Johnson · 1755
Samuel Johnson and the Dictionary
On the fifteenth of April 1755, in the print-shop of the Strand publisher William Strahan, the two-volume folio *A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson, A.M.* was published. The Dictionary, about forty-three thousand entries with approximately one hundred and fourteen thousand illustrative quotations from English literature, had been the nine-year solo lexicographical work of Samuel Johnson, then forty-five years old, the Lichfield-born grub-Street writer of *London* (1738), the *Vanity of Human Wishes* (1749), the *Life of Mr Richard Savage* (1744), and the twice-weekly *Rambler* essays (1750–52). The Dictionary was the first English-language dictionary to apply to English the scholarly philological method that the Académie Française had applied to French in its 1694 Dictionnaire. Johnson worked at his Gough Square house at the rate of about a column-and-a-half a day with six amanuenses; the project ran nine years against the Académie Française's eight teams of forty-academicians-each working for forty years to produce the equivalent French work. The publication-eve correspondence between Johnson and the belated patron Lord Chesterfield (who had snubbed Johnson at the 1747 outset of the project and had attempted to claim patronage in the 1755 publication month) became the foundational document of the modern English-literary independence from aristocratic patronage. The Johnson Dictionary remained the standard English-language dictionary until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928.
It is twenty past four on the afternoon of an unrecorded Wednesday in early April 1755, in the upstairs garret-study at 17 Gough Square, on the lane off Fleet Street in central London, in pale spring light through the east casement. He is forty-five years old. He is Samuel Johnson, born at 4 Breadmarket Street in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on the eighteenth of September 1709, son of the Lichfield-bookseller Michael Johnson and Sarah Ford, schooled at Lichfield Grammar School and (briefly) at Pembroke College Oxford (he had been forced to withdraw without taking a degree on the family financial collapse of 1729), in his nineteenth year of grub-Street writing-career since the 1737 Walmley-to-London journey on foot with David Garrick.
On the writing-desk in front of him is the bound second-volume page-proof of the Dictionary, just brought up from Strahan's Strand print-shop by a small printer's boy. The Dictionary's publication date is the fifteenth of April 1755, nine days hence. The front matter (the Preface, the Plan of the Dictionary, the History of the English Language, the Grammar of the English Language) is in the first volume's proofs.
He thinks: the Dictionary is, in plain reading, the largest single piece of English-language scholarship of the Hanoverian century. The forty-three thousand entries, the hundred-and-fourteen-thousand illustrative quotations from English literature, the nine years of work by me and six amanuenses, all of it goes to the public on the fifteenth.
He thinks: the Lord Chesterfield, who refused me his patronage when I called on his Grosvenor Square house in February 1747 at the outset of the project, has, in the November 1754 issue of The World, written two essays praising the Dictionary-in-progress and inviting himself, in a courtly literary-conversation register, to the status of the patron of the work.
He thinks: Chesterfield's late-claim-of-patronage is, in plain reading, an attempt to attach the Chesterfield name to the public-recognition of the Dictionary. The attempt is the precise aristocratic-patronage gesture I have been refusing for nine years.
He thinks: I will write Chesterfield a private letter in the form of a formal response to his November essays. The letter will state, in courteous Augustan prose, that the patronage Chesterfield is now offering would have been useful at the outset of the project in 1747 and is, at the eve-of-publication of 1755, not relevant to the work. The letter will be a private document. The letter will, however, by the grub-Street circulation-convention, be in public-circulation within six weeks of writing.
He drafted the Chesterfield-letter on the seventh of February 1755, sent it the same day, and the letter was in public-circulation through the Strahan-and-Cave grub-Street network by the end of March 1755. The letter is preserved in the 1781 Lives of the Poets by Johnson himself and in the 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. The most-quoted passage is: 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. 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?
A Dictionary of the English Language was published by William Strahan on the fifteenth of April 1755, in two folio volumes at the list-price of four pounds and ten shillings (the equivalent of about £700 in 2025 money). The first edition of two thousand copies sold out by the end of 1755; the second edition followed in 1756; the third (Johnson's major revision) in 1773. The Dictionary remained the standard English-language dictionary until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928, a hundred and seventy-three years.
Samuel Johnson continued as the English-literary figure of the late-Georgian period. He published the eight-volume Lives of the Poets (1779–81), the novel Rasselas (1759), and the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) with Boswell. He died at 8 Bolt Court (his final London house) on the thirteenth of December 1784, seventy-five years old. He is buried in Westminster Abbey in the Poets' Corner. The Gough Square house is, since 1911, a museum (Dr Johnson's House) under the Carter Trust trusteeship; the upstairs garret-study where the Dictionary was compiled is preserved with the replica of the Johnson lectern-and-amanuensis tables. The 2025 visitor-count is about twenty thousand a year.