Johnson's 'Dictionary' and Dictionary Johnson

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Popular ideas about the authorship of dictionaries have a curious double life. On the one hand, any and all dictionaries of a given language are likely to be thought of under the impersonal rubric of'the dictionary': we have often been told and often told others to 'look it up in the dictionary'. On the other hand, some particular dictionaries are closely identified with the names of their principal authors, or with the authors of the texts on which they are based. This is more true of eighteenth-century dictionaries of English than later ones; among works in English, it is pre-eminently true of Johnson's Dictionary and Webster's. Even the remote revisions and abridgements of these works retain the name of the author of the early editions. In fact, the later works are the ones actually entitled 'Johnson's' or Webster's', whereas the editions published within the authors' lifetimes have more conventional titles: A Dictionary of the English Language ( 755) or An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). The later, eponymous titles are justified in many ways, of course, but they tend to conceal the extent to which even the early editions of the great 'one-man' lexicons are heavily reliant on still earlier dictionaries and are, in a sense, only new editions of that ongoing impersonal work which popular speech, with some wisdom, has dubbed 'the dictionary'. A Dictionary of the English Language (I755) became Johnson's Dictionary for some reasons that are only tangentially related to the fact that Johnson was the principal author, editor, and compiler. The appellation arose, in part, out of a certain phase in the construction of authorship in the late eighteenth century. Without denying that the eponymous title is in many ways apt, we wish to examine the extent to which A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) is really Johnson's personal creation. Such an inquiry leads us to ask a number of related questions. What kind of authorship and authority does Johnson achieve over his materials in the Dictinary? Is Johnson's personal life as a scholar and as a man visible in the Dictionary, as we expect it to be in the creations of most authors? Is the Dictionary the culmination of a 'declaration of independence' for authors, as Alvin Kernan has described Johnson's prepublication letter to Chesterfield?1 To what extent, on the other hand, is the Dictionary highly conventional, or merely compiled, the accretion of a