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| Johnson's Dictionary | |
|---|---|
| Name | Johnson's Dictionary |
| Author | Samuel Johnson |
| Country | Kingdom of Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Lexicography |
| Publisher | W. Strahan and T. Cadell |
| Pub date | 1755 |
| Pages | 2 volumes |
Johnson's Dictionary was a landmark English-language lexicon compiled by Samuel Johnson that reshaped lexicography, literary practice, and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Commissioned amid debates in London publishing circles, the work combined definitions, quotations, and etymologies that engaged with figures and institutions across the period, providing a cultural repository cited by writers, critics, and statesmen. Its production involved networks of patrons, printers, and scholars spanning Westminster, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Dublin.
Johnson began the project in a milieu shaped by patrons such as Lord Chesterfield, publishers like T. Cadell and William Strahan, and intellectual interlocutors centered on London salons and coffeehouses frequented by contemporaries including David Garrick, Samuel Richardson, and Oliver Goldsmith. Early influences included lexicographical precedents such as Nathan Bailey, Edward Phillips, and the Dictionary of the English Language (1748) proposals debated in Royal Society and Society of Antiquaries of London circles. Financial pressures linked to debts, subscriptions, and the print market—exemplified by firms in Fleet Street and the book trade networks of Edinburgh and Dublin—shaped his timetable. Johnson also drew on classical and continental models from Homer, Virgil, Hermann Boerhaave, and Renaissance scholars in Leiden and Paris for philological method and citation practice.
The Dictionary was published in two folio volumes by W. Strahan and T. Cadell in 1755 after a decade of work that involved correspondence with patrons including Lord Chesterfield and publishers in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. The 1755 first edition appeared alongside competing projects and responses from figures in the print culture of George III’s reign, provoking notices in periodicals such as the Gentleman's Magazine, reviews by critics linked to the Minerva Press, and commentary from academics at Oxford University and Cambridge University. Later printings and issue variants were produced for subscribers including members of Parliament and literary figures such as Horace Walpole, while pirated and revised editions circulated in Edinburgh and Boston, Massachusetts during the transatlantic book trade expansions tied to firms like Benjamin Franklin’s networks.
Johnson organized entries alphabetically with definition, etymology, and illustrative quotations drawn from canonical authors such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, John Donne, and Ben Jonson. The Dictionary combined rhetorical elucidation and moral commentary, citing texts spanning medieval manuscripts in Westminster Abbey collections, Renaissance humanists associated with Cambridge University, and continental authorities like Franciscus Junius and Pierre Bayle. Johnson’s etymologies interwove classical languages—Latin, Greek, and references to Hebrew scholarship—while quotations referenced dramatic, poetic, theological, and legal works including decisions tied to Court of King’s Bench precedents and texts read in Lincoln's Inn. The typographic design, paper sourcing, and printing processes invoked London workshops connected to St Bride's Church and typefounders operating near Fleet Street.
Contemporaneous reception mixed admiration from literary figures such as Samuel Richardson, David Garrick, and Edmund Burke with criticism voiced by rivals and reviewers affiliated with The Critical Review and the Monthly Review. The Dictionary influenced lexicographers, dramatists, statesmen, and educators, informing usage in parliamentary debates within House of Commons, sermons preached in St Paul's Cathedral, and curricula at Oxford University and Cambridge University. Its authority was invoked by later novelists and critics including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and essayists tied to the Cambridge Apostles. Legal practitioners, editors of classical texts, and translators in the milieus of Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and William Makepeace Thackeray also referenced Johnson’s work when adjudicating usage, citation, and style.
Subsequent editions, abridgements, and revisions were produced throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by printers and scholars associated with Longman and other publishing houses, with scholarly annotations by figures in Bodleian Library and editorial contributions linked to universities like Edinburgh and Yale University. Nineteenth-century lexicographers such as Noah Webster and later projects culminating in the Oxford English Dictionary drew on Johnson’s method of citation and historical exemplification, while archivists and textual scholars in institutions like the British Library and Bodleian Library preserved Johnson’s manuscripts and correspondence. The Dictionary’s legacy persists in studies of eighteenth-century print culture, the history of Lexicography, and literary canon formation in collections across British Museum and academic presses at Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.
Category:British dictionaries