The Age of
Doctor Johnson

The late 17th and early 18th centuries bring the first substantial concerns about ‘correct’ English, and a corresponding rise in complaints and protests among some educated people against what they see as the misuse of language, particularly in its written form. This was the beginning of a programme that continues to this day, that of ‘policing’ the language and its users. In historical terms, it is also one of the factors that allows us to identify the emergence of modern English at this time.

The consciousness of the ‘need’ for correctness and order in language may be attributed to several factors. It can be seen as a long-term reaction to the politicial and civil turmoil that marked much of the 17th century, in particular the Civil War. More immediately, a population boom went hand in hand with other demographic changes such as greater mobility and a growth in literacy, while from the cultural perspective a new focus on standards of politeness and good conduct naturally extended to speech and writing. Whatever the reasons, this period saw an increase in anxiety and uncertainty over the English language and the ways in which it was developing.

Paradoxically, debate and disagreement over language become possible only when the boundaries and rules are fairly clear. Orthography, or spelling, provides an obvious example. In the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (1345–1400) it was accepted, and quite acceptable, to spell the same word in different ways because spelling was not fixed. Even in Shakespeare’s day, English spelling could be, in the words of his biographer Anthony Burgess (1917–93): ‘gloriously impressionistic’. By the 18th century everything had changed. There were rules, and with the arrival of rules came the whiff of sanctions, even if it was only being mocked for one’s ignorance. There were some benefits too, however. Perhaps the greatest benefit of all was the appearance in 1755 of Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

Jonathan Swift Writes a Letter

In 1712 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), wrote an open letter to Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford. Harley was the senior minister in the Tory government, in effect the prime minister of the country. Swift lards his letter with the usual – and necessary – compliments to this powerful man, although he is not afraid to hint at the consequences for Harley’s future reputation if he does not follow his (Swift’s) advice.

The subject of this long letter was the condition of the English language. After a gallop through the history of English, taking in the Romans, Saxons and Normans, Swift explains what he considers is wrong with it and what should be done to put it right. The nub of the writer’s complaints is that:

our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.

Swift cites only a few instances to back up his claims. He objects to the fad for new words. He objects to words being shortened, and he particularly blames poets for the:

. . . barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses; and this they have frequently done, so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure.

In the letter he singles out the jarring sounds of ‘Drudg’d, Disturb’d, Rebuk’t, Fledg’d’, words that might have been pronounced with what to us would sound like an extra syllable (drudg-ed, disturb-ed). Elsewhere Swift expressed his unhappiness at abbreviations such as rep(utation) or incog(nito).

Jonathan Swift was a satirist, but these were objections which he intended to be taken seriously. Before laughing at his fuddyduddy comments we ought to remember that, although the specific points of criticism may have changed, the underlying attitude that there is a right and a wrong way to use English is still with us. Until recently, any formal use of English would have rejected abbreviations like fridge or phone, just as Swift would never have written ‘rep’ and ‘incog’. In the same style as he dismissed drudg’d or disturb’d, so in some types of writing it is still unacceptable to use standard elisions (i.e. it’s, isn’t, couldn’t). We are not so different from Swift as we might imagine.

In addition, Swift had some sensible things to say in the letter. For example, he rejected the idea that spelling should be reformed so that it reflected the way people actually sounded their words. He believed that the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer had established a standard of English, a view shared by later generations. But at bottom Swift seems to have found something ugly in the Anglo-Saxon roots of English – as well as the ‘Northern Ear’ remark in the letter quoted above he talks of ‘the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended’ – while being drawn to the more ‘liquid’ vowels of Italian.

So what was Swift’s answer to this intolerable situation of the decline and fall of a language? It was to be a committee, following the example of the French who had set up the Académie Française in 1635 to oversee the development of their language (it still issues its pronouncements to this day). Swift was vague about numbers and qualifications, although he did suggest that the Earl of Oxford himself might be willing to join them. His overall aim was not exactly vague, even if it was certainly unrealistic:

But what I have most at Heart is, that some Method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever, after such Alterations are made in it as shall be thought requisite.

