Johnson’s Authority

By Mark Phillipson, 11/2004

Questioning authority

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language has been so often referred to as the first authoritative dictionary in English that I began to wonder:  what was the basis of Johnson’s authority?  The identification of one man with this gigantic work (his amanuenses tend to fade into a Scottish blur) makes this question all the more pressing. 

There is a tautological answer – this is the work of Samuel Johnson, after all:  the lumbering eighteenth-century genius “gifted with very extraordinary powers of mind”; in his lifetime recognized “as the foremost living English man of letters,” as the introduction to a standard collection of his works has it.[i]  Yet canonization doesn’t count as proof, or explicate the basis of authority.  The description of Johnson’s achievement in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science gestures similarly to the self-evident, the ineffable, even as it specifies the Dictionary’s methodological innovation:  “His judgment and good taste had brought forth a reference work where definitions were ably supported by apt quotations duly documented, and though—like any other great work—able contemporary scholars could reprehend it for its flaws, only the envious could fail to recognize the grand concept for which only a genius could have been responsible.”[ii]

Standard anthologies often include Johnson’s “Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language,” which contains strains of humility (“…those who toil at the lower employments of life… the slave of science… the humble drudge” (Johnson 1952, 234)).  Such modesty is countered, though, by self-congratulations, a balance discernable in formulations such as, “To have attempted much is always laudable, even when the enterprise is above the strength that undertakes it” (252).  In any event, few modern readers encountering Johnson’s work in anthologized collections are given the chance to measure the success of his attempt “to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind,” (255) because the dictionary itself is often not excerpted, at least to any significant extent. 

Knowing that this topic could quickly open into a dissertation, I decided to simply tiptoe around Johnson’s Dictionary and later appraisal of his methods to ascertain the practically ex nihilo generation of authority in this amazing work. 

Quoting authority

First I wondered about the credentials Johnson presented to London’s literary world by the time he published the “Plan” of the Dictionary in 1747.  A scan of the ‘Samuel Johnson’ entry in the Oxford Companion to English Literature gave me the bare outline of a 38-year-old editor and contributor to The Gentleman’s Magazine who had long struggled with poverty and lacked a degree from Oxford.  Though Johnson enjoyed friendships with poets such as David Garrick and Richard Savage, and had published a poetic attack on Robert Walpole that had caught Alexander Pope’s eye, the Oxford Companion  describes the years leading up to the “Plan” as a “period of poverty and hack-work.”

For a handle on how someone in this position was entrusted with such a major project, I turned to the entry on the Dictionary in a well-organized encyclopedia by Pat Rogers covering all things Johnson.[iii]  This entry describes the competitive origin of the Dictionary, highlighting the desire of booksellers, spearheaded by Robert Dodsley, to compete with authoritative lexicography  on the continent.  Lacking academies to sponsor such an enterprise, the English booksellers made a fantastic gamble, offering Johnson the equivalent of $150,000 in today’s dollars, according to Rogers.  A solicitous dedication to the literary patron Lord Chesterfield in Johnson’s initial proposal was a bid for even more support.  That initial proposal stressed the attribute of the Dictionary that has ever since been cited as its distinguishing attribute:  a support of definitions by quotation of selected authors.  

A look at a conveniently indexed, abridged version of James Boswell’s famous biography of Johnson suggested to me an interesting twist to this reliance on established authors.  Boswell’s biography is hagiographic, of course, written in the wake of Johnson’s subsequent success, but it does hint at the artful dropping of Alexander Pope’s name as endorsement of Johnson’s “Plan”: “we find him mentioning in [the “Plan”], that many of the writers whose testimony were to be produced as authorities, were selected by Pope; which proves that [Johnson] had been furnished, probably by Mr. Robert Dodsley, with whatever hints that eminent poet had contributed towards a great literary project….”[iv]   The suggestion is, of course, that Johnson was merely carrying out the intentions of the more established and celebrated Pope.

When reading an account of Johnson’s occasional self-quotation in the Dictionary[v] – a less self-effacing practice validated, or excused, by his usual reliance on other authors for illustration, I was intrigued to run across another blurring of Johnson’s authority with Pope’s.  In the first two editions of the Dictionary, the word ‘island’ was defined with reference to a couplet actually lifted from Pope’s Essay on Man, though labeled as work by Johnson himself (Wimsatt, 65); the reference was rectified in the third edition, and dropped altogether in the fourth.  No authority is an island in Johnson’s dictionary:  his submission of the words of others to the hectic recontextualization of cut-and-paste helped generate what we might describe as a sense of collectivity, or, less charitably, convenient confusion. 

