Samuel Johnson’s dictionary is one of the most famous dictionaries published in 1755. His was not the first, but it was definitely the most complete and had much better documentation. He started with books instead of the alphabet, and notes basically all words from over 2,000 books
Boswell’s Life of Johnson is a bibliography written about Johnson by someone he met. He was a diseased and sickly infant.
- He was a stern moralist
- Went to Oxford College, had only 40 people, but he wasn’t very rich
- He was very rebellious and defied a lot of authority and rules at the college
- He was ashamed of his family circumstances
- Johnson left after 13 months because he supposedly could not afford to keep going to the college, had a very consistent spending of 8 shillings a week and then just stopped
- Johnson was the “original toy boy”, married a widow who was more than 20 years older than him. Elizabeth Porter or Teti as he called her, gave up a lot to marry Johnson
- His literary career failed, so he decided to set up a school using his wife’s money, but that school also failed
- Johnson is one of the best examples of tourette syndrome in history. He had compulsions and wanted things to be done “just right”, like with English.
- Booksellers were starting to make a lot more money and start to become a viable job, because now everybody was writing to make money
- Dictionary was the publisher’s idea. Italy and France both had standard dictionaries, but English had nothing, so they felt like their language was not competing. Britain was a new concept at the time (union started in 1707).
- Made rapid progress for 3 years