Volume 53, Number 11 · June 22, 2006
Lives of Dr. Johnson
By Frank Kermode
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW
Johnson on the English Language: The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume XVIII
edited by Gwin J. Kolb and Robert Demaria Jr.
Yale University Press, 506 pp., $85.00
Samuel Johnson's Unpublished Revisions to the Dictionary of the English Language: A Facsimile Edition
edited by Allen Reddick
Cambridge University Press, 425 pp., $180.00
Anniversary Essays on Johnson's Dictionary
edited by Jack Lynch and Anne McDermott
Cambridge University Press, 245 pp., $75.00
Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709–1791
by Freya Johnston
Oxford University Press, 265 pp., $74.00
Loving Dr. Johnson
by Helen Deutsch
University of Chicago Press,322 pp, $35.00
Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary
by Henry Hitchings
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 292 pp., $24.00
The Lives of the Poets
by Samuel Johnson, edited by Roger Lonsdale
Oxford University Press,4 vols., 1,981 pp., $595.00
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, as it first appeared in 1755, occupied two huge and very expensive folio volumes. A glance at the familiar Vanity Fair illustration will prove that the school-leaving copy thrown out of her coach window by Becky Sharp was not the whole dictionary but a cheap abridgment, such as might be thought a suitable school-leaving present. The publishers—or more properly the booksellers, for in the eighteenth century they did the work of publishers—provided various cheaper versions, easier to sell, to carry, and to throw. But however it was packaged, Johnson's was simply the dictionary of English. It had its faults, but it had no serious rival for over a century. Inevitably it grew less useful for the purposes of ordinary users, and it is now consulted mostly by eighteenth-century scholars and amateur lovers of Johnson, two numerous and devoted communities, though it must be said that many members of the second group are probably more interested in Johnson the man than in anything he wrote. For the scholars, last year, being the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Dictionary, has proved a stimulus to research, and the university presses have proved themselves equal to the challenge.
Review, 5322 words
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