A history of the dictionary: Dr Johnson, I presume? Transcript Date: Monday, 2 March 2009 - 12:00AM A HISTORY OF THE DICTIONARY: DR JOHNSON, I PRESUME? Henry Hitchings I am going to talk this afternoon about Samuel Johnson - who is today better known as Doctor Johnson - and about his Dictionary of the English Language, which was published on April the 15th, 1755. It seems appropriate to begin with a few thoughts about dictionaries. They are, after all, a resource we take for granted. We consult them rather as a Christian may consult the Bible: looking for absolute and definitive truth. But to many people, even if dictionaries are useful guides, they don't seem interesting. One might very reasonably ask, 'Why expend any energy exploring the origins, methods and qualities of a dictionary? Especially a dictionary published in age so far removed from our own.' As for the idea that someone might go so far as to read a dictionary - and I have read Samuel Johnson's Dictionary; all 2,300 pages; twice... it sounds a bit like madness. Who actually reads dictionaries, apart from Scrabble addicts? One answer, as it happens, is the American civil rights activist Malcolm X, who worked through a dictionary from cover to cover while he was in prison in the 1940s. But this kind of behaviour isn't common, and on the whole we turn to a dictionary to remind ourselves how to spell a particular word or to reassure ourselves that we understand its meaning. Most people are inclined to think of dictionaries as stores of verbal lumber, full of obsolete jargon, or just as forests of words, impenetrable and redolent of damp. There is, of course, another way of looking at them. I've always been the sort of person who likes searching for buried treasure. As a child, I used to read the family medical encyclopaedia - or the 'death book', as we called it. It brimmed with interesting information, even if sometimes it was the sort of information I could comfortably have done without (I have a slightly too vivid recollection of the picture that accompanied the entry for 'zip fastener injuries'). The medical encyclopaedia was a better read than any of the patronizingly cute children's books we had foisted on us at school. So was the London A to Z. I liked the fact, for instance, that in the part of South London where my cousins lived there were adjacent streets called Shakespeare Road, Chaucer Road and Milton Road. Back then I hadn't heard of cultural imperialism, but I had heard of Chaucer and Shakespeare - I'm not so sure about Milton - and my little discovery led me to suspect that the London streets were thick with hidden stories. It was in much the same spirit that I later became interested in dictionaries. Dr Johnson insisted that dictionaries are the pedigree of nations. It was a typical Johnsonian claim: a bold statement, tinged with patriotism and pride. But it was not an exaggeration; the character of our language defines us, and Johnson grasped that dictionaries, while playing an important role in authorizing usage, testify as well to the vitality of languages, to the role of languages as expressions of national character. Our relationship with our own language can be complacent, but when we speak a foreign tongue we sense more keenly the 'characterfulness' of that language, the peculiar ways it channels history and culture, its special version of the world, its distinctive textures and codes. Different languages seem suited to different areas of experience. Legend has it that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, preferred to speak French to diplomats, Italian to ladies, German to stable boys, and Spanish to God. English he seems to have used sparingly - allegedly only to talk to geese. A recent history of world languages, a wonderful book by Nicholas Ostler called Empires of the Word, paints a different picture, speaking of 'Arabic's austere grandeur; Chinese's unshakeable self- regard; Sanskrit's luxuriating hierarchies; Greek's self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Spanish rigidity and fidelity; French admiration for rationality; and English admiration for business acumen.' We may not straightaway recognize all those characterizations, or indeed agree with them, but they provide a useful framework for thinking about English, its flavour, its texture, and how a dictionary can capture its essence. As for reading dictionaries, there's another argument for doing so: they are the last word in what I have already termed 'buried treasure'. They contain a wealth of arcane information, home truths, snippets of trivia, sketches and miniature histories. They are, I would argue, encyclopaedias in disguise. And what about this Dr Johnson? It's a name to conjure with, but that's exactly what tends to happen: he's reduced to a few magical soundbites and inaccurate anecdotes. A hundred years ago pretty much any well-educated person in this country could have recited a string of Johnson's achievements. But his shares have declined. It is probably no exaggeration to say that he is now chiefly known for his appearance in an episode of Blackadder. Some of you may recall the episode in question. It's called 'Ink and Incapability', and begins with Blackadder's master, Prince George, a young man apparently 'as thick as a whale omelette', weighing up the merits of becoming Johnson's patron. He invites the great wordsmith to show him his handiwork. Unfortunately, Blackadder's dogsbody Baldrick uses Johnson's sole manuscript of the Dictionary to stoke a fire. Blackadder decides that the only reasonable course of action is to compile a new dictionary himself and hope Johnson doesn't notice. He struggles, however, to get past 'aardvark' - which he defines as 'Medium-sized insectivore with protruding nasal implement'. A repentant Baldrick is on hand with some characteristically hopeless suggestions. Of the letter 'C' he ventures this: 'big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in'. Blackadder is unamused. Baldrick tries out another of his efforts: 'I'm quite pleased with 'dog',' he says, pausing before supplying his definition - 'Not a cat'. Baldrick isn't being quite as stupid as we might at first think. It's common to phrase definitions in oppositional terms: when we want to tell our friends what something is like, we often tell them what it isn't. 'He's not a tall man'; 'This wine's not too tannic'. Johnson himself, in his Dictionaryentry for the word 'sweet', gives as three of his definitions 'not salt', 'not sour' and 'not stinking'. But while the Blackadder episode may be quite perceptive about one of the problems that faces people who make dictionaries, its fidelity to history is limited (for instance, it has Jane Austen as Johnson's contemporary, sporting 'a beard like a rhododendron'), and it is responsible for a few funny ideas about Johnson, notably that he forgot to include in his magnum opus the word 'sausage' - which he didn't. The main place Dr Johnson crops up, though, is in the more self-regarding quarters of the Press. Johnson was a great one for succinct and witty sayings, and columnists love to quote them - or misquote them, or indeed simply pass them off as their own. The one that appears most often is 'When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life'. True then, perhaps, but now less obviously so - and a cliché. Altogether more pungent, I'd suggest, are Johnson's pronouncements that second marriages are 'the triumph of hope over experience' and that 'Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he be caught young'. In his Dictionary, some of this pungency remains, as when he defines 'suicide' as 'the horrid crime of destroying one's self' and 'luggage' as 'anything of more bulk than value'. In any case, there is a lot more to Johnson than this... It took his best biographer, James Boswell, almost a thousand pages to relate his life. Modern efforts have tended to be more economical - perhaps, making a virtue of brevity, I can at this point usefully distil the life of Dr Johnson into a few hundred words. Samuel Johnson was born in September 1709 in Lichfield, which was at that time a prosperous market town. He was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller, and he grew up in his father's bookshop - a sort of library magpie, able to pluck books down from the shelves at will. His childhood was unhappy. He was part blind, hard of hearing, and disfigured by a form of tuberculosis he had developed as a baby. His home life was awkward, especially when his parents bickered about his father's lack of business sense. At school he was supervised by a succession of peevish, intolerant schoolmasters. It's worth noting his Dictionary definition of 'school': a 'house of discipline and instruction'. It seems telling that the discipline precedes the instruction. In his adolescence Johnson was at peace only with his books or when being indulged by the few local worthies who spotted his unusual powers of imagination and argument. When in 1728, aged nineteen, he went to Oxford University, it should have been a release, but lack of funds forced him to leave after just thirteen months. The next few years were spent in obscurity. But Johnson made an important decision in 1737. By this time he was married to a woman twenty years his senior and had failed in his attempt to set up a boarding school with her money. Now, hoping to make a living as a writer, he determined to travel to London, Dick Whittington style, to seek his fortune.