And then came Samuel Johnson, `the Great Cham of Literature', and with him, the turning point. It was Tobias Smollett who coined the name—meaning, essentially, a figure of authority and autocratic self-confidence—and applied it to the bookseller's son from Lichfield in Staffordshire, the schoolteacher turned journalist and parliamentary sketch-writer and wanderer and conversationalist who would become one of the towering figures of English letters. The magisterially famous Dr Johnson created his great dictionary in 1755—in two volumes, in scores of editions, the book that all educated households possessed and took down whenever anyone asked simply for `the dictionary', set the standard for the following century, and some still think for all time, of just what an English dictionary should be.
It is important to reiterate in this context that Johnson's work set standards for all future English dictionaries. For the way that English had developed, and the way that in the eighteenth century it was coming to be recognized at home, was profoundly different from the way that other languages were then being seen, and were being recognized and then collated and corralled into dictionaries elsewhere. The point is an obvious one: but it bears repeating, as it underlies—indeed, is vital in every way to—the making of the book that plays the central role in this story.
For English is not to be regarded in the same way as, say, French or Italian, and in one crucially important way. It is not a fixed language, the meaning of its words established, approved, and firmly set by some official committee charged with preserving its dignity and integrity. The French have had their AcadeÂmie FrancËaise, a body made up of the much-feared Forty Immortals, which has done precisely this (and with an extreme punctiliousness and absolute want of humour) since 1634. The Italians have also had their Accademia della Crusca in Florence since 1582—since long before, in other words, there was even a nation called Italy. The task of both bodies was to preserve linguistic purity, to prevent the languages' ruin by permitting inelegant importations, and to guide the public on just how to write and speak. The two bodies were established, in short, to prescribe the use of the language.
For more than a century after its publication in 1755, Samuel Johnson's massive work was the dictionary, essential to the library of every educated household.
No such body has ever been set up in England, nor in any English-speaking country. 9
And though George Orwell might have longed for an AngloSaxon revival, though John Dryden loathed French loanwords, despite Joseph Addison's campaigns against contractions such as mayn't and won't, and although Alexander Pope pleaded for the retention of dignity and Daniel Defoe wrote of his hatred of the `inundation' of curse-words and Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to `fix our language forever'—no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.
For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, nor can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; its grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need. Dictionaries that record and catalogue the language thus cannot ever be prescriptive; they must always be entirely descriptive, telling of the language as it is, not as it should be. Samuel Johnson's majestic Dictionary of the English Language, published first in 1755 and remaining in print for well over the century following, is a classic of this kind. It is as full a record as Johnson and the six serving men who worked with him as amanuenses for six years in cramped rooms south of Fleet Street could determine, of the entire assemblage of words that were employed by all who lived in the realm—the words used by the learned, the nobly born, the doctor, the dandy, and the divine and, most important of all, the words used by the common man of the street, the slum, the farm, and the field.
(There has long been a running argument over whether Johnson himself ever thought it desirable to fix the language in the aspic of his authority. The current view is that at first he did—that he initially espoused the conservative views of Swift and Addison and their like, and had half a mind to make a dictionary that laid down rules, just as an Academy might. In his Plan for the dictionary, written in 1747, he said he wished `to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom'. But halfway through the task he realized that, in dealing specifically with the endearingly unruly monster that was English, this simply was not possible. He then, perhaps reluctantly, fell in with the dictum laid down by a predecessor lexicographer, the former Surrey ploughboy and inventor named Benjamin Martin, twenty years before Johnson began his monumental work:
The pretence of fixing a standard to the purity and perfection of any language is utterly vain and impertinent, because no language as depending on arbitrary use and custom, can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem'd polite and elegant in one age, may be counted uncouth and barbarous in another.
And Johnson agreed. Whatever he had said in his Plan of 1747, he was not to repeat in his Preface of 1755. His aim in making the great dictionary was, he then admitted, not `to form, but to register' the language. In this way a whole new way of dictionarymaking, and an entirely new intellectual approach to the language, had been inaugurated.)
The approach that Johnson took was not to decide for himself what words meant, not (to reiterate the point) to prescribe how they should be used—but instead to let the printed record of centuries-worth of writing and literature illustrate how words had actually been used in the past, and tease from the record the variety of historic meanings, from the time each was invented and first introduced, and as their various senses shifted like silverfish over the succeeding centuries. `When I took the first survey of my undertaking,' he wrote in his famous Preface,
I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated. Having therefore no assistance but from general grammar I applied myself to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might be used to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulated in time the materials of a dictionary which, by degrees, I reduced to method.
This was a method which Johnson perhaps honoured more in the breach than the observance. But it nonetheless set the pattern for all the best dictionaries for all time to come: no better means has ever been developed for producing as near as possible a complete record of a language.
There are essentially three sources for the words that are to be put into a new dictionary. There are those to be found in existing dictionaries (a fact which caused scores of earlier dictionary makers to cry plagiarism whenever an unusual word found in one book was then found in another published subsequently). There are words which are heard in conversation. And there are words that are to be found by a concerted trawl through the texts of literature. Johnson leant heavily on this third source— only, as it turns out, not heavily enough. For he took the unilateral decision—to save himself time and money—only to read the books that had been published since 1586, and the death of Sir Philip Sidney. Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales were not to be considered; none of the works from Caxton made it into Johnson's lists; Bede's writings were not included; nor was Domesday Book; neither were the Bibles of Wyclif and Tyndale. A mere century and a half of English literature was to provide the wellspring for his book: not a few have since expressed surprise that, despite so limited a source, so very many words made it in at all.