The Life of Samuel Johnson

In 1747, Johnson announces that he is planning to produce a dictionary of the English language. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language will be the most famous achievement of his career. He begins by publishing a prospectus, a plan for the dictionary, addressed to Lord Chesterfield and explaining his intention to use his own judgment to decide questions of linguistic “purity or propriety” (133).

Some booksellers contract with Johnson, and he hires a staff of six secretaries to assist him in the “mechanical part” of producing the dictionary. Boswell emphasizes that Johnson’s decision to produce such a work on his own was noteworthy, since dictionaries in other languages are usually produced by committees and “the co-operating exertions of many” (132). When someone points out that the French Academy took forty years and as many people to produce a French dictionary, Johnson replies, with a characteristic national chauvinism: “As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman” (135).

Boswell mentions that Johnson showed “never-ceasing kindness” (135) to these secretaries throughout the rest of their lives, including giving monetary assistance to one of them when he fell into poverty. Throughout the book, Boswell presents instances of Johnson’s charitable actions toward the less fortunate, implied to be rooted in his strong Christian beliefs.