To Londoners who happened to spot the notice in the Daily Advertiser one day in 1747, it must have seemed less an announcement than a boast: "There is now preparing for the press, and in great forwardness, in two volumes in folio, an English dictionary; etymological, analogical, syntactical, explanatory, and critical." Who could have undertaken such a gargantuan task? In 1755. when the two volumes came out, the world became aware that Samuel Johnson would forever be famous as Dictionary Johnson.
In its own day, few books caused a bigger stir than the Dictionary. But as the years passed and other dictionaries came out, the great book became overshadowed by the man. How good a dictionary was it? This week, on the sooth anniversary of its publication, Johnsonians could find the answers in two new studies: Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, by James H. Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb of the University of Chicago (University of Chicago Press; $5), and Young Sam Johnson, by James L. Clifford, professor of English at Columbia University (McGraw-Hill; $5.75).
Barbarous Language. Sam Johnson was not the only man to realize the need for such a book. While learned academies in France and Italy had both compiled dictionaries for their own countries, Britons, said Dryden in 1693, "have yet no English prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous." The best reference book around was Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary, but the Bailey brand of definition, e.g., a mouse: "an animal well known," was hardly adequate. Finally, a group of booksellers got in touch with Johnson, persuaded him to compile a dictionary within three years. "But, Sir," remonstrated a friend, "how can you do this in three years . . . ? The French Academy, which consists of 40 members, took 40 years to compile their dictionary." "Sir," replied Johnson, "thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; 40 times 40 is 1600. As three to 1600, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman."
Actually, it took Johnson a good deal longer than he thought. For nine years, balanced precariously in a chair with only three legs, he worked at his word lists in the garret of his Gough Square house. At first he had a lofty ambition: not only to rid the language of impurities, but to fix it permanently. "Our language," he wrote. "for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it."