Abstract

In the eighteenth century lexicographers were still learning their trade, and perhaps we should not expect them to have been acutely sensitive to current intellectual trends. The commercial advantages of keeping very much abreast of new words and idioms were slight. Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary certainly dominated lexicography in the second half of the century, recommended the usage of earlier generations as a model, in preference to current usage. Nevertheless, whether they meant to or not, dictionaries seem to have 'become enlightened' during the course of the first fifty or seventy-five years of the eighteenth century. They reflected and promoted Enlightenment values. I shall present evidence here that the later eighteenth-century dictionaries not only exhibit an increasing awareness of the cultural ideals we associate with high Enlightenment but also embody those cultural ideals. Most research on eighteenth-century English dictionaries has been concerned either with the evolution of lexicography or with Johnson's achievements in the field.' Thus, the two early dictionaries I quote from most frequently in this essay have been characterized as relying more on 'the subjective impressions and prejudices of the editor or his sources than [on] the objective documentation of language' that modern dictionaries aspire to.2 Thus, more trivially and questionably, one scholar asserts thatJohnson's was 'the first English dictionary that could in any way be considered as a standard, all its predecessors being mere lists of words in comparison'.3 My approach, while by no means incompatible with these two, is different: making common-sense allowances for idiosyncrasy and error, I take dictionaries as representative of their times. This is not an unproblematical assumption, given that every eighteenth-century dictionary drew heavily on

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