Yesterday was the birthday of Samuel Johnson (popularly known as “Dr. Johnson”), a titan of English literature and one of the most erudite people who have ever lived. Instead of writing a birthday bio for the subject of the greatest biography of all time (James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson—and if that’s not enough, Walter Jackson Bate won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his own 1978 biography of Johnson), I decided a better route to celebrate Johnson’s birthday would be to go look at a selection of some of “The Great Cham’s” greatest works at the Lilly Library.

The first stop on my bibliographic tour of Johnsoniana would of course be his famous Dictionary of the English Language, written over nine years from 1746 to 1755, which Bate says “easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time.” As Simon Winchester explains in his popular history of the Oxford English Dictionary, Johnson’s dictionary was really the first broad-based, usable dictionary of the English language, and what made it just as much of a landmark were Johnson’s extensive use of sample sentences from favorite authors like Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Swift, and … John Arbuthnot. (Who?)

Now I actually own a facsimile copy of Johnson’s Dictionary at home. (right: a bit chintzy looking; it’s from the 70’s.)

But I decided, “What the heck,” let’s see as early an edition of the Dictionary as can be found at the Lilly Library. As it turns out, this is a second edition from 1755-56. And if I thought my facsimile copy was one big slab of book, it was nothing compared to the two-volume monster they brought out at the Lilly. Here’s what Vol I. looked like from the outside (to offer some size reference, that’s my 15-inch laptop and mouse in one of the pictures.)

Holy smokes! Here’s a book you have to stand up and wrangle with two hands. Now having read my facsimile version, I wasn’t quite surprised by what I found inside the book—but it is definitely something when the pages are this large. The initial pages carry Johnson’s eloquent Preface and an extensive section on the Grammar of the English Language, which is probably one of the earliest systematic grammars of English—and it highlights how Johnson’s Dictionary is far more than just a list of words, but an incredible work of literature and scholarship in its own right.

What is fantastic is how Johnson undertook something so important and useful as this study of English language and grammar—this first major stab at telling the history of the language—pretty much as a personal project. There had been dictionaries before Johnson’s, as Simon Winchester explains, but nowhere near as complete and nowhere near as useful. It is Johnson who first points the way towards what became the monumental Oxford English Dictionary by including quotes for each of his words (thereby pointing to the necessity to track the changes in word orthography and usage over the course of time) as well as offering several distinct senses in which a word is used (thereby pointing to the idea that virtually any and every function of every word can be pinpointed with the minutest accuracy.)

Johnson not only performed a goodly portion of the yeoman’s work that ultimately led to the OED (his favorite authors, including Arbuthnot, remain among the most commonly quoted in OED), he also created the intellectual framework of what a dictionary should be and what it should do (i.e. not just an alphabetical list of words, but a compendium of the entire history of a language) that the creators of the OED supplied the manpower and logistics to follow through with.

I also saw yesterday two other works of great interest by Johnson at the Lilly, a much smaller octavo edition of The Works of William Shakespeare coedited by Johnson and George Steevens (this edition from 1780), an 1779 first edition of Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, and a 1749 first edition of Johnson’s very first published work, the poem On the Vanity of Human Wishes. I’ll leave off writing about these, though, for another day.