0:00:07.054,0:00:08.054
[Music]

0:00:15.108,0:00:16.625
[Narrator] In 1747 in an attic room[br]in Gough Square in London,

0:00:16.625,0:00:21.357
a remarkable literary project[br]was underway.

0:00:21.357,0:00:28.557
Embracing the spirit of the 18th century,[br]a dictionary had been commissioned --

0:00:28.557,0:00:30.258
a book that would do [br]for the English language

0:00:30.258,0:00:32.475
what Newton had done[br]for the stars:

0:00:32.475,0:00:39.707
classifying words, fixing their meaning,[br]bringing order to the chaos of language.

0:00:39.707,9:59:59.000
>>by the farthing,[br]for every copy we make him 80.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
>>Careful, wholes day work [br]there you know.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
[Narrator] Nine years in the making [br]this landmark of English literature

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
was the brain work of one man.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
>>He was a frightful digger, [br]huge, shambling,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
twitching, blind in one eye.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
>>[Female 1] Often his wig would be singed at [br]the front from,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
from holding a candle too close [br]to his short-sighted eyes.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
>>[Female 2] Lots of people when[br]they first met him

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
thought he was a lunatic, [br]until they were able to talk to him.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
[Narrator] Samuel Dictionary Johnson an[br]unlikely hero,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
an eccentric unknown hat writer, [br]destined to become a literary superstar.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Samuel Johnson's dictionary is one of [br]the most important books ever written

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in the English language.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
In the 250 years since its publication [br]it has served as a model

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
for dictionary writing throughout [br]the world.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Today rare first editions [br]are proudly preserved

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in the world's great libraries.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
[Henry Hitchings] So, here is the dictionary: [br]two volumes,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
forty two thousand seven hundred [br]and seventy three words,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
over a hundred thousand [br]illustrated quotations,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
two thousand [br]three hundred pages.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And as you can see these [br]are huge cumbersome books.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
You couldn't pick one of [br]the volumes up with one hand,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you might struggle [br]to do it with two hands.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
What's more I can't even touch[br]this particular copy of it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
because this was the personal copy of[br]King George the Third.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Usually, today, when we see [br]a book on this kind of scale

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that's something that's been produced [br]by people collaborating large teams

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
of people who've come together.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And when it[br]sits in front of you like this you're reminded of what a remarkable accomplishment it was for one man[br]essentially unaided this is his work but it's also a book that's produced by one[br]person who had to overcome incredible difficulties to do that in his personal life in the life of his mind we're[br]talking about a guy who had incredible psychological difficulties obstacles and obstructions to his Labor's and this[br]really very orderly production is at odds with that and that's a tribute[br]really to Johnson's personal qualities