Regulating confusion

Johnson puts forth his view of language as inevitably shifting field in the Dictionary’s “Preface”:  “Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words” (Johnson 1952, 256).  This ever-generating process sounds refreshing in this formulation, but in many other passages of the “Preface,” especially ones describing the ungovernable “copiousness” (257) of speech, language threatens to engulf our lexicographer into chaos.  A subject search in Bowdoin’s OPAC led me, in fact, to a study that takes its title from this very aspect of the “Preface”: Regulating Confusion.[vi] This study frames the Dictionary as the confrontation between an untamable multiplicity—“’boundless’ protean activity, a crowd phenomenon without limits or formal propriety”(Reinert, 10)—and a heroically unifying individual.  Such an approach casts an interesting light on Johnson’s indulgence in rhetoric; as delightful as it is to read passages in the “Preface” such as, “It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure,” (Johnson, 1952, 258) we might also suspect that Johnson’s double-phrasing is succumbing to the unfixedness he wants to resist.  Being attuned to this struggle, we can also appreciate the succinctness of many of Johnson’s definitions in the Dictionary, even as illustrative quotations multiply like rabbits.

Reinert’s work interested me in other efforts by critics to provide a regulating framework to Johnson’s unruly assemblage.  Elizabeth Hedrick casts the Dictionary as a sustained dialogue with John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Johnson quotes Locke frequently in his definitions, and agrees with him about the “close relationship between mental and linguistic processes,”[vii]  and yet Johnson insists on a “respect for etymology… [that] supercedes… epistemological principles” (439).  William Wimsatt, in a chapter of his monograph Philosophic Words, emphasizes the encyclopedic aspirations of Johnson’s Dictionary, depicting it as the metastasizing of the traditional ‘hard word’ list into a full-blown compendium of natural philosophy, or the “physico-theological school.”[viii]  Under Wimsatt’s treatment, the Dictionary transforms into an encyclopedia of science.  Similarly, but much more ponderously, Robert DeMaria Jr. approaches the Dictionary as a “commonplace book” of 17^th-century morality.[ix]  DeMaria strings together networks of quoted authorities in Johnson’s definitions to trace a “rhetoric of truth” (DeMaria, 78) that seeks to “join the pantheon of seventeenth-century writers whose works are the basis of his history” (11).  As the divergent emphases of these study suggests, Johnson’s work is capacious enough to respond to a wide variety of organizing readings.  The risk of all of them is that, in ‘fixing’ the Dictionary into one defined emphasis, these critics override the heterogeneity of its construction and application. 

Navigating a crisis

Regulation of an abundance of material was a very real, and very physical struggle for Johnson, as Allen Reddick makes clear in his 1990 monograph, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary.[x]  This was the most informative study I found on the Dictionary (again through a ‘Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784. Dictionary of the English Language’ subject search in the OPAC), not least because of Reddick’s copious bibliographic references.  Digging deeply into the day-to-day circumstances of patching together the Dictionary, Reddick details the actual process, Johnson’s relationship with his bright but unstable amanuenses, and the physical and theoretical crises that forced him to revise his plans along the way.  Originally, as Reddick emphasizes, Johnson envisioned a rigid outline for multiple definitions that canonized etymology as the ‘purest’ form of meaning; and yet his reliance on quotations—deployments of words in practice—set up a “contradiction between Johnson’s practice and his stated procedure,” (48) that would force a methodological crisis.

Reddick’s study is particularly helpful in clearing up the confusing or glossed-over descriptions of this composition by contemporaries.  Boswell’s Life daubs a nice portrait of Johnson’s opening bravura, unlikely persistence, and generous release of a project that ended up yielding “very inconsiderable” profit (Boswell, 86).  But this traditional account can be deceiving, as when Boswell characterizes the initial part of the Dictionary as having been written mistakenly on both sides of the paper, an “inconvenien[ce] for the compositor” (Boswell, 54) that forced Johnson to order the manuscript re-copied (and cost him 20 pounds).  In fact, as Reddick has gleaned from examining manuscripts, the re-copying was a result of Johnson re-thinking a pre-word processor workflow and, more significantly, abandoning the rigidity of “his confident and pristine categories” (Reddick, 51). 

Reddick’s account does much to explain (rather than explain away) the delays in the Dictionary’s production. Of particular interest to me, given my attention to authority in this work, was his description of the final delays in the publication of the first edition.  Almost ten years after the inauguration of a project that Johnson had confidently predicted would be completed in three, he tarried to wage a final struggle that had everything to do with authority:  the proofs were held up, Reddick tells us, so that Johnson could appeal to Oxford for a degree to put behind his name on the Dictionary’s title page:  “The letters ‘A.M.’ could suggest to a skeptical reader the solidity of Oxford (in lieu of an English academy) behind the lone lexicographer” (Reddick, 77).  This solidity was particularly important, given the souring of Johnson towards that other means of legitimization, Lord Chesterfield, who had proven a patron-manqué. 