Whether or not the Earl of Oxford considered making a favourable response to Swift’s ideas, they were never realized. It took Dr Johnson, more pragmatic than Swift, to recognize many years later that language could never be fixed.

Samuel Johnson Writes a Dictionary

Doctor Samuel Johnson (1709–84) was one of the dominant figures in English life of the mid-18th century. A poet, critic and essayist, he also compiled the first English dictionary of real substance and authority. Johnson’s reputation grew after the publication of the dictionary in 1755 but his posthumous fame is closely linked to James Boswell’s Life (1791), which devotedly recorded Johnson’s table-talk and wide-ranging opinions.

Johnson fought against idleness all his life but, in truth, he was a one-man academy. He rented a house (17 Gough Square) off Fleet Street in London and used the topmost floor, the garret, as the ‘dictionary work-shop’.

He employed six assistants, five Scots and one English, to copy out the quotations illustrating the words to be defined. Given Johnson’s frequent rudeness about the Scots – often as a way of getting under the skin of his great biographer Boswell, who was born in Ayrshire – it is ironic that he picked the majority of his helpers from that nation.

Johnson not only chose, from his own vast reading, quotations which numbered almost a quarter of a million (around 114,000 were actually used) but wrote the definitions to more than 40,000 words. The best known definitions now are the ones where Johnson let his prejudices or his sense of humour show through. Lexicographer is defined as ‘A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge’, while oats are ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people’. But Johnson’s definitions were generally considered outstanding. He did his job so well that, for more than a century, his Dictionary of the English Language had no meaningful competitor.

Johnson had a difficult relationship with his patron, Lord Chesterfield, who had shown an interest in the Dictionary in its planning stages. But where Jonathan Swift depended on the Earl of Oxford to further his plan for an English Academy, Johnson was eventually able to dispense with a patron altogether. As the work neared publication he felt that Chesterfield was trying to claim some of the glory. He wrote a letter in which he told Chesterfield with magnificent coldness: ‘The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed until I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.’ Chesterfield seems not to have been too upset and left the letter where it might be seen by visitors, saying generously and rightly of Samuel Johnson: ‘This man has great powers.’

Johnson may have kept Chesterfield at arm’s length but he had admirers at the highest level. In 1767 he frequently visited Buckingham House (on the site of which Buckingham Palace now stands) to use the library there, probably to consult books on law. King George III (1738–1820) was an active bibliophile and had recently appointed the youthful Frederick Barnard as librarian. Aware that the king wanted to meet Johnson, Barnard saw his opportunity during one visit when the great lexicographer was settled and reading by the fire. Without saying anything to Johnson, he crept out of the room, fetched the king from his private apartment and escorted him by candlelight through a suite of rooms until they came to a private door into the library. Johnson was so deep in his reading that he started up when Barnard went across and whispered in his ear, ‘Sir, here is the King’.

George III came forward and – in the words of Johnson’s biographer James Boswell – ‘at once was courteously easy’. The conversation went well. Johnson was respectful but not overawed, talking in his usual ‘sonorous voice’ and not dropping into the soft, deferential tones most people would have adopted when facing the monarch. They talked of books and writers, including Johnson himself:

His Majesty enquired if he was then writing any thing. He answered, he was not, for he had pretty well told the world what he knew, and must now read to acquire more knowledge. The King, as it should seem with a view to urge him to rely on his own stores as an original writer, and to continue his labours, then said ‘I do not think you borrow much from any body.’ Johnson said, he thought he had already done his part as a writer. ‘I should have thought so too, (said the King) if you had not written so well.’ – Johnson observed to me, upon this, that ‘No man could have paid a handsomer compliment; and it was fit for a King to pay. It was decisive.’ When asked by another friend, at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, whether he made any reply to this high compliment, he answered, ‘No, Sir. When the King had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign.’ Perhaps no man who had spent his whole life in courts could have shewn a more nice and dignified sense of true politeness, than Johnson did in this instance. (James Boswell, Life of Johnson)

