The Dictionary: Johnson

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The Dictionary of Samuel Johnson

The Dictionary of Samuel Johnson

Note: this video is property of BBC-4 Media channel hence kindly do not forget to mention it if you are quoting the same. here is the original link of this video 

The below summary hereafter is part of the following link:

Link:http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/johnson/1755johnsonsdictionary.html

Samuel Johnson's 'Dictionary of the English Language' is one of the most famous dictionaries in history. First published in 1755, the dictionary took just over eight years to compile, required six helpers, and listed 40,000 words. Each word was defined in detail, the definitions illustrated with quotations covering every branch of learning. It was a huge scholarly achievement, a more extensive and complex dictionary than any of its predecessors - and the comparable French Dictionnarre had taken 55 years to compile and required the dedication of 40 scholars.

Literary quotations

In all, there are over 114,000 quotations in the dictionary. Johnson was the first English lexicographer to use citations in this way, a method that greatly influenced the style of future dictionaries. He had scoured books stretching back to the 1500s, often quoting from those thought to be 'great works' such as Milton or Shakespeare. Thus the quotations reflect his literary taste and his rightwing political views. However, if Johnson didn't like a quotation, or if a phrase didn't convey the exact meaning he required, he did not hesitate to chop, twist around, or rewrite a few words - Johnson famously scribbled all over his books, underlining, highlighting, altering and correcting the words, much to the horror of acquaintances who had lent him their books!

A tangled mess

A group of London book-sellers had commissioned Johnson's dictionary, hoping that a book of this kind would help stabilise the rules governing the English language. In the preface to the book Johnson writes of the 'energetic' unruliness of the English tongue. In his view, the language was in a mess, and was in desperate need of some discipline: 'wherever I turned my view', he wrote, 'there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.' However, in the process of compiling the dictionary, Johnson recognised that language is impossible to fix, because of its constantly changing nature, and that his role was to record the language of the day, rather than to form it.

Johnson's personal touch

Even so, many of Johnson's definitions bear the mark of a rather pompous man (but also quite a humorous one). Many of the words he included were incomprehensible to the average reader - long words such as ‘deosculation’, ‘odontalgick’. He is even believed to have made up some words. His definition of oats is very rude to the Scots. He defines the word as 'A Grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' Johnson was criticised for imposing his personality on to the book. However, his dictionary was enormously popular and highly respected for its epic sense of scholarship.

Johnson's Comment on Paradise Lost

Johnson’s critical limitations are most clearly seen in his criticism of Paradise Lost. He was prejudiced against Milton on political grounds. He was allergic to the Republicanism. His argument that the poet had no regular hours for prayer though he made Adam and Eve pray clearly indicated his mind not accepting the indisputable scholarship of Milton. He, with hesitations accepts Paradise lost as an epic though Milton was not the first attempt such he has his own reservation about the grand style of the epic. His criticism that the mixing up of the supernatural and the human cannot be justified as the same happens in every epic.

Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare

“The Preface is the impartial estimate of Shakespeare’s virtues and defects by a powerful mind”. (Halliday). Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare is a classic of literary criticism in which he is above his political personal, religious and literary prejudices: mentions both the merits and demerits of Shakespeare like a true critic; and become very honest and sincere in his estimate of Shakespeare. Johnson tests Shakespeare by the fact and experience, by the test of time, nature and universality, his defense to tragicomedy is superb and still unsurpassed; in which he has excelled his guru Dryden. He finds Shakespeare great because he holds a mirror to nature. In minimized the importance of love on the sum of life, Johnson anticipates Shaw.

One of the first excellence of Shakespeare, as Preface shows: “Shakespeare is above all the writers, at least above the modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror if manners and life.” According to Johnson, “Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident”. His blend of tragedy and comedy is also nearer and more natural to life, because the mingled drama approaches nearer to life :Mingled drama may convey all the instructions of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alternations of exhibition and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life”

Shakespeare was the originator of “the form, the character, the language and the shadows of English drama” and “opens a mine contains cold and diamonds”. “Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare of men”, thus, Shakespeare is one of the great and the original masters of the language. There are few limitations of Preface too: Johnson could not fathom the depths of Shakespeare’s poetic genius. Nor could he think of the psychological subtleties of his characterization, he was equally deaf to “the overtones of Shakespeare’s poetry at its most sublime his criticism of his perceptive powers. In the mystery of Shakespeare tragedy was beyond the reach of his common sense. No wonder then if he feels that Shakespeare was at his best in comedy”. Nevertheless these shortcomings do not mar the basic merits of his Preface which is as immortal as the plays of Shakespeare and the tests of Shakespeare provided by him are valid even today.

About the excellence of Shakespeare’s plot, Johnson says, “our writer’s plots are generally borrowed from novels”, but due to his merit, “his plots, whether historical or fabulous, are always crowded with incidents, by which the attention of a rude people was most easily caught than by sentiment or argumentation”. Johnson writes, Shakespeare “knows how he should most please; and whether his practice is more agreeable to nature; or whether his example has prejudiced the nation.” He could not see “how truth may be stated myth or symbol, how The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale for instance, are more than pleasant romantic pieces; significantly, he says of the latter that with all its absurdities, it is very entertaining”.

The limitations of this critical sensibility are no where prominent than in his complaint that Shakespeare “seems to write without any moral purpose”. He fails to see the hidden morals of Shakespeare’s plays; to him only the explicitly stated morals are the morals, thus, some of the most conspicuous virtues of Shakespeare, for example, his objectivity and his highly individualized treatment of his characters, are treated by Johnson as his “defects”—these defects are certainly not Shakespeare’s, but Johnson’s. Shakespeare was the first playwright whose tragic as well as comic plays succeeded in providing the dramatic pleasure appropriate to them. He has given us excellent comedies “without labour which no labour can improve,” so the world prefers his comedies because they are profound and more true to nature. However, the language of his comic scenes is the language of the real life, neither gross nor refined and hence it has not gone obsolete.

Early in English drama “Neither the character nor dialogues were yet understood, Shakespeare may be truly said to have introduced them both amongst us, and in some of his happier scenes to have carried them both to the utmost height”. “In my opinion”, concludes Johnson, “very few in the lines were difficult to his audience, and that he uses such expressions as were them common, though the paucity if contemporary writers makes them now seem peculiar.”

His enumeration of Shakespeare in itself is a classic piece of criticism. These faults he finds are owing to two causes—(a) carelessness, (b) excess of conceit. “The details analysis of the faults”, says Raleigh, “is fine piece of criticism, and has never been seriously challenged”. Shakespeare’s obscurities arise from:

1. the careless manner of publication;

2. the shifting fashions and grammatical license of Elizabethan English;

3. the use of colloquial English;

4. the use of many allusions, the reference, etc., to topical events and personalities;

5. The rapid flow of ideas which often hurries him to a second thought before the first been fully explained.

Thus, many of Shakespeare’s obscurities belong either to the age or the necessities of stagecraft and to the man.