The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

The village thus fast became known as a site of revelry and abandon—a place where public houses, brothels, and lewd theaters abounded, and where a man could find entertainment of all kinds—and disease of all varieties—for no more than a handful of pennies. To see a play that would not pass muster with the London censors, to be able to drink absinthe into the small hours of the morning, to buy the choicest pornography newly smuggled from Paris, or to have a girl of any age and not be concerned that a Bow Street runner (as London’s early police were known), or her parents, might chase after you—you “went Surreyside,” as they said, to Lambeth.

disease—the appearance of pus in a wound was said by doctors to be “laudable,” the sign of healing.

Crazy how far medicine has come

At the beginning of the war, before Emancipation had been proclaimed, the Irish were staunch in their support of the North, and equally antipathetic to a South that seemed, at least in those early days, to be backed by the England they so loathed.

Lord Chesterfield, Johnson was to say later, taught “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master.”

And it was all those quoted meanings, a demonstration of the multiplicity of subtle shadings of sense that can be encompassed by the simple arrangement of a group of letters, that prove the great triumph of Johnson’s dictionary.

words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.