Johnson’s Understanding

Dr Johnson explained some of the background to his Dictionary in the preface that he wrote for it. He outlines the principles he used for inclusion. The word highwayman needs to be in the Dictionary because its two parts (‘highway’+ ‘man’) do not by themselves give the sense, but coachman is self-explanatory and so is not included. He comments on an aspect of English that has always been problematic for those trying to learn the language: the vast number of phrasal verbs. These are expressions formed by a verb and preposition or adverb, such as fall in, fall out, fall back, fall to, fall on, in which the distinct meanings are hard to work out if the words are taken one by one. Johnson says that he has noted these ‘with great care’, one of several comments that show he intended the Dictionary to be used by ‘foreigners’ as well as native speakers.

He is full of a common sense which reveals itself in honest awareness of the limitations of the task. He has not attempted an almost endless list of words beginning re- or un-, since these can be made up almost on the spot. He reflects on the inherent difficulty of the dictionary-maker’s task, of being under the necessity of explaining words by using other words. Some definitions, he says, are inevitably circular (hind, the female of the stag; stag, the male of the hind). He comments on how the greatest problems tend to lie in the commonest terms like ‘cast’, ‘full’, ‘get’, ‘give’, ‘do’, ‘put’.

There is something heroic and touching about Johnson’s description of the gap between the very high aims with which he began and the realization, as the magnitude of the task sank in and as the time for publication approached, of the compromises that he was compelled to make. In a famous and poetic passage he tells how he had to set boundaries to his quest:

To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.

But the most significant passage in Johnson’s preface is the answer it gives to Swift’s desire to ‘fix’ the language. Johnson plainly did not like some linguistic innovations, and as an instinctive conservative viewed most changes as being for the worse. But he also realized that change was inevitable, in language as in everything else. The passage justifies quoting at length:

Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.

Johnson understood that any dictionary is always provisional. It must be provisional, because any living language is a work in progress, never fixed and never finished. However, while a language may never be fixed, there is a sense in which it can remain settled for a long period in its spelling, its punctuation and grammar, even in its pronunciation within fairly wide margins. And this was the stage which English had now reached.

Some Definitions from Dr Johnson’s Dictionary

Ambition The desire of something higher than is possessed at present.

Bookworm 1. A worm or mite that eats holes in books, chiefly when damp. 2. A student too closely given to books; a reader without judgement.

Candidate A competitor; one that solicites, or proposes himself for something of advancement.

Dull Not exhilaterating [sic]; not delightful; as to make dictionaries is dull work.

Excise A hateful tax levied upon commodities.

Melancholy A gloomy, pensive, discontented temper.

Patron One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.

Pension An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

Pleasure Delight; gratification of the mind or senses.

Tory One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.

Whig The name of a faction.

Novels, Newspapers and Tattoos

By the early to middle parts of the 18th century the English language was recognizably modern. There are a few differences in spelling between the forms used then and those used now, but where they do exist – Jonathan Swift putting enthusiastick, for example, or the novelist Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) writing cloaths – the differences are negligible. There are contrasts in punctuation habits. Defoe in Robinson Crusoe (1719) employs the semi-colon where we would reach for the full stop. And as late as the period when Jane Austen (1775–1817) is writing, in the early 19th century, we find forms like her’s (for hers), where the apostrophe is technically wrong by modern grammatical standards. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

It is no coincidence that this period of linguistic settlement is marked not only by Johnson’s Dictionary and others but by a surge in books on grammar and pronunciation. Correct pronunciation, that is. Elocution lessons were popular with those striving to speak ‘proper’ English and perhaps to shed their regional or class accents. At the same time, grammar teachers and pundits were establishing some of the rules which, depending on your point of view, have shaped or plagued English ever since. Among them is the principle or fetish that you should not end a sentence with a preposition. Another is the taboo on double negatives (I can’t get no satisfaction) although doubles and even triples had regularly been used in the past by great writers, for example Shakespeare, who has one of his characters in Twelfth Night say: ‘. . . nor your name is not Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither.’