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
[Narrator] What we know about the author of this[br]extraordinary book is largely gleaned from one of the most celebrated biographies in the English language[br]Boswell's life of Johnson James Boswell was a young Scottish lawyer who met[br]Johnson some eight years after the publication of the dictionary Boswell[br]immediately fell under the authors spell and for over 20 years he doggedly pursued Johnson filling notebook after[br]notebook with records of their many conversations intending one day to publish the story of Johnson's life[br]truly conceived by those who Pina indeed have ventured to say there's more[br]science and learning within a circumference of 10 miles of where we now sit there is in all the rest of the[br]world well the only disadvantage is a very great distance at which people live from one another just occasion by its[br]large which in turn is a very cause of all the other advantages there are times where I would willingly leave London[br]retire to our desert either a deserts enough in Scotland a man of intellect[br]would never willingly leave London nope when a man's tired of London he's tired in life well there is in London all that[br]life can afford Johnson's passion for London is legendary he wrote his famous[br]dictionary here in GOP's Square a house of Fleet Street which was in the 18th[br]century the very heart of literary London welcome everybody to dr.[br]Johnson's house I'd like to roll back in time a little bit just tell you a little bit about Johnson's earlier years if we[br]could just have a look at the picture on the wall here now this is a rather quirky picture it's by Johnson's friend[br]Joshua Reynolds and obviously it's retrospective as as Reynolds didn't know[br]Johnson when he was about six months old or however old years and you can see even then he's having great thoughts[br]about and about something now Johnson was born in in quite poor health I mean[br]he was baptized on the spot and was with Johnson himself said that he was a diseased and sickly infant[br]he contracted scrofula from his wet nurses milk which is TB at the lymph nodes he managed to throw it off[br]naturally but this was not withstanding the several rather odd cures one of[br]which is to have a cut made on the child's arm which was they're not allowed to heal up for several years but[br]this scar filler did leave him badly affected in terms of his eyesight and[br]his hearing he described himself as being nearly blind in one eye and certainly his hearing was very bad as[br]well Johnson was born in Litchfield in[br]the Midlands in 1709 the son of a bookseller he was from the very stars a[br]voracious reader in his sickness he sought refuge in Greek and Latin classics taken from his father's shelves[br]but Johnson's mother disapproved of much of his reading preferring instead to steer him towards Christian Texas find[br]good things here things you'll need this[br]one I don't just read it learn it don't you'll find things in[br]here you'll never regret in life sir[br]when Johnson was a child in petticoats and had learned to read his mother one[br]morning put the Common Prayer book into his hands pointed to the collect for the day and said Sam you must get this by[br]heart she went upstairs leaving him to study it but by the time she had reached the[br]second floor she heard him following her what's the matter she said I can see it[br]he replied and he repeated it distinctly though he could not have read it more[br]than twice throughout his life Johnson[br]was a stern moralist doubtless the result of his mother's early influence the family bookshop was equally[br]significant in developing Johnson's precocious intellect but it failed to generate enough income to sent into[br]university indeed it was only when he was nineteen years old that a chance legacy gave the family just enough money[br]to get Johnson started at Pembroke College Oxford[br]this is the college chapel which was some in the 18th century guard as one of[br]the greatest monstrosity is to be erected so it was being built when[br]Johnson first came here as an undergraduate but the rest of the court didn't exist at all thing was just works[br]being carried out on this there about 40 students 40 students and fellows in[br]total and that would be also you would know every Johnson would have made his presence felt because he would know[br]simply everybody in the college and everyone would know him so I know so you can't be inconspicuous you can't fade[br]into the background if you're in a college of only 40 people so he was you know and this would be up here would be[br]where his rooms were so in the gatehouse which we can go and look up[br]we have to imagine these some stairs and Johnson's time it would be very lighting[br]Oxford 18th century Oxford is just full of hierarchy so where and where you[br]lived proclaim very visibly the kind of student you were so Johnson may have[br]defined himself as a gentleman but his rooms as you can see were not[br]necessarily those pertaining to gentlemanlike status this would have[br]been the bedroom hardly larger than a cupboard as it is recorded at the time[br]when he'd been reading assiduously for years before that so he came equipped[br]with a massive store of knowledge and it was in this room that he would have set his hundred volumes which he came[br]equipped with what you know on horseback traveling these 76 miles from Litchfield[br]so this is where it all happened where he would have written his essays and prepared his themes[br]well Johnson's account of his time here is that he disregarded all power and all[br]authority and I think that's what we can see almost from his first moments in the college and in his first week he's[br]missing tutorials which is certainly something you wouldn't expect a student in their first week of their course to[br]do he writes extraordinary good pieces of work but not necessarily the ones he was[br]asked right he goes off sliding when he should be attending lectures he goes off[br]drinking in taverns when he's supposed to be on college premises I think again this is this extra enough in your first[br]week as an undergraduate you expect this you know extraordinary dutiful you know observance of everything you're supposed[br]to