Messing about in dictionaries.(Book Review)

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language, edited by Jack Lynch; Atlantic Books, 2004, $49.95.

"BELIEVE ME, my young friend, there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half as much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." To many of us, Ratty's advice to Mole could equally apply to dictionaries.

In an age of postmodernist, politically correct obsessives, Professor Jack Lynch's book Samuel Johnson's Dictionary is a welcome relief and comfort to the word-whipped. And Lynch's introduction is a beautifully written account of Doctor Johnson's nine-year commitment to create the first "standard" English dictionary.

 
   dictionary n.s. A book containing the words of any 
   language in alphabetical order, with explanations of 
   their meaning ... 

This was the dictionary of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley,. Austen, the Brontes, Arnold, Trollope and Dickens. It is the dictionary that Robert Browning read from cover to cover to "qualify" himself to be a poet. It is also the dictionary used by the framers of the US Constitution, and the work that inspired a critical Noah

Webster to write his American version. Until the arrival of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1933, Johnson's was the English dictionary.

Born in the Staffordshire town of Lichfield in 1709, Johnson grew up to be, according to Jack Lynch, a voracious reader of plays, poems, romances, histories, sermons and philosophical treatises in English, French, Latin and Greek. His father was a bookseller, which no doubt helped. His education at Oxford stalled because of money problems, so he set up a school in the town of Edial (near Lichfield) and educated amongst others the actor David Garrick. His school failed.