by Nine years in a London attic, forty thousand words and one sentence about American liberty that my night class would not let go
A Harmless Drudge: Dr. Johnson, His Dictionary and What He Said About Us
I brought a prop tonight. It is a facsimile of one page of the first great dictionary of the English language, blown up on the copier at the public library at ten cents a sheet. I taped it to the board and asked my night class to find the joke. It took the woman from hospital billing about forty seconds. She read it out, and then she said, wait, is a dictionary allowed to do that? That is the whole lesson. In 1755 one was.
The Man
Samuel Johnson was the son of a failing bookseller in an English cathedral town. He was a huge, shambling man, scarred by a childhood disease, half blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, with tics and convulsive gestures that alarmed strangers. He left Oxford without a degree because the money ran out. He failed as a schoolmaster. At twenty-eight he walked to London to make his living as a writer, which then meant hack work for booksellers at so much a sheet, and for years he and his wife were so poor that he sometimes walked the streets all night for want of a bed.
In 1746 a group of London booksellers came to him with a proposal. English had no proper dictionary. The French had one, the Italians had one. Would he write it? He said he would, in three years, for a fee of fifteen hundred guineas, out of which he must pay his own helpers.
Somebody pointed out that the French dictionary had taken forty scholars forty years. He did the arithmetic on the spot. Forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three is to sixteen hundred, he said, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.
It took him nine. That is still one man doing in nine years what took forty men forty.
The Attic
He rented a tall brick house in a court off Fleet Street and fitted out the top floor like a counting house, with a long desk at which his copyists stood. There were six of them, five of whom were Scots, which will matter in a moment. You can visit the house. It is one of the few left from that period in the City of London, and Dr Johnson’s House is open to the public, attic and all.
His method was new. He did not start from lists of words. He read. He went through the best English writers of the previous two centuries, Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, the philosophers, and wherever a word was used in a telling way he underlined it and marked the sentence. The helpers copied each passage on a slip. The slips were sorted, and he wrote definitions to fit the evidence.
So his was the first English dictionary to show what words meant by how they had actually been used. Over a hundred thousand quotations. Around forty-two thousand entries. Two folio volumes, each the size of a paving stone. It was published in April 1755 and remained the standard for a hundred and fifty years. The men who drafted the founding documents of this country had it on their desks.
The Jokes
Now the page on my board. He did the serious work seriously. But here and there, this broke, proud, exhausted man let himself go. Since he has been dead a long time I may quote him.
Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
Oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. Remember the five Scots at the desk. It is said that one of his friends replied: which is why England is known for its horses and Scotland for its men.
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. The tax commissioners took legal advice on whether they could sue.
Pension: an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country. Seven years later the king offered him a pension, and he took it, and his enemies never let him forget the entry.
And patron: one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.
The Letter
That last one has a story, and it is the best put-down in the language. When he began, he had addressed his plan to a great nobleman, an earl famous for his manners, hoping for support. He was kept waiting in an outer room and received next to nothing. Seven years of drudgery followed, with no help. Then, as the dictionary was about to appear and was plainly going to be a triumph, the earl published two essays recommending it, as though he had been behind it all along.
Johnson wrote to him. It is a short letter. He recalls that seven years have passed since he waited in the earl’s rooms and was turned from his door. He asks whether a patron is not one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help. He says the notice the earl has been pleased to take of his labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till he is indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till he is solitary and cannot impart it, his wife having died; till he is known and does not want it.
The delivery driver in my class asked me to read it again. Then he said he would like to send it to a former employer.
And Then, About America
I cannot teach Johnson in this country without the other thing. He did not like us. In 1775, with the colonies in open resistance, he wrote a pamphlet for the government arguing that Parliament had every right to tax them. Its title sums it up: taxation was no tyranny. He said the colonists had chosen to leave a country where they had a vote for one where they did not and could hardly complain.
Most of it is forgotten. One sentence is not. Near the end he asks: how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
I wrote it on the board and stood back. This was the week after we read the poems of an enslaved woman in Boston. The room was ahead of me.
The paralegal student said, he is right. Somebody else said, he is right and he is a hypocrite, he was defending a king. A third said, can both be true? Yes. That is the answer. He was a Tory who thought ordinary people should defer to their betters, and on that he was on the wrong side of history. He was also a lifelong, furious opponent of slavery, who once shocked a dinner at Oxford by proposing a toast to the next uprising of the enslaved in the West Indies. When he died, he left the bulk of his estate to his servant and friend of thirty years, a man born in slavery in Jamaica.
He saw the contradiction in the American founding more clearly than nearly anyone, and said it in fifteen words, and was wrong about almost everything else in the pamphlet. My students decided he had earned the sentence and not the argument.
What It Has to Do With My Other Job
I write for Bohiney and The London Prat. The London editor’s guide for writers, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, says the sharpest tool we own is the definition: say precisely what a thing is, and half the time that is the joke. Johnson proved it. A hateful tax. A harmless drudge. Paid with flattery. He smuggled a view of the world into a reference book, one entry at a time, where nobody could say he was being anything but accurate.
So this week I have written a dictionary. A new edition, the piece reports, has been issued for the present age. Consultation: a meeting held after the decision. Stakeholder: a person who will be informed. Efficiency: the removal of someone you will later need. Patron: see donor. Lexicographer: a harmless drudge, currently on a zero-hours contract across two campuses.
It goes on the English satirical news page and in Bohiney. My London editor asked whether Johnson had an entry for our trade. He did, and I am saving it for next week. The class has asked to keep the photocopy. More of what I write is over here.