do but there's Johnson willfully taking the opportunity to slide instead so and this was the source of the first[br]of Johnson's many finds in the corner actually where he was fined tuppence as he said for a lecture not worth a penny[br]which also is not guaranteed to give you an easy passage through the college[br]when Johnson arrived at Oxford he appears to have been ashamed of his family circumstances deciding to[br]register as the son of a gentleman rather than the more appropriate title of tradesman the college record books at[br]the time contained further clues to Johnson's life at Oxford okay[br]and these are the battles books for 1720 and 1729 and these contain all the[br]records of the expenditure of every individual student and fellow in the[br]college and they're written in an as-yet unbroken 17th century code which if we[br]could break it would be absolutely wonderful and then there's Johnson there and as[br]you can see lots of annotations for Johnson always below the line and these[br]are the things that were we able to break this code would tell us an awful lot more about what Johnson was like as[br]an undergraduate fine somehow finds rectally on this particular I don't see[br]being a good boy at this point but if we went over to this one over here we can[br]see a lengthy unfirm black mark you see he has a black mark against his name[br]below the line that is very clearly a fine here I'm not a thing October I was rather like the graffiti[br]at the end I get pages like these actually I always scrutinize these[br]extensive see whether there's anything for Johnson here there's lots of Morley's which suggests that maybe the[br]college wasn't a single sex as we suspect or Molly seems to be here quite a lot under fear this is the fear as[br]well somewhere there's quite a lot about Johnson's friends here's Philip Jones Jones is a four-piece dog and come forth[br]Philip Jones and hey you know answer your charge for exceeding the battles again so Johnson wasn't really keeping[br]company that led him to keep them maybe the most economical ways in the college[br]after 13 months Johnson had to pack up his belongings it's thought Jonathan left because he'd[br]ran out of money and he didn't make any effort as far as we can see from the[br]college records to modify his spendings or to exist more economically while he[br]was here so he has a very sustained level of expenditure his 8 shillings a[br]week from beginning to end and then suddenly the record stops halfway through one week and Johnson disappears[br]off the college books[br]Johnson returned to the family bookshop in Litchfield where his father was now[br]seriously ill and soon to die he was expected to take over the business[br]but after Oxford he thought that selling books was beneath him I remember once I[br]was disobedient to my father wasn't long after I had returned from Oxford the[br]truth it was just weeks before he died I refused to accompany him to you tops at[br]a market where he went regularly to sell books he'd asked me for help she needed[br]my help despite his condition hell is only a few[br]years ago I decided to attend this fault so I went to you tops it and very bad[br]weather I stood for hours bare headed in the rain very spot where[br]my father's bookstore used to stand I stood in contrition[br]it was my penance my atonement[br]so ashamed[br]having turned his back on the family business Johnson sought to make a living from writing he wrote a number of essays for[br]the Birmingham Journal and was paid five pounds for translating father Jerome Lobos voyage to Abyssinia and then in[br]1735 Johnson made a rather unlikely marriage Johnson was actually the[br]original toy boy he married a widow who was more than twenty years older than[br]himself when he was in his mid-20s she was claiming 40 at the time and was[br]probably nearer and 45:46 as an older woman she saw something in Johnson that[br]perhaps a younger woman who would only look at the surface of things with not see Teti as he called her Elizabeth[br]Porter always strikes me as quite a sad character as she gave up a lot to marry[br]Johnson she never really again had her own home until she moved here and by[br]then really hurt her poor health meant that she couldn't really enjoy it we all[br]know that love can manifest itself in some quite bizarre ways but it's certainly the the great puzzler of[br]Johnson's life is that he married this woman who seems so wrong not an intellectual so much older most a mother[br]figure one suggestion is he may originally have been interested in her daughter but the daughter spurned his[br]advances and so he turned to the mother people who have an antipathy to Johnson have cast all kinds of cynical[br]aspersions on what the marriage was all about that it wasn't consummated or that Johnson was incredibly inept when it[br]came to lovemaking and say tatty pretty quickly showed him the door on that front it's fascinating to speculate[br]about but there's very little first-hand information Johnson's literary career failed to take[br]off so he decided instead to set up this school just outside Litchfield using his[br]wife's money but the school also failed attracting only a tiny number of pupils[br]as prospective parents were deterred by Johnson's very eccentric behavior dr.[br]Johnson is probably the best example of Tourette syndrome within history it's[br]only the best described case I think this is a quote from Fanny Burney this[br]is what she described Johnson by saying his mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting as if he were chewing[br]he has a strange Methodist frequently twirling his fingers and twisting his hands his body is in a continual[br]agitation see-sawing up and down his feet are never a moment quiet and in short his whole person is in perpetual[br]motion here's another passage from Boswell's life of dr. Johnson he made various[br]sounds with his mouth sometimes giving half a whistle sometimes clucking like a hen and these[br]sound to me like phonic tics my view[br]about how Tourette's works is that any one time in all of our brains there are[br]a whole range of motor phenomena and behavior that are competing to be expressed but that a part of our brain[br]called the striatum filters all of them out and only lets through