If Dr Johnson, who was born 300 years ago on Friday (at least according to the post-1752 Gregorian calendar, which overnight lost 11 days from British life), had been around today he would most probably have been a radio star, and been paid a fortune for it, unlike the pittance he earned as a writer. Conversation was for him the breath of life, not just as the antidote to the depression that never really left him but as the surest way to discover the truth. In talk (not chitchat), Johnson could flex his intellectual muscle, wrestle with ideas, and satisfy his hugely competitive desire for victory. But he was also full of fun, delighting in wordplay, making up rhymes, flashing his wit. He would have outdone Paul Merton on Just a Minute and yet also excelled on Round Britain Quiz. John Humphrys would have been cast in the shade by Johnson’s presence on the airwaves, and if Melvyn Bragg hadn’t already established his In Our Time discussion programme, Johnson would have tried to rob him of this Radio Four prize.
As Dr Freya Johnston suggested on this week’s The Essay: Johnson Now (Radio Three), which gave us five alternative views of the legacy of the dictionary-maker, poet, author of Rasselas and creator of some of the most memorable quotations in the English language, you might even argue that speaking was Johnson’s real vocation, rather than writing. Certainly, he is mostly remembered now for such clever quips as ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’, or ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, and perhaps most pertinently, ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’ (Johnson was talking about the Revd Dodd, hanged for forgery, for whose pardon he campaigned tirelessly).
It’s no wonder, then, that he has proved such a rich subject for celebration on Radios Three and Four in a galaxy of programmes that have reminded us of Johnson’s potent mix of intellectual genius and emotional fragility. On a special edition of Great Lives (Radio Four), Matthew Parris invited Boris Johnson to share with us his enthusiasm for this great bear of a man, physically and mentally larger than most of his contemporaries and, like Boris himself, addicted to outraging sensibilities and cutting through cant. In just half an hour, they gave us (together with their expert witness, the biographer Peter Martin) a very rich portrait of Sam (not Boris) J. We heard of his early struggles to prove himself in London against poverty, ill health and his provincial background; of how he befriended a cantankerous blind woman, a prostitute, an alcoholic doctor and a black servant. But most of all Boris marvelled at Johnson’s ability to get to the heart of human nature in what he said and wrote while also mobilising language in a very powerful way through his creation of the massive two-volume Dictionary of the English Language: 42,000 entries, 140,000 definitions and 220,000 illustrative quotations — all written or collected by Johnson.
Another contributor to The Essay: Johnson Now, Professor David Crystal, took just 15 minutes to give us one of the clearest expositions of why Johnson’s dictionary is so important. It was not the first English dictionary, he explained, but it was the first ‘modern’ dictionary because of its ‘coverage’ of the English language, gathering in not just ‘hard words’ that are little used, such as ‘adumbrate’ and ‘prognosticate’, but also ‘easy’ words in common usage, such as ‘what’, ‘make’, ‘do’, ‘take’ (for which he provided 134 different definitions, discovering that ‘easy’ words are not easy at all). It was also new in its ‘treatment’ of words, giving us information about usage and meaning through Johnson’s collection of illustrative quotations gleaned from the best writers in the last 200 years. Crystal’s talk was in itself a model of Johnsonian definition.
Earlier we had heard from another prof, David Nokes, who in Radio Four’s Johnson’s Miscellany gave us excerpts from the works (read by Michael Pennington). Listening to a section from Johnson’s life of his friend the poet Richard Savage (among other things, Johnson pioneered the art of warts-and-all biography), from the preface to the Dictionary and from an Idler essay on the delusions we entertain that happiness can be found by a change of scene, made it obvious that Johnson needs to be heard, not read. His resonant command of syntax, his careful building of the argument, phrase upon phrase, his vivid use of language is wonderfully aural, and would in its time have been read out loud in a society less than 50 years removed from a relatively book-less world. Come to think of it, Johnson himself would probably have argued we need radio (not writing) the better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
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