An organizing center

The status attained by Johnson’s dictionary is best measured by the fact that lexicography in English seems wholly keyed to its publication.  To get a better sense of the context of Johnson’s achievement, I looked at a history entitled The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson.[xi]  Inventorying early dictionaries by the likes of Robert Cawdrey, Thomas Blount, Edward Phillips, Elisha Coles, John Kersey, and Nathan Bailey, this monograph charts a tradition of what we might call expansive plagiarism, while, at the same time, the field of lexicography grew in prestige.  Johnson’s Dictionary “invested the calling with lasting dignity” (Talmage and Noyes, 196), but this dignity was the result of a long transformation of dictionary-making over the 17^th century and early 18^th century from the “chance or whim” (195) of dilettantism to a credentialed pursuit of linguistic authority.  

I was fortunate to find a good rundown of the subsequent influence of the Dictionary also written by Gertrude E. Noyes.  In this rundown of the critical reception of Johnson’s efforts, the entire field of English lexicography is once again organized around the “master-work” of “a great man and an age which strove ceaselessly to discipline its language.”[xii]  Though she points to accolades for the Dictionary in contemporary periodicals (especially Adam Smith’s measured endorsement), Noyes really conveys its dominance by tracing “the assault on Johnson” (Noyes, 183) stretching from his death in December, 1784, on through to Noah Webster’s 1828 identification of “principal faults” as a catalyst for the American Dictionary of the English Language.

Going to the source

After considering the authority of Johnson’s Dictionary from various angles, I decided to end by turning to the work itself and seeing how it defined ‘authority’ and related terms.  This seemed like it could be a particularly telling, reflexive point of entry into Johnson’s massive assemblage.  In doing so, I was surprised to find out how limited the distribution of the Dictionary really is.  Though it would seem to be perfect for the Web, there is no online version of Johnson’s dictionary. (It has been digitized; Amazon.com lists a CD-ROM edited by Anne McDermott.)  Nor is there a circulating full copy of this text at either Simmons College or Bowdoin College.

Bowdoin does circulate a 20^th century abridgement of the Dictionary.[xiii]  This abridgement is not the one Johnson oversaw (an ottavo edition that generated many more sales than the full two-volume work in 1755).  Instead, the modern abridgement valorizes the personal and the quirky.  Its purpose “is to furnish the modern reader enough of the original work so as to give him some sense of the unique quality of this landmark of literature and learning” (xiii); definitions deemed too ordinary are expunged.  I, at any rate, was under-furnished; turning to ‘authority,’ I found listed only Johnson’s fourth definition (“Support; justification; countenance”).  ‘Author’ is missing altogether—an odd excision, given the Dictionary’s reliance on apt quotation of representative authors.

An oversized reproduction of the full Dictionary could be consulted – but not borrowed – in the reference room at Bowdoin.[xiv]  This folio giant is a one-volume reprint of William Strahan’s 1755 edition, and just hoisting it down off the shelf brought home the sheer volume of Johnson’s work:  a tangible measure of authority.  It was clear here, as it could not be in the Modern Selection, just how much Johnson loaded up his definitions with textual references—fitfully, to be sure, but often amply.

Skimming through the six iterations of the word “Authority,” all of them exemplified by at least one quotation, I was struck by the instability of the term in practice.  For example, the first definition of ‘authority’–legal power—is illustrated by the following taunt from King Lear: "Idle old man, / That still would manage those authorities, / That he hath given away!" Skimming down Johnson’s other illustrations of ‘authority,’ I tracked the concept as non-transferable ("Adam’s sovereignty, that by virtue of being proprietor of the whole world, he had any authority over men, could not have been inherited by any of his children." Locke), usurpable (“"But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." i Tim. ii. 12), withholdable (“"Do’st thou expect th’ authority of their voices, / Whose silent wills condemn thee?" Ben Johnson”), and quite possibly overbearing (“I was liable to have been overborn by a torrent of authorities." Glanville).  Authority, in other words, seemed defined in the breach, or at least presented as a most unstable object of contestation.  

I finished my survey by looking at a related contrast in the Dictionary: “Amanuensis:  A person who writes what another dictates [no quoted illustration],” and “Author [first of four definitions]:  1. The first beginner or mover of any thing; he to whom any thing owes its original.  ‘That law, the author and observer whereof is one only God, to be blessed for ever.’  Hooker.”  The profusion and theological bolstering of the second definition privileges it, of course, but the concision of the first suggests, at the least, professional sympathy if not outright self-identification.  Engagement with the English language, in Johnson’s Dictionary, proves to be a negotiation between true yet derivative copying and a frankly approximated originality. Johnson’s authority, it seems to me, stems in large measure from his confidence in countenancing such negotiation.

[i][i] Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1952).