those bits of behavior which are appropriate to the[br]circumstance in Tourette's syndrome that feels free or as other people are called as a firewall isn't working for some[br]reason most people with Tourette's syndrome have obsessions and compulsions this is what boss wall notes he had[br]another peculiarity this was his anxious care to go out or in a tad oral passage by a certain[br]number of steps from a certain point or at least so that either his right or his left foot I'm not certain which should constantly[br]make the first actual movement when he came close to the door or passage that's a wonderful example of what I call a[br]just right compulsion which are very common in Tourette's syndrome it's a feeling of having to do or say or[br]think something so it's absolutely just right and if you don't do it in that way you have to go back and do it again so[br]it doesn't surprise me at all that dr. Johnson wrote an English language dictionary because I think he[br]is characteristic which is obviously having to do or say or think something so that it's just right would be a[br]personality characteristic which would very much suit a dictionary writer then he wouldn't rest until he felt that the[br]definition of the word was just right and that would allow him to feel comfortable mentally and I would imagine if he hadn't have settled upon exactly[br]the right definition he would have suffered from a mental uncomfortableness[br]despite the many handicaps that Johnson faced he resolved to resume his literary[br]ambitions and set out for London in March 17:37 people talked about grub Street[br]which was not so much a physical space as a kind of state of mind there was this culture of jobbing[br]authors hacks who turned out pieces to order and Johnson saw himself as definitely having the capacity to kind[br]of participate in that however his whole sort of physical bearing meant that when[br]people saw him they thought Covent Garden Porter that's you and so actually a lot of people turned in a way but it[br]was here at some John's gate in Clerkenwell that he got his first big literary break[br]this was where the gentlemen's magazine was based the jugglers magazine was run by a man called Edward cave who like[br]Johnson was a native of the West Midlands and cave recognised Johnson's abilities and quickly employed Johnson[br]as someone to write reports of parliamentary debates and all kinds of other topical pieces and this was really[br]where Johnson served his apprenticeship as a jobbing author it was a very modest[br]living and it's it's certainly clear that he lived a hand-to-mouth existence constantly moving from one abode to the[br]next and it was precarious and it was during that time that he consorted with some of London's sort of dodgiest[br]characters he had one particular friend Richard savage who was a destitute and[br]badly behaved poet who was at one point accused of murdering someone in a coffeehouse brawl and Johnson would[br]associate with people like savage and often stay out all night and sleep in the street and this was a guy who was[br]definitely you know quite close to the gutter this was formative in terms of developing his his sense of really I[br]think urgency about his professional career but also his humanity that he knew about you know the wretches who[br]were one whole stratum of of kind of London life and certainly the junk women's magazine was was a very[br]important and cultural organ of the period and it gave him a kind of platform and it was like sort of doing[br]work experience he was able to acquire kind of plethora of different skills all of which would be useful in due[br]course you know these days people who want to be writers have all kind of noble aspirations that they start out with Johnson was much more[br]nuts-and-bolts in his approach and he worked up from the ground and learned all kinds of useful things about you[br]know shorthand and reporting and and kind of he was a book muncher I kind of like to think of him as this sort of you[br]know omnivore almost out there in the literary wilderness Johnson was in his[br]late 20s when he arrived in London famously he loved the city it stimulated[br]him it set him in an intellectual community that had been missing since his Oxford days you must understand that[br]every man has his genius and it's true to say that the great rule by which all excellence is achieved and successes[br]procured is to follow that genius my own particular genius as you have observed[br]during our conversations is manifests in extreme layers I'm either very silent or[br]very noisy very gloomy or very merry very sour or very kind what you must[br]understand is that with juice submission to Providence a man who genius has seldom ruined but by himself[br]the literary London that Johnson was reveling in during the 1730's and 40s was a fast changing world where once[br]literature had been the plaything of aristocratic patrons a new professionalism was emerging bookseller[br]publishers were assuming a new importance what they could sell on the market determined which projects were[br]commissioned and it was a group of six such booksellers who got together in 1746 and identified the need for a[br]definitive Dictionary of the English language the dictionary was a[br]booksellers idea a publisher's idea and it's no accident that all Johnson's[br]great projects and the dictionary was the first and the greatest we're actually first of all devised and[br]proposed by booksellers many of Johnson's most famous quotes are[br]quotes about the the desirability of commercial endeavor in the world of[br]literature no man but a blockhead writes except for money the bookseller cell[br]patrons of literature the desire to have a good English dictionary fitted in with[br]a lot of things that were going on at the time it was a period of codification anthologies and also the creation of[br]sort of national monuments you know at approximately this time you get things like the British Museum the Royal Academy of Arts the suddenly this idea[br]that arts should be institutionalized and institutionalizing English is part[br]of that process Italy had a standard dictionary the Academy Frances had[br]produced a dictionary for the French language and England had nothing so there was a perceived