in which knowledge was credited, acquired, and shared through language. iii Acknowledgments I thank Deidre Lynch, my supervisor, for her support, generosity, and enlivening conversation, for sharing her formidable insight and knowledge, and for opening new avenues to me. I thank my committee members Carol Percy and Heather Jackson for their incisive feedback and conversations that helped me to discern my project, their encouraging comments and keen recommendations, and the way they fostered my research with generosity and spirit. I am grateful to Heather Jackson for taking steps to ensure that I was supported during my precarious career as an international student and to Deidre Lynch for providing me with the means to attend conferences as far away as other countries. I am also grateful to Deidre Lynch and Carol Percy for seeking out support for me throughout my studies, bringing me to conferences and finding scholarships and other opportunities for me. My work has benefited from the Warren N. Cordell Research Fellowship and the Ruth E. and the Harry E. Carter Ontario Graduate Scholarship. I am lucky to have benefited from conversations with John Baird, Simon Dickie, Darryl Domingo, Alan Galey, Emma Gorst, Lindsey Eckert, Tony Fong, Alexandra Howard, Thomas Keymer, Marie Korey, Richard Landon, Randall McCleod, Erin Parker, Michael Raby, Jay Rajiva, Alpen Razy, Janet Sorensen, Morgan Vanek and many others I have not named. iv Table of Contents Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................v List of Appendices ........................................................................................................................ vii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Bailey's Dictonary: Reading Information....................................................... .............16 Bailey’s Dictionaries and Johnson’s Plan .....................................................................................20 The Dictionary as “Storehouse” of Words and Author’s Work ....................................................26 Johnson’s Use of Bailey’s Dictionary and the Bookseller’s Use of Both .....................................34 Readers of the Bailey Dictionary: Information and “the School of the People” ...........................41 Chapter 2: Johnson's Dictionary: Authoring Information ............................................................ 57 How to Read the First English Dictionary .....................................................................................66 How to Plan the First English Dictionary ......................................................................................77 How to Read Johnson’s Dictionary ...............................................................................................87 Chapter 3: Swift's Reading Devices: Imagining Information ......................................................101 Pope and Swift’s Ciphers .............................................................................................................106 The Ancient versus the Virtual Text ............................................................................................111 The Mathematical Computer .......................................................................................................118 Communication versus Rhetoric ..................................................................................................124 Reading with the Lagado Computer ............................................................................................132 Chapter 4: Piozzi's British Synonymy: Appreciating English ......................................................140 The Virtue of Periodical Essays ...................................................................................................145 The Error of Synonymy and the Use of Synonyms .....................................................................151 Vacuous Writing ..........................................................................................................................156 British Synonymy and Obscurity ..................................................................................................160 v The Medium of Amplified Language ..........................................................................................167 Touching the Medium ..................................................................................................................172 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................175 Works Consulted.................................................................................................................... ......177 Appendix: Bibliography of Nathan Bailey Dictionaries ..............................................................189 vi List of Appendices 1. Bibliography of Nathan Bailey Dictionaries vii 1 Introduction This thesis began when I undertook a bibliography of eighteenth-century lexicographer Nathan Bailey’s little-known English dictionaries, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721-1802), and the illustrated, expanded, Dictionarium Britannicum (1730, 1736). Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, though used by more Britons than any English dictionary before it, was eclipsed in popular consciousness by Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson had the official backing of the nation’s learned and polite for undertaking a new English-language codifying project that would vie with France’s Dictionnaire de L’Academie française. Johnson’s supporters expected the lexicographer to undertake an original work by prescribing limits to the contents of the Dictionary, determining which words counted as proper English. By contrast, Bailey’s dictionaries were an inclusive form of database. In Peter Stallybrass’s discussion of early- modern writing as database, he argues that writers copied from commonplace books and printed inventories of knowledge, housing collections of other texts within their own compositions. Benefitting from what Simon Stern has called “a flourishing public domain” and the “limited scope of legal protection” of authors in the eighteenth century, Bailey compiled dictionaries that were collections of other English dictionaries, reference books, and glossaries published prior to (and during) the early eighteenth century in London.1 Bailey collected “hard words” for his inclusive list of terms, Latin and technical words that allowed his dictionary to double as a general reference book or “dictionary” of arts and sciences. Bailey’s Dictionary might be said to have shared information, information in the modern sense that Geoffrey Nunberg discusses in his essay “Farewell to the Information Age”: Nunberg argues that “information” is now a substance that has no proper speaker or form, a 1 See Peter Stallybrass’s discussion in “Against Thinking,”

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