Samuel Johnson and the Dictionary

Some independences are won in parliaments and some on battlefields. A quieter sort is won at a writing-desk, by a man who has been kept waiting too long in another man's antechamber and who decides, on the eve of his own vindication, that the wait shall be entered into the record.

THE LICHFIELD BOOKSELLER'S SON

He was born above a bookshop at 4 Breadmarket Street in Lichfield, on the eighteenth of September 1709, the son of Michael Johnson, a provincial bookseller chronically short of money, and Sarah Ford. Scrofula marked his face and weakened his eyes in infancy; the touch of Queen Anne in 1712 did not cure him. He took to books because he could hold them close. Pembroke College Oxford received him in 1728 and lost him thirteen months later when the family money failed. He left without a degree, returned to the Midlands, married Elizabeth Porter (a widow some twenty years his senior, whom he called Tetty), and in 1737 walked to London with his pupil David Garrick to try the trade of letters. For nine years after that he was a Grub Street hand: parliamentary reports for Edward Cave at the Gentleman's Magazine, the poem London (1738), the Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), the Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), the twice-weekly Rambler (1750-52). A scholar's reputation accreting around a poor man's name.

THE PLAN AND THE EARL

In 1746 the booksellers, Strahan and Dodsley chief among them, contracted with him to produce an English dictionary on the scholarly model the Académie Française had brought to French in 1694. He addressed his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language to Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Secretary of State, arbiter of polite letters, in the hope of patronage. He called at the Earl's Grosvenor Square house in February 1747 and was made to wait in the outward rooms. He was, by one account he afterwards gave, kept waiting while Colley Cibber was received within. He did not call again. For seven years he worked at Gough Square, off Fleet Street, with six amanuenses at long deal tables in the garret, paring slips, copying out quotations from Sidney to Swift, building the corpus that would carry roughly forty-three thousand entries and a hundred and fourteen thousand illustrations. The Académie had spent forty years and forty academicians in eight teams. He worked at about a column and a half a day. Tetty died in March 1752. The work continued.

THE GARRET ON THE EVE

It is an afternoon in early April 1755, in the upper room at 17 Gough Square. Pale spring light comes through the east casement. The deal tables stand where they have stood for nine years. The amanuenses are gone home or to their suppers. The bound second-volume proof has just been brought up by a printer's boy from Strahan's shop in the Strand. Publication is set for the fifteenth, nine days off. Two folio volumes, four pounds and ten shillings the set, an edition of two thousand. On the floor lie the printed sheets of the first volume's front matter: the Preface, the History of the English Language, the Grammar, and at the head the Plan once addressed, in 1747, to the Earl of Chesterfield. He sits heavy at the desk; his eyes, never strong, are tired with the proofs. In the pocket of his coat is a copy of The World for November 1754, in which the Earl, having heard which way the wind sets, has written two graceful essays recommending the forthcoming Dictionary to the public, and offering, in the lightest courtly register, to stand as its patron.

THE HINGE

He weighs the gesture. To accept it is the work of a single courteous reply: a Lordship's name above the Plan in the second edition, an annuity perhaps, a settled place at the better tables of the town. To decline it is to make a private quarrel public, since by the convention of the trade a letter written in February will be copied at Cave's and at Strahan's and read aloud in the coffee-houses before Easter. He thinks of the seven years. He thinks of the outward rooms, and of Tetty, who did not live to see the book. He thinks of the man drowning, who is offered a hand only when his feet have already touched the gravel. The metaphor arrives whole, in the cadence he has been making his own since the Rambler: balanced clauses, the Latin underneath the English, the indignation kept in the harness of grammar. A lexicographer is, by the trade itself, a man who fixes meanings; and the meaning of the word Patron is, at this moment in his life, about to be fixed. He dips the pen. The letter is dated the seventh of February 1755; the date in the garret is later; the deliberation is the same deliberation, drawn out across weeks, settling at last into ink.

THE LETTER

He writes, in the steady periods his prose has learned: Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. And then the figure that will outlive both men: Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? He signs himself the Earl's most humble, most obedient servant, by the form of the age, and seals it. The letter goes by hand. Within six weeks it is being copied at the printing-houses, recited at the booksellers', preserved in the memory of young men like Boswell who will set it down in 1791. Chesterfield, when shown it, lays it on a side-table in his drawing room and remarks that it is very well written. He does not answer it.

THE FIFTEENTH OF APRIL

On the fifteenth of April 1755, William Strahan publishes A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson, A.M., in two folio volumes. The booksellers' subscribers take their copies; the Gentleman's Magazine notices it; Oxford, which had refused his degree in 1729, confers the M.A. that stands on the title-page. The edition sells out by the end of the year. A second follows in 1756, a third, with Johnson's own corrections, in 1773. In its definitions there is room for the lexicographer's humour and the lexicographer's grievance: Lexicographer. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge. Patron. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery. The book becomes, and remains for a hundred and seventy-three years until the Oxford English Dictionary is completed in 1928, the standard English dictionary of the language.

THE DRAWING ROOM IN GROSVENOR SQUARE

The Earl of Chesterfield lives till March 1773. His own monument, the Letters to his Son, is published posthumously and read for its polish; but already, in his lifetime, the world has begun to read him through Johnson's sentence, and to know him chiefly as the man who did not answer the door. The relation of writer to patron, which had held in England since Chaucer addressed John of Gaunt, does not survive the transaction in the outward rooms. After 1755 the writer's account is settled with the public, through the booksellers, on terms the writer himself sets. It is the quiet end of an old dispensation. No proclamation marks it. A letter marks it.

THE HOUSE AT GOUGH SQUARE

Johnson lived another twenty-nine years. He wrote Rasselas in the evenings of a single week in 1759 to pay for his mother's funeral. He kept the Idler, edited Shakespeare in 1765, travelled with Boswell to the Western Islands in 1773, and gave the trade, between 1779 and 1781, the Lives of the Poets. He died on the thirteenth of December 1784 at 8 Bolt Court, off Fleet Street, and lies in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The garret at 17 Gough Square, where the slips had been pared and the quotations copied out, is now a museum, kept since 1911 by the Carter trustees; the long tables have been replaced by replicas, the casements look out as before onto the chimneys of the City. About twenty thousand visitors climb the stair each year. They come up looking for the desk, and find instead the room: bare boards, dormer light, the corner where a man once sat down with a piece of paper and decided that, henceforth, the writer would pay his own way.

Some independences declare themselves with cannon. This one declared itself in two folio volumes and a sealed letter, and is registered to this day at the head of the English language by a single definition, fourteen words long, in the column where the word Patron falls.