lack the English[br]felt very different about their language they felt that they weren't keeping up with the competing nations in Europe so[br]we needed an English dictionary to compete with other European nations we have to remember that Britain is a new[br]concept at the time you know the active union had only happened in 1707 so Britain at the time when Johnson starts[br]on the dictionary is about 40 years old and there's this sense that you have to have a sort of program of Britishness[br]and things an image of Britishness being projected the dictionary was a huge[br]project and it's extraordinarily effective of this group of London[br]booksellers that they picked Johnson I mean a lot of it was because of one man[br]in particular a very influential book seller called Robert Dodds Lee who was a[br]friend of Johnson's had become a friend of his and had a sense of his[br]extraordinary talents and his extraordinary erudition a man born to[br]grapple with libraries somebody said about Johnson Johnson signed a contract[br]with the booksellers in June 1746 he would be paid fifteen hundred guineas[br]over a period of three years enough to pay Johnson a living wage to her a team of helpers and to rent a large[br]house off Fleet Street number 17 Goff square he'd been commissioned to write[br]the dictionary of the English language and of course this was an enormous project and he knew that he'd need a[br]large workspace he saw the famous dictionary garret at the top of the house and this just[br]inspired him as somewhere that he could really spread out and work and of course[br]have his assistants[br]how long will the money lost by my reckoning three years three years they think I'm mad but three years it's 1500[br]Ganesa 500 here oh do have faith doctors[br]can see working hard we have our methods working hard and I comforted them what[br]we're doing will impress this will be a[br]dictionary like no other be preaching quotations full of the traces of the[br]finest minds Durham's physical theology bronze[br]vulgaris all worthy of quotation all full of learning and words well mused[br]this is great work but how can you possibly do this in three years you of course know that the French Academy with[br]40 members took 40 years to compile ended well 40 times 40 is 1600 and as[br]three is the 1600 so is the proportion of an Englishman to French[br]we have on the table and the facsimile version of the first edition of the[br]dictionary you can see from from looking at the volumes we have on the table just[br]by looking at the size of the books what a massive project it must have been what[br]makes Dobson's dictionary very idiosyncratic is that it contains illustrative quotations after many of[br]the definitions that contain the word that that he's trying to define so you[br]can actually see the word in action if you like collaborators on this no he had[br]what he called his amanuensis his his six copyists they helped with the actual[br]copying out but it seems that these the brainwork came from johnson himself[br]it's a popular myth that Johnson's dictionary was the first Dictionary of the English language in fact there had[br]been several before but whereas earlier dictionaries had offered little more than simple synonyms Johnson wanted his[br]dictionary to go further he wanted to offer more elaborate definitions and to give examples of words as used by the[br]finest authors one of the first things Johnson did was to have a look at pretty[br]much all the existing dictionaries and I think he initially considered the possibility of so drawing up a word list[br]by plundering what was already there but after a time he realized this wasn't a[br]very effective methodology and instead he decided and this is a radical decision and an influential one that he[br]would start with books rather than with the alphabet said what he does is he sets about what he calls the perusal of[br]English literature and he looks at about 2000 books by about 500 authors from[br]approximately the previous 200 years we can detect the records of other[br]dictionaries of the lexicographers within Johnson's dictionary but Johnson's making it very much his own dictionary and a lot of it is stopp'd[br]from Johnson's extraordinary memory because he had this amazingly retentive[br]memory that many of the quotations that appear in the dictionaries are ones that he[br]self-promote they're not always entirely accurate because they are the product of memory and the writers Johnson Johnson[br]admired are the ones located in the past although this is a Dictionary of the English language of 1755[br]the massive evidence within this dictionary comes from the past the kind of legitimizing heritage if you want[br]so there's writers the writers who dominate on Shakespeare Milton Dryden[br]Hobe the canonical greats of the past and their usage is often used to[br]exemplify a state of language which is quite different to that of the mid 18th[br]century for three years Johnson made[br]rapid progress selecting the very best quotations to bolster his definitions[br]showing language in action bed presser a[br]heavy lazy fellow this sanguine coward this bed presser this horse backbreaker[br]this huge hill of flesh Shakespeare by dental having two teeth ill management[br]of forks is not to be helped when they are only by dental Swift[br][ __ ] doodle a fool and insignificant wretch where study butchers broke your[br]novel and handled you like a fob doodle Judy Brock science certainty grounded on[br]demonstration science perfects genius and moderates that fury of the fancy[br]which cannot contain itself within the bounds of Reason Dryden Oates a grain[br]which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people the oats have eaten the horses[br]Shakespeare Dixie whimsy a made word in ridicule or[br]disdain of a waif abaca Darion he that[br]teachers or learns the alphabet or first rudiments of literature dull not[br]exhilarating not delightful as to make dictionaries is dull work we have a few[br]examples that are survived at the books Johnson used when he was making the dictionary and completely ruined some of[br]these books he borrowed from friends and he went through he found a word used in[br]a way that he liked in a quotation he admired or sometimes expressing