Defining the World Quotes

“Johnson continually sketched out ideas for books he hoped, aspired or intended to write. These included a history of criticism, a set of biographies of the great philosophers ‘written with a polite air’, a history of Venice, a prayer book, a dictionary of ancient mythology, editions of Chaucer and Bacon, a compendium of proverbs, a collection of epigrams, a history of the ‘revival of learning’ in Renaissance Europe, a cookbook laid out ‘upon philosophical principles’, a history of his melancholy, and an autobiography (these last two surely very much”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“It is the sort of book that has to be rested on a table or a lectern; it is not easy to lift a volume one-handed, and only a basketball player would be able to hold it up and open with a single hand. With its pages spread, it is almost twenty inches wide, and the pages are a foot and half in length; stacked, the four volumes make a pile nearly ten inches high. Johnson’s finished tome was stately in appearance—‘Vasta mole superbus’ (‘Proud in its great bulk’), as he beamingly described it in a letter to Thomas Warton.1”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“What, then, did the finished Dictionary look like? What kind of a feel did it have? It was, in the first place, a large, cumbersome item, weighing around twenty pounds—the same as a very big Christmas turkey. It was plainly intended to be bound in two volumes: at the end of the Grammar there were directions for the bookbinder, who was requested to bind the entries from A to K in one volume, and those from L to Z in a second. Some owners ignored this suggestion, possibly for aesthetic reasons, but more probably for practical ones.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“In Eric Partridge’s book The Gentle Art of Lexicography, there is a story about an elderly lady ‘who, on borrowing a dictionary from her municipal library, returned it with the comment, “A very unusual book indeed—but the stories are extremely short, aren’t they?”’3”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“The Dictionary contains the names of numerous card games: among them piquet, quadrille, ombre, basset, whist, lansquenet and”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“The answer lies in the Preface, where he explains, ‘Obsolete words are admitted, when they are found in authors not obsolete, or when they have any force or beauty that may deserve revival.’ag Significantly, the epigraph to the finished Dictionary is a passage on this very theme from the second of Horace’s Epistles; it celebrates the efforts of the prudent critic who weeds out undignified language and rehabilitates forgotten but elegant words.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Johnson stigmatizes words of which he disapproves. He does this by applying denigratory labels to them. ‘To ponder on’ is ‘improper’, ‘ambassadress’ is ‘ludicrous’, ‘bouncer’ (meaning ‘an empty threatener’) is ‘colloquial’, ‘overwhelmingly’ is ‘inelegant’, the alarming-sounding ‘to powder’ (‘to come tumultuously and violently’) is ‘corrupt’, ‘coxcomical’ is ‘unworthy of use’, ‘from hence’ is ‘vitious’,”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“He had trouble with his eyes and his lungs, and with insomnia and asthma; suffered from gout and rheumatoid arthritis; experienced dropsy, emphysema and at least one fainting fit; and in his seventies developed a malignant tumour on his left testicle. To combat these problems, he consumed a vast quantity of medicines: opium, oil of terebinth, valerian, ipecacuanha, dried orange peel in hot red port, salts of hartshorn, musk, dried squills, and Spanish fly. He was frequently bled, for complaints as disparate as flatulence and an eye infection. Yet Johnson’s most enduring malady was mental. Throughout his life he suffered from a profound melancholy which periodically surged towards madness. It was this, much more than any other ailment, that blighted his middle years. No”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“The Rambler gave Johnson an opportunity to try out words he had encountered during his reading for the Dictionary: words like ‘adscititious’, ‘efflorescence’, ‘equiponderant’, ‘quadrature’, ‘to superinduce’ and ‘terraqueous’.5 While his taste for these difficult terms can look like a form of intellectual self-display, it is symptomatic of the widespread eighteenth-century conflation of what we would now call ‘science’ with the language of power and argument. 6 Although the particular character of Johnson’s rhetoric is inherited from seventeenth-century natural philosophy, rather than empowered by the latest mid-eighteenth-century developments, he remains an influential figure in giving the specialized terms of natural philosophy a real public currency. In”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Dictionary he identifies ‘what ills the scholar’s life assail’: ‘Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail’. The last of these was always a genuine possibility: it was common for people owing even modest debts to be incarcerated, and several writers known to Johnson had suffered this fate—the”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“gloomy, pensive, discontented temper This melancholy flatters, but unmans you; What is it else but penury of soul, A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind? —JOHN DRYDEN AT”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“In the past, dictionaries had been less scientific, and definitions often crudely brief. One example historians like to cite is the definition of ‘mucus’ in John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708) as ‘snot or snivel’. Johnson, by contrast, defers to the authority of the medic John Quincy, and defines ‘mucus’ as ‘that which flows from the papillary processes through the os cribriforme into the nostrils’. Kersey exemplifies the simplicity of the older dictionaries. He defines ‘coffin’ as ‘a case for a dead body’, ‘penis’ as ‘a man’s yard’, ‘eye’ as ‘the wonderful instrument of sight’,”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“In his entry under the verb ‘to antedate’, Johnson quotes the essayist Jeremy Collier: ‘By reading, a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and makes himself contemporary with the ages past.’ It is Johnson’s engagement with the past and his revival of a diffuse pot-pourri of materials that make the Dictionary such an unexpectedly vibrant work. At”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Johnson’s decision to employ these particular men was partly motivated by charity. He rotated them as his needs (or theirs) dictated, and offered accommodation to those who could not afford lodgings elsewhere. The amanuenses were his servants, but also his companions—dogsbodies with the status of intimates, hirelings who doubled as friends. Their presence in the background is a reminder”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Gin, often referred to as ‘Madam Geneva’ (and sometimes as ‘Kill-Grief’), was a national obsession. It had first arrived in England in the 1680s, along with William of Orange. Fifty years later, as many as one in ten London properties was a gin shop. According to official records, nearly 7 million gallons were consumed in 1730, and this figure excludes the vast quantities of low-grade gin sold from wheelbarrows, which was often adulterated with turpentine.7 The sale of spirits was officially prohibited in 1736, but the measure was so unsuccessful that prohibition was lifted seven years later, and a more pragmatic approach resulted in the Gin Act of 1751,”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Lord Macaulay, ready as ever with a flush of gorgeous hyperbole, evokes the circumstances of the Grub Street authors: Sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking champagne and Tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge Island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste; they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew comfort. He goes on, ‘They looked on a regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old gypsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode … They were as untameable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom, as the wild ass.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Censorship diminished, and copyright was originated. Moreover, the early years of the eighteenth century gave rise to a galaxy of new phenomena that included the printed handbill, printed receipts, printed tickets, printed advertisements, and posters. At the same time there was a surge in the production of political pamphlets, broadsides, books for children, and even street maps. Alexander Pope satirized the rage for print in his poem The Dunciad (1728–43); he mockingly suggested that its democratizing power had brought ‘the Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings’. Johnson echoed Pope’s sentiments, complaining that ‘so widely is spread the itch of literary praise, that almost every man is an author, either in act or in purpose’.3”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“There are hints, too, of wider social trends. The first edition of the Dictionary contains more than thirty references to coffee, and even more to tea. Johnson would vigorously defend the latter, not long after the Dictionary was published, in his review of an essay by the umbrella-toting Hanway, who believed it was ‘pernicious to health, obstructing industry and impoverishing the nation’.2 Johnson’s love of tea was deep but not exceptional: the leaf had been available in England since the 1650s (Pepys records drinking it for the first time in September 1660), and by 1755 it was being imported to Britain at the rate of 2,000 tons a year. The fashion for tea-drinking, facilitated by Britain’s imperial resources, drove demand for another fruit of the colonies, sugar (‘the native salt of the sugar-cane, obtained by the expression and evaporation of its juice’). Tea also played a crucial role in the dissolution of the eighteenth-century British Empire, for it was of course Bostonian opponents of a British tax on tea who opened the final breach between Britain and colonial America. All the same, it was coffee that proved the more remarkable phenomenon of the age. Johnson gives a clue to this when he defines ‘coffeehouse’ as ‘a house of entertainment where coffee is sold, and the guests are supplied with newspapers’. It was this relationship between coffee and entertainment (by which Johnson meant ‘conversation’) that made it such a potent force. Coffee was first imported to Europe from Yemen in the early part of the seventeenth century, and the first coffee house opened in St Mark’s Square in Venice in 1647. The first in England opened five years later—a fact to which Johnson refers in his entry for ‘coffee’—but its proprietor, Daniel Edwards, could hardly have envisioned that by the middle of the following century there would be several thousand coffee houses in London alone, along with new coffee plantations, run by Europeans, in the East Indies and the Caribbean