Another factor that contributed to the standardizing of English, and which would have encouraged people to believe that there was some universal level of correctness, was the growth of literacy and the sheer increase in reading matter. The Elizabethan and early Jacobean ages were pre-eminent in drama and poetry. The first of these is designed to be seen and heard in public places rather than read in private, while the second – apart from ballads – is likely to be the preserve of well-educated individuals with time on their hands. The era of Dr Johnson saw the rise of the novel, an inherently populist form, as well as other types of printed entertainment and information.

The situation was helped by the slackening of various laws which had for centuries governed the production of books and pamphlets. From the 1530s onwards the authorities had maintained oversight of what was published and had also limited the number of printers. In 1662 a new version of the Licensing Act banned the publication of any material that was hostile to church or state. By the turn of the century, however, parliament was refusing to renew the law, and an era of freedom began. This freedom was relative, of course, since publishers and others could still be prosecuted for libel and sedition.

Newspapers had been circulating from before the time of the English Civil War but the 18th century saw a startling increase in their numbers. There were 12 newspapers in London in 1712; a century later that number had grown more than fourfold. There was a similar increase in the provincial press, coinciding with the growth of cities such as Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow. Periodicals like the Spectator or Tatler may have been short-lived at the time – although they have thriving modern incarnations – but they were evidence of the appetite for print and of the leisure to read it. Before the 18th century, a magazine was a place of storage, usually for arms and ammunition. By 1731 the word had acquired its principal modern definition: ‘a publication containing articles by various writers intended chiefly for the general reader’ [author’s italics].

If the general reader in the 18th century wanted something more substantial than a newspaper or magazine then he or she could always pick up a novel. This new literary form was wide-ranging. Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe have already been mentioned. These were, respectively, satirical/absurd and realistic (although also exotic because of Crusoe’s desert island). Novels could be romping and farcical on the surface, like the archetypal 18th-century work, Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding. They might be sinister and rather silly – like Horace Walpole’s proto-typical Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) – or sober and instructive. In this second category comes Dr Samuel Johnson’s one and only novel, Rasselas (1759), a philosophical tale written in a single week to pay for his mother’s funeral.

These, and countless others, were the books taken up by the expanding middle classes. The flourishing printing presses, which fed the appetite for reading by turning out not only novels but everything from grammar guides to gossipy gazettes, were a testament to the growing robustness and confidence of the English language.

This strength was on its way to becoming a universal phenomenon. English was, of course, the predominant language of America in the years before Independence. But it was spreading to other quarters of the globe too. Whereas English had, until this point and with the considerable exception of America, been largely confined to the British Isles, it was now starting on its long passage around the world. No longer at the mercy of invaders like the Anglo-Saxons and Normans, free to develop at its own pace, the language was turning into an exporter rather than an importer.

The trade in words is a two-way process, however. To take a single example: in the years between 1768 and 1776, Captain James Cook (1728–79) made three exploratory voyages to the southern hemisphere. On his arrival in Tahiti, he observed how the indigenous islanders painted their bodies and covered them with tattoos. The original Polynesian word is tatau, and in the 18th century it entered English as tatt(a)ow before settling to its current form. Tattoo is one of many terms to enrich English which now began to arrive from the far corners of the Earth.

KEYWORD
Coffee-house

The word coffee is, like the drink itself, an import. It comes via Turkish from the Arabic qahwah. The first written reference to a coffee-house in England is to one in Oxford in 1650. A couple of years later there is a confirmed sighting in Cornhill in the City of London, the first of several in the area. In the course of the next century coffee-houses and chocolate-houses proliferated in the capital and some became the favourite meeting-places of the nation’s literary, artistic and political élite. Figures such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Thomas Gainsborough frequented these male preserves, usually named for their proprietors (Slaughter’s, Tom’s, Will’s). Lloyd’s, the famous London insurance market, started in Edward Lloyd’s coffee-house, a place frequented by shipping merchants. During the 19th century the term café gradually eased aside the coffee-house, and the whole concept went downmarket. It has taken the rise of various chains to revive the ghost – a very pale ghost perhaps – of the places that Dr Johnson would have recognized as hubs of gossip, newspaper-reading and idling.