a[br]sentiment he thought worth expressing and he would underline that word mark[br]off with vertical lines the whole passage he wanted quoted right the initial letter of the word in the margin[br]for his his help her hacks his ax men UNC's and they would go through the[br]business of transcribing a whole quotation cutting them out and slits and arranging them in alphabetical order but[br]Johnson was kind of he was getting books really[br]but Johnson wanted his dictionary to be far more than just an anthology of English literature in an age where[br]science industry and knowledge were all expanding rapidly what Johnson had in mind was something closer to an Internet[br]for the 18th century the way a modern[br]internet search engine works is it automatically seeks out knowledge from all over the world and pulls it together[br]into a gigantic database Johnson worked in much the same way when he put together his dictionary he sat down and[br]read literally thousands books and marked out quotations trying to find the[br]most interesting passages trying to put together a systematic and synoptic view[br]of the knowledge of the 18th century and he assembled more than a hundred thousand of these quotations to serve as[br]a kind of database or information bank of everything that was known everything[br]that was worth knowing entries on history and politics and biology tables[br]of logarithms for people interested in mathematics one entry on the mating habits of elephants another on the[br]medicinal value of opium he said he wanted them that all of the quotations[br]would do more than simply illustrate the meaning of one of them to teach things Johnson[br]provided a book that was in some ways the search engine of the 18th century[br]but Johnson's great ambition was not easily achieved he prepared the dictionary as far as the letter U when[br]the printers returned the proofs for a and B reading them Johnson was massively disappointed as he[br]realized that he'd completely underestimated the complexity of language well I think when Johnson[br]starts on the evidence of the plan of the dictionary that he he publishes in[br]1746 he thinks that the dictionary is going to legislate that it's going to be[br]a prescriptive dictionary it's going to guard the language against corruption[br]and innovation and Johnson seems to think of himself as a controller of[br]words when he starts by the time he's finished he's completely changed his[br]mind and indeed ruefully characterizes his earlier ambitions he's like trying[br]to sort of stand against the way it's trying to lash the winds he says you[br]can't do this the language has a life which you can at best try to record but[br]you can't as it were make decisions about which words should or should not be used one of the things that we need[br]to understand is that Johnson started out with a slightly restrictive sense of[br]how many different applications any given word might have he thought that really a word could have at most about[br]about seven well not about seven applications but in the course of his[br]reading he found that you know somewhere to twenty or thirty or a hundred different applications I think he says that the the verb to take has a hundred[br]and thirty four different applications and he ends up expending about eight thousand words on explaining all of[br]those I think what must have caused the[br]problems for him was when he reached the verbs and in the letter a as it happens[br]there aren't really very complicated verbs in the English language but there are plenty in the letter B so it must[br]have been when he got to the letter B and the ink adverbs like the verb to bear for example he must have realized that not[br]only are there lots of lots of different meanings of the verb to bear there are also phrasal verbs including[br]the verb to bear to bear up to bear down to bear away and so on and he wouldn't[br]have realized that before he started because previous dictionaries didn't have phrasal verbs Johnson decided that[br]all that he had done so far needed revision it was too expensive to reprint the entries for a and B but he was[br]determined that everything else should be rethought the text just didn't match[br]his expectations it wasn't the kind of dictionary he wanted to write so he[br]refused to send the rest to the printer we do know that Johnson must have got a[br]letter from the proprietors because we've got his reply to the letter and the reply to the letter is a very strong[br]rejection of what seemed to have been threats from the proprietors the proprietors seemed to have threatened[br]that they would storm his house and take away the material that he had in it and[br]print the dictionary whether he wanted them to or not to give him[br]they want us to keep in pink[br]what we've done is good it's what you said we do what you told us and then I don't care what I told you[br]it's poor we need more space we need more time we need more definitions we need more[br]examples languages which I will not be[br]boys oh not me bleed I will not be[br]bullied but the printers continued to[br]hound Johnson he set aside the dictionary and feeling wretched and[br]guilty he now entered one of the many periods of depression that dogged his life here we have Johnson's prayers and[br]meditations which were left in the manuscripts of which were left to the college what we can see here is a kind[br]of Johnson's own accounting actually of his life to himself[br]they often record his sense of penance for not having achieved what he hoped to[br]achieve as a very transparent sense of guilt often and his prayers this is one very early one here from 1749 where we[br]can see his sense of religion and his devoutness but also this prayer for strength to sustain him and any for him[br]to improve their often quite depressing reading actually meaning a a ritual[br]tortured sense of Johnson Ramon actually oddly never very witty never very pithy[br]Nova very epic erratic it's much more somebody searching their own conscience[br]or what they should have done and what they have not done and what they hope to do and improve in the future[br]Johnson says that when he started on the dictionary he had imagined what he would[br]do was wander amongst the the groves of Posie that he would delightedly