Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University and CEO of Samuel Johnson Industries Ltd., has published a belated but worth-waiting-for review of Johnson on the English Language in The Weekly Standard. This is Vol. XVIII of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, a scholarly enterprise in the works for more than 50 years. The latest installment includes not Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, which was published in two immense volumes in 1755, but drafts of “The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language” (1747), the great “Preface,” and much of the editorial paraphernalia that accompanied the dictionary. Lynch rightly stresses the broad human appeal of Johnson’s work:
“…while Johnson was a serious scholar…he wasn't writing only for other academics. Johnson once said he `rejoice[d] to concur with the common reader,’ and this `common reader . . . uncorrupted with literary prejudices,’ was his ideal audience. Johnson has a reputation for being a difficult, even a forbidding, writer; but he could be admirably direct and powerful when he chose to be.”
To use a word defined in his dictionary as “relieving,” but which has subsequently been turned into a synonym for trivial and politically correct, Johnson is eminently “relevant.” In his hands, even lexicography, dismissed as a recondite academic specialty, offers suggestions of how we might live our lives. This comes from the “Preface”:
"If the changes we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language."
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2 comments:
To speak Johnsonianly, the cant use of the word “relevance,” especially with reference to education, is worthy of a post to itself.
As to the Dictionary, are there any really good modern editions available? I happened to pick up Lynch’s Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, a selection from the original, from the remainder table at Barnes & Noble one night; his introduction and editorial material do a good job of setting the work’s original context and answering obscure points, but I have found myself wondering about some of his word selections in a necessarily compressed format. His own principles for selection are sound, I think: 1) “famous” entries (e.g., “oats”); 2) words that have changed meaning in interesting ways (e.g., “nice”); 3) words with significance for literary history, including words important to Johnson’s writing (e.g., “vanity”), words from works Johnson consulted for the Dictionary (e.g., words from Hamlet), and words with significance for literature of Johnson’s day and shortly after (e.g., Lynch’s examples, “pride” and “prejudice”); and 4) words that reflect the culture of Johnson’s period in areas such as science, politics, and law, as well as more quotidian arenas.
Lynch’s implementation of these principles is less certain. To cite just a few examples, starting with your word, “relevance” – surely an excellent choice for category 2 above? Lynch omits it, choosing instead, just to draw from the pages immediate to where “relevant” would be, “Renard” (“the name of a fox in a fable”) and “rhabarbarate,” the first a still-common literary allusion to which Johnson’s entry frankly does not add much, and the second a word having to do with rhubarb that I cannot imagine was common even in Johnson’s day and which, however lexicographically interesting does not, to my mind, fit well even into category 4 above. Other omissions that I can recall off the top of my head include “inmate” for category 2 and “positive” for category 3, which I think I sought out when reading a book on George Eliot (i.e., “positivist”). But I suppose this is quibbling – what I’d really like to see is a relatively cheap but more expansive selection, perhaps in two volumes. The only other modern edition of selections that I can find available for purchase (Dover) is, in page length at least, shorter than Lynch’s.
I'm grateful -- both for the puffs of my Dictionary abridgment and my recent review in The Weekly Standard, and for the thoughful criticism of the abridgment.
The anonymous poster mentioned the Dover abridgment -- that's McAdam and Milne from 1963. Theirs was the only modern one around when I took on the task; my biggest difference from them was that I keep entries intact: if I include an entry, I include the whole thing, whereas they chopped them up. That means they have room for more entries, whereas I've included more quotations and such. Note that just last year the British linguist David Crystal published an abridgment very similar to mine, though it's now available only in the UK, and Crystal tells me he doesn't know of any plans for a US edition. Still, for Dictionary fans, it's worth a look.
The odds of a cheap facsimile of the whole Dictionary are pretty slim, at least any time soon -- the book is just too damn big. But you can at least get the whole text on-line now at
http://www.fab24.net/jd100203/
That's the Johnson Dictionary Project supervised by my friend Anne McDermott of the University of Birmingham. The search software still needs work (and Anne has been complaining to me for a long time about the difficulties of getting it to work at all), but it's a step in the right direction -- and the plan is to keep it on-line for free. (The URL will probably change one of these days.)
By the way, while I'm engaging in shameless self-promotion, I'll mention my Dictionary abridgment has just been released in paperback, and I've persuaded the publisher to keep the price low.
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