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THE WORKS OF SAMUEL JOHNSON VOL XVIII

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface....................................................................................................................ixContents...................................................................................................................xvIntroduction...............................................................................................................xviiShort Titles and Abbreviations.............................................................................................xlvSigla Used in the Textual Notes............................................................................................xlviiThe Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747) Editor's Introduction..............................................3The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747)....................................................................25From A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)Editor's Introduction to the Preface.......................................................................................63Preface....................................................................................................................73Editor's Introduction to "The History of the English Language".............................................................115"The History of the English Language"......................................................................................125Editor's Introduction to "A Grammar of the English Tongue".................................................................265"A Grammar of the English Tongue"..........................................................................................275From A Dictionary of the English Language, First Abridged Edition..........................................................(1756)Editor's Introduction......................................................................................................363The Preface................................................................................................................367From A Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Folio Edition (1773)Editor's Introduction......................................................................................................373"Advertisement to this Edition"............................................................................................375AppendicesFacsimile and Transcription of "A Short Scheme for compiling a new Dictionary of the English Language".....................379Facsimile of the Fair Copy of the Plan.....................................................................................428Index......................................................................................................................491

Chapter One

Composition, Publication, and Reception of the Plan

The composition of The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language ranks among the most complicated processes of writing and revising that Johnson ever undertook. The successive stages in the composition can be described at length because two annotated manuscript drafts of the pamphlet are extant, a quantity seemingly unequalled by the preliminary stages of any other of Johnson's works. Our account is a shorter, simpler, altered version of a much more extensive treatment, readily accessible to the curious.

The story begins soon after Johnson had presumably decided to accept the tentative proposal of seven important London booksellers (John and Paul Knapton, Thomas Longman and Thomas Shewell, Charles Hitch, Andrew Millar, and Robert Dodsley, who apparently initiated the proposal) that he prepare a new dictionary of the English language, or at least that he draw up a prospectus of such a work which, meeting with their approval, would lead to a formal contract (which, in the event, he and the booksellers signed on 18 June 1746). Accordingly, Johnson wrote "A Short Scheme for compiling a new Dictionary of the English Language," a holograph manuscript now part of the Hyde Collection at the Houghton Library, which is reproduced (and accompanied by a printed text) in the Appendix below (pp. 378-427). Both his known habit of rapid composition and the manuscript itself suggest that the "Scheme" was drawn up only a short time before 30 April 1746, the date noted by Johnson on the last leaf, supposedly just after completing the piece. For a man who had "long thought" of making a dictionary and who testified repeatedly to his speed in writing, the composition of the nineteen-leaf "Scheme" was, at most, probably a matter of a few days' labor. Indeed, like "forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage" (Life, I.166), the whole document may have been created at a single sitting.

Whatever the exact period of composition, a study of the manuscript indicates, first, that Johnson was primarily intent on setting down, quickly and systematically, his notions about the problems and practices involved in compiling a dictionary of the English language and, second, that he was not making a conscious effort to write in his most polished style. The "Scheme" originally consisted of nineteen leaves, but part of the third and all of the eighth are now missing. The remaining seventeen and one-third leaves3 contain approximately 3,500 words arranged in some 41 paragraphs. In these paragraphs, which correspond to the "body" (pars. 7-74) of the first printed text, Johnson treated, sequentially, such topics as the choice of words for inclusion in his dictionary, spelling, pronunciation, etymology, syntax, definition, "the Distribution of words into their proper classes," and illustrative quotations. That he recorded his thoughts speedily and painlessly and without very much attention to the niceties of writing is evidenced, in varying degrees, by the clean appearance of most of the leaves, the probable omission of several words, the heavy reliance on the comma for pointing and the absence of all punctuation marks in a good many spots where one would normally expect them, the few lapses from "correct" or typically Johnsonian syntax, and the small number of revisions relative to the number made during subsequent stages in the composition of the Plan.

The changes that Johnson made before submitting the manuscript to readers consist almost wholly of (1) the substitution of words or phrases for the originals, (2) the correction of mistakes resulting from haste or carelessness, and (3) the deletion of words (largely) or phrases. These changes are distributed fairly evenly throughout the document, with fourteen of the seventeen and one-third leaves each containing, roughly, from two to five.

After he had written the "Scheme" and had made changes of the sort just described, Johnson presumably passed the manuscript to at least one reader and possibly more: two different persons wrote comments on it. We can offer no conjecture about the identity of the more taciturn of the two, who seems, from the location of his remarks, to have been the second reader. But we think that the first, and much more vocal, reader was probably the bull-breeding king of Ashbourne, Johnson's close friend Dr. John Taylor. Taylor's handwriting is markedly similar to...