[BBC 4] Samuel Johnson: The Dictionary Man

[Music]

[Narrator] In 1747 in an attic room
in Gough Square in London,

a remarkable literary project
was underway.

Embracing the spirit of the 18th century,
a dictionary had been commissioned --

a book that would do
for the English language

what Newton had done
for the stars:

classifying words, fixing their meaning,
bringing order to the chaos of language.

>>by the farthing,
for every copy we make him 80.

>>Careful, wholes day work
there you know.

[Narrator] Nine years in the making
this landmark of English literature

was the brain work of one man.

>>He was a frightful digger,
huge, shambling,

twitching, blind in one eye.

>>[Female 1] Often his wig would be singed at
the front from,

from holding a candle too close
to his short-sighted eyes.

>>[Female 2] Lots of people when
they first met him

thought he was a lunatic,
until they were able to talk to him.

[Narrator] Samuel Dictionary Johnson an
unlikely hero,

an eccentric unknown hat writer,
destined to become a literary superstar.

Samuel Johnson's dictionary is one of
the most important books ever written

in the English language.

In the 250 years since its publication
it has served as a model

for dictionary writing throughout
the world.

Today rare first editions
are proudly preserved

in the world's great libraries.

[Henry Hitchings] So, here is the dictionary:
two volumes,

forty two thousand seven hundred
and seventy three words,

over a hundred thousand
illustrated quotations,

two thousand
three hundred pages.

And as you can see these
are huge cumbersome books.

You couldn't pick one of
the volumes up with one hand,

you might struggle
to do it with two hands.

What's more I can't even touch
this particular copy of it,

because this was the personal copy of
King George the Third.

Usually, today, when we see
a book on this kind of scale

that's something that's been produced
by people collaborating large teams

of people who've come together.

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

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