Johnson's 'Dictionary' and the Politics of 'Standard English'

Abstract

Did Johnson's Dictionary support the cause of class oppression? A well-known group of studies has portrayed Johnson's work in precisely this way as an instrument for suppressing lower-class idioms and for authorizing the language of the upper classes as the only 'proper' English. According to John Barrell, whose work has strongly influenced this interpretation, there is a direct link between Johnson's allegedly authoritarian politics and his loyal support of the ruling classes in the Dictionary: 'Johnson's notion of language, as of government, is quite openly and frankly one in which the majority should be idle and helpless spectators, while the customs of the polite are converted into law.'l Citing the Preface to the Dictionary, Barrell points to Johnson's apparent rejection of working-class idioms, 'the fugitive cant' of the 'laborious and mercantile part of the people'.2 Johnson embraced the language of 'gentlemen', a superficially neutral and universal standard that in fact gave full authority over English to the ruling elite. Barrell's position was later taken up by Olivia Smith, who included Johnson along with Harris and Lowth in a 'linguistic trinity' that 'contributed to the hegemony of language, justifying and perpetuating class divisions'.3 By giving precedence to written over spoken language, Johnson divided language along 'class lines', condemning 'the language of all but the exclusively educated'.4 Most recently, Tony Crowley has enrolled Johnson in the 'war' waged by eighteenth-century lexicographers and grammarians to crush the 'heteroglossic' vitality of English, with its many class and provincial dialects, and to create a single national idiom, 'standard English'.5 This interpretation of Johnson as an authoritarian Tory, dedicated to silencing the poor and uneducated, takes no account of modern scholarship by Donald Greene and others that has attempted to disabuse readers of this deceptive Victorian understanding of his politics. Yet better informed studies of the Dictionary have not, curiously, questioned the assumption that Johnson stigmatized vulgar language and legitimized only 'polite' idioms as proper