There were, in the end, 43,500 of them, supported by 118,000 illustrative quotations (a good number of which were amended by Johnson if he didn't like the originals). The headwords were listed alphabetically in a book that was printed in a first edition of 2,000
copies, and sold for £4 10s. 0d. a copy—a good deal of money for 1755. Realizing this, Johnson produced a second edition in 165
weekly parts, at sixpence each. This did the trick; by the end of the century every educated household had, or had access to, the great book. So firmly established did it swiftly become that any request for `The Dictionary' would bring forth Johnson and none other. One asked for The Dictionary much as one might demand The Bible, Hymns Ancient & Modern, or The Prayer Book.
Examined with the steely-eyed rigour of today, there are in Johnson eccentricities in abundance. Some of his definitions are infamously political, like `Oats: A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland feeds the people'. Some were reckoned libellous, as `Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid'. Not a few were self-effacing, like `Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words'. 10
Others were simply frightful, entries that breached the lexicographer's guiding principle that in writing a definition, no word may be used that is more complex or unfamiliar than the word being defined—which was very much not the case with Johnson's definition of `Network: Any thing reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections'. Small wonder that Johnson collected some harsh critics—like Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was to curse him as `a wretched etymologist', and another, who wrote that `Any schoolmaster might have done what Johnson did. His Dictionary is merely a glossary to his own barbarisms.'
Dr Johnson was sufficiently brazen and self-confident not to have been distressed by such carping. But he must have taken some pleasure in hearing that his book attracted the prurient as well as the pedant. On being accused, by a genteel society lady, of failing to include obscenities in the book he replied, in a mixture of the caustic and the sardonic: `Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers. I find, however, that you have been looking for them.'
As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth so the number of new dictionaries multiplied, each one larger and more comprehensive and more authoritative than its predecessors. Perhaps the most notable was the formidable American Dictionary of the English Language, edited by the `short, pale, smug and boastful' schoolmaster from New Hartford, Connecticut, Noah Webster.
This `severe, correct, humourless, religious and temperate' man had already enjoyed extraordinary popularity with his earlier books—his first spelling book became the best-selling volume in the United States, exceeded only by the Bible, and in its heyday it thundered off the presses at the rate of more than 500 copies an hour. As a result the word Websterian—meaning `invested with lexical authority'—rapidly entered the language, making its first appearance in print in 1790 (as it happens, a full year ahead of the similarly freighted eponym Johnsonian). And when, in 1828, and after fifteen years of solitary work, Webster completed his dictionary, 11 it was almost double the size of Johnson's, with 70,000 headwords, 1,600 pages, and a preface declaring the book's solemn determination to fix and purify a language that Johnson— with his inclusion of vulgarisms and other low words—had in Webster's view dared to cheapen and to coarsen.
Noah Webster created—entirely alone—his wildly popular American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. For years afterwards this huge volume—defining twice as many words as Johnson—even outsold the Bible.
Despite the rivalry between the two men, between their two books, and between the two languages, the value and scale of both Johnson's and Webster's work is unchallenged. And since Webster was the larger, more comprehensive, and editorially less eccentric of the pair of books, it goes without saying that even while Johnson remained in print, Webster fast became the gold standard of the lexicographers' art, and sold almost as well in England as it did back home in America.
There was one final attempt to better even these. Charles Richardson, a schoolmaster from Clapham, published in two volumes A New Dictionary of the English Language in 1837—and he did so by employing what, by the developing standards of the day, was a most curious style. He almost entirely did away with definitions— but instead showed how each word had been used by illustrating usages with quotations. He decided that there had been four distinct linguistic eras in the story of English; the first ran from 1300 to the accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. The second ended with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. The third and shortest period closed with the reign of the first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in 1714. And the fourth period extended into the nineteenth century—more precisely, to 1818, when Richardson's dictionary began to appear, in parts, as contributions to the multivolume Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.
Richardson endeavoured to show, for all words he included, quotations from each of the periods during which the word was known to have existed. He felt that only thus—by depicting a word's history, its biography—could the dictionary user have full and familiar knowledge of how best to employ the word himself. He considered definitions by and large to be irrelevantly prescriptive: far better to show how others had utilized the word than to insist on how it should be utilized in future. It was an approach— dictionary-making based on what were to be widely called `historical principles'—that won Richardson a deserving place in the canon of lexicographers: and it was an approach that was eventually to inform, in all its essentials, the making of the greatest dictionary of them all.
3. The Mission
And yet none of these volumes was truly good enough. Not one of them—not Johnson, not Webster, not Richardson—ever did the English language justice. Nor did any of the dictionaries, so far as the growing army of nineteenth-century philologists felt, contain all the words that made up English in its entirety. To be sure, no one could be certain just how many words were in the language. But there was a feeling abroad that the total had to be very considerably more than the 80,000 or so (Webster had listed 70,000) that even these skilled lexicographers were managing to come up with.
At first this feeling was ill defined—no more than a vague unease. But in the early summer of 1842 came the beginnings of a formal acknowledgement of it. A wealthy Oxfordshire landowner and Anglo-Saxon expert named Edwin Guest—his financial condition underlining the assertion that what was to follow would be the work, initially, of men who were both learned and leisured— established what was to be called the Philological Society. He did so with other luminaries—most notably Thomas Arnold of Rugby School and Hensleigh Wedgwood, grandson of the potter Josiah, and one of the most notable etymologists in the land. The purpose of the Society—which exists still—was to `investigate the Structure, the Affinity and the History of Languages'. Its first paper, which reportedly stimulated animated discussion among the members, was a classic of arcane enthusiasm: `The dialects of the Papuan or Negrito race, scattered through the Australian and other Asiatic islands.'