In the 150 years preceding the appearance of Johnson’s Dictionary more than 20 English lexicons had been produced; however, on a variety of criteria, none was satisfactory. Most importantly, none communicated an impression of the sense of the language in use. While appreciating the enormity of his undertaking, Johnson was nothing daunted, airily predicting that he would finish the work in three years.
The Florentine Accademia took 30 years to complete its Vocabolario; the Académie Française took 55 to produce its Diction- naire. Both were the protracted works of teams of academics, working from libraries of international stature. By contrast, though Johnson installed half a dozen amanuenses in the attic of his house in Gough Square, his was essentially the work and vision of one man, a buyer and borrower of books, but nonetheless a walking — if haphazard — lexicon himself. His Dictionary in the event took eight years to complete. For two of these, he almost single-handedly also wrote and produced the magazine the Rambler, which appeared twice a week, and wrote hundreds of other articles, essays and prefaces. Though Johnson was capable of turning out 10,000 words a day, he often berated himself for idleness.
His experience writing up parliamentary debates (which he often had to make up himself on the basis of sketchy reports) for the Gentleman’s Magazine had ‘accustomed him to the vicissitudes and duties of a life of writing, an existence that combined studious drudgery with occasional opportunities for creative flair’. These skills, allied with long habits of voracious reading and a sense of obligation to add something to the sum of human know- ledge, produced the book that was to be the worldwide model for the dictionary as we know it.
‘A vital part of Johnson’s enterprise, and his most important innovation as a lexicographer, was his decision to include quotations to illustrate the words he defined,’ Hitchings observes. As an incidental result, ‘the Dictionary creates a canon of treasurable English authors, and anthologises their writings in a giant commonplace book’. It is its compendious nature as an omnium gatherum that has made the Dictionary not merely lasting but loved. ‘More than any other English dictionary, it abounds with stories, arcane information, home truths, snippets of trivia, and lost myths. It is, in short, a treasure house.’
Hitchings’ own prose avoids the sesqui- pedalian and the rebarbatively recondite. Agapistic towards his subject, he is yet capable of appreciating Johnson’s many solecisms, though he is, at worst, only ever subderisorious. The overall effect is one of agreeable concinnity, likely to appeal to all but the analphabetical.
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