sample[br]from all the kind of great literary works but also the works of learning and[br]science and that this would be a rather delicious an instructive thing but then[br]he says these were the dreams of a poet doomed to awake a lexicographer[br]he was in many ways what we would call a depressive a person in particular possessed by some religious terrors he[br]apparently kept a padlock and chained at the house of his great friends mr. and[br]mrs. trail who lived in Stratham and this padlock and chain which he[br]presented to mrs. Trail were there if you should ever go mad he was to be restrained and locked up and he feared[br]madness as a kind of constant presence[br]flash quick a tremor of the body I know[br]I watched him walking through the street yesterday where was he going till the[br]ladies on the miter no doubt sure who could blame by 1750 Johnson could no[br]longer afford to pay for the amanuensis and they had to be laid off but he still[br]had other bills to pay his sick wife needed constant medical care and a wage[br]had to be found for her companion stimulants my husband yes[br]he's resting there's not another man works as hard Johnson chose to try to[br]solve his financial problems by starting a magazine the Rambler a collection of[br]essays often characterized like so much of his writing by a model in sense of disappointment in his own failings he[br]would not deny me a place among the most faithful voters of idleness how often[br]have I sittin down to write and rejoice this interruption and how often I have[br]praised the dignity of resolution determined at night to write in the morning and deferred it in the morning[br]to the quiet hours of the night it was[br]almost two years before Johnson returned to the dictionary and faced up to the[br]publishers they had paid for a dictionary and he hadn't completed it he'd reneged on his contract and he knew[br]it and he must have felt remorseful about that and he must have known that they were right so I think that probably[br]was a kickstart for him to start the project again and he must have gone back to it at that point and tried to[br]resurrect it and tried to complete it but this time of course he's got very little money and he he gets a new[br]contract with the publishers they agree to pub to give him a guinea per sheet[br]per printed sheet so he's getting some more money but it's not a great deal of[br]money so he can only employ two amanuensis to help him[br]after a period of inertia in 1751 Johnson really plunged himself back into[br]his world of work he was Eames kind of galvanized he was excited by the task in hand again and at the same time that he[br]was working very zealously he also started socializing a lot more and it was too little little taverns like this[br]that he would come little places tucked away and kind of nooks and crannies of London and he would throw himself back[br]into that intimate social life not necessarily drinking very much but enjoying social pleasures went well for[br]him until March of 1752 when his wife Teti died that was crushing that was[br]disabling he suddenly became incredibly introspective introverted he stopped socializing he was he was really[br]disabled with grief with a return of the black dog of melancholy he stopped[br]coming to places like this he stopped doing anything he certainly stopped work on the dictionary and there was a period[br]then a kind of hiatus where he was just blank but he pulled himself out of this[br]and the way this seems to have happened really is that his house in golf Square began to fill up with people like[br]Francis barber the young Jamaican servant boy who came to live with him[br]and new friends his house became a sort of menagerie of eccentrics strange people on the fringe of literary society[br]coming to his household and invigorate him and fill him with not exactly shuara de vivre but some kind of appetite for[br]life and ultimately for work amongst the new arrivals at Johnson's house was a[br]twelve year old recently liberated slave Frank barber barber became a surrogate[br]son to Johnson and lived with him until Johnson's death when barber was left the sum of 750 pounds and Teddy's wedding[br]ring there was Robert Levitt a somewhat disreputable self-appointed doctor who[br]picked up much of what he knew about medicine from conversations overheard in a cafe near a medical school in Paris[br]there was a blind poet s Anna Williams who claimed to have taken part in the[br]first experiments leading to the discovery of electricity and mrs. de Mulan Tati's companion who later told[br]Boswell that she'd received numerous amorous advances from Johnson who even groped her on occasions I mean it must[br]have been a chaotic household with all these different people living in it Johnson does say that there were frequent arguments the inhabitants[br]didn't get on with one another so they're out with each other frequently so it can't have been an easy household to live in but Johnson doesn't seem to[br]have minded that he didn't mind people round with one of it what he hated was being alone he really feared being left alone he[br]delayed and delayed he didn't do the job because he couldn't face up to it he didn't know how to do it he had these problems on it and he[br]didn't know how to solve the problems but then once he stirred into action he[br]really gets going and he produces 80-percent of the dictionary in less than two years with the help of just two[br]amanuensis[br]if Johnson had done this in a university setting it would have been a different dictionary it probably would have been[br]much better organized he probably would have had easier access to materials that[br]would have given him for example better etymological and information but I'm not[br]sure it would have been a better dictionary after 9 years[br]Johnson's Labor's were complete but before he would allow the dictionary to be printed Johnson wanted to be sure of[br]one last detail even after all his Labor's on the dictionary there was one[br]thing that Johnson had to do before he was prepared to set it before the general public and we can actually see[br]evidence of what that one thing was on the title page these letters after his name a and today we would say ma we may[br]recall that Johnson left Oxford almost 30 