Samuel Johnson & the Journey Into Words

Description

Popular readings of Johnson as a dictionary-maker often see him as a writer who both laments and attempts to control the state of the language. Lynda Mugglestone looks at the range of Johnson's writings on, and the complexity of his thinking about, language and lexicography. She shows how these reveal him probing problems not just of meaning and use but what he considered the related issues of control, obedience, and justice, as well as the difficulties of power when exerted over the 'sea of words'. She examines his attitudes to language change, loan words, spelling, history, and authority, describing, too, the evolution of his ideas about the nature, purpose, and methods of lexicography, and shows how these reflect his own wider thinking about politics, culture, and society. The book offers a careful reassessment of Johnson's lexicographical practice, examining in detail his commitment to evidence, and the uses to which this might be put. Dictionary-making, for Johnson, came to be seen as a long and difficult voyage round the world of the English language. While such images play their own role in lexicographical tradition, Johnson would, as this volume explores, also make them very much his own in a range of distinctive, and illuminating, ways. Johnson's metaphors invite us to consider-and reconsider-the processes by which a dictionary might be made and the kind of destination it might seek, as well as the state of language that might be reached by such endeavours. For Johnson, where the dictionary-maker might go, and what should be accomplished along the way, can often seem to raise pertinent and perhaps troubling questions. Lynda Mugglestone's generous, wide-ranging account casts new light on Johnson's life in language and provides an engaging reassessment of his impact on English culture, the making of dictionaries, and their role in a nation's identity. Cover Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words Copyright Contents Preface List of figures 1: Journeys into words Writing the world of words The journey as device 2: Writing the Dictionary: Departures and destinations Planning the course Redirection: Writing the Plan of a Dictionary Departure and destinations: from Plan to ‘Preface’ 3: ‘Excursions into books’: Documenting the new world of words The dictionary as collection Acts of reading Collections and canonicity 4: The ordered state: Power, authority, and the written word Order and the making of the Dictionary Order, power, and the problems of prescription Models of authority: Johnson, spelling, and the Dictionary 5: Meaning, governance, andthe ‘colours of words’ Criticism and correctness: The dictionary-maker as judge Johnson’s critical practice Doubt and the art of definition Reason and the ‘colours of words’ 6: Defending the citadel, patrolling the borders Defending the citadel of words Writing French resistance Naturalization and the use of words Border crossings The end of toleration? 7: History and the flux of time Writing the past Usage on the margins: Obsolescence Writing the present The lessons of history 8: The praise of perfection The critics on the shore Appendix: 1755–73 Notes Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Appendix References Primary sources Secondary sources Electronic resources Index