years before without a degree this[br]was something that had rankled during the intervening years he felt that he needed some kind of badge of his[br]academic credentials his authenticity as a scholar to put on the title page to[br]lend credibility really to his publication and so he badgered some of his Oxford contacts to make this happen[br]and until they did make it happen he wasn't prepared for the dictionary to be released and those letters were were[br]vital to his realization as a fully fledged man of a khadeem finally on[br]April the 15th 1755 the dictionary was published 2,000 copies were printed[br]initially selling for a costly four pounds and ten shillings each but swiftly followed by cheaper editions see[br]realizations and abridgements it made him a kind of national figure[br]and then as now it's simply struck observers as an extraordinary thing for[br]one man to do yet focus several years[br]afterwards though he was now unknown author a great man dr. Johnson he was[br]still quite hard up he had to give up the house at Gough square probably because he couldn't afford the rent anymore indeed actually the year after[br]it was published he was being arrested for debt and bailed out by his his acquaintances the novelist Samuel[br]Richardson and it was only rarely in 1762 seven years later when Georgia[br]third the young Georgia third gave him a pension a generous pension that he[br]escaped financial need for the first time in his life Johnson continued to[br]write for the rest of his life including a novel Restless an edition of the works of Shakespeare and a number of essays on[br]the lives of Britain's greatest poets his reputation made he was the king of[br]literary London he held court in various sours and coffee houses and of course[br]there was always Boswell noting down his every word for posterity[br]dictionaries are like watches the worst is better than non but the best can't be[br]expected to go quite true much of my life being lost to the pressure of[br]disease much I confess has been trifle away but it will all have been worthwhile if by my efforts foreign[br]nations and distant ages can gain access to the propagators of knowledge and[br]understand that teachers of truth whether by my writing have added[br]everything to English literature time alone will be my judge but if the[br]dictionaries fails to do justice to our language that I only failed in something which no human powers that his are too[br]completed I believe I knew very well what I was undertaking I believe I knew[br]very well how to do it and I believe I did it very well[br]Johnson never stopped working on revised editions of his dictionary four of which[br]were published before his death in 1784[br]in the 82 nineteenth century people very shortly after death often had these[br]sometimes wax sometimes plaster casts made of their faces and the upper part[br]of their bodies Johnson's death mask was I believe commissioned by Johnson's[br]friend and executor Sir Joshua Reynolds[br]it's extraordinary um as you look at as you look at the death mask you have this[br]incredible sense of of really seeing Johnson as a person much more than in[br]the paintings which present this kind of sanitized vision of what he was like to[br]me this feels even though it's you know ironically it's something that's been done after Johnson's death it's[br]something which has this incredible life about it you're really able to read[br]something about Johnson's personality to see what the living breathing talking[br]Johnson must have been like but it's a very large head and you get the[br]impression that these would have been very expressive features but the default the expressions wouldn't necessarily[br]have been you know a broad smile I mean the mouth he sort of twisted in a[br]strange kind of rictus I know that that might just be death but there is a sense[br]that it's not a happy mouth there's something about this face which suggests I think unhappiness[br]scrofula a deprivation of the humors of the body[br]Litchfield city of the dead flesh quake[br]a tremor of the body grub Street a street in London much[br]inhabited by writers of small histories dictionaries contemporary poems pension[br]pay given to a state filing for treason to his country[br]lexicographer a writer of dictionaries a harmless Drudge over 250 years after its[br]publication the legacy of Johnson's dictionary endures it still sets the[br]standard for dictionaries today the Oxford English Dictionary began life as[br]a revision to Johnson's and there are still some 1700 of his original definitions in the current edition don't[br]some must have been enormous ly proud of his dictionary after he'd finished because he always referred to it as his[br]book he doesn't refer to any of his other publications as his book just the[br]dictionary and he became known as dictionary Johnson and was very proud of that nickname though clearly he thought[br]that was his central achievement of his life some people criticized his favoring[br]some quite unusual words and not including words that perhaps ought to have been in there so for example he[br]doesn't have the word blonde he doesn't have port as a drink even though he was certainly familiar with it he doesn't[br]have the word banknote but he does have the word the retro minjin C which means[br]pissing backwards which is apparently something that has do and you might think well it is that strictly necessary[br]it's actually very good that Johnson included that word but the were things he left out in the preface to the[br]dictionary he says as if it were a self-evident truth the chief glory of[br]every people arises from its authors and the dictionary is a proof of that as far[br]as he's concerned and if you were to say in one sentence what is Johnson's importance what's the[br]importance of his career I think you would say is he is the person more than any other who invents English literature[br]so some repository of cultural values as a place to go to and[br]as a some educational tool as well and that's what the dictionary really does[br]stay with us as Robbie Coltrane plays Samuel Johnson joined by John sessions[br]as James Boswell to recreate the pair's trip to the Hebrides in 1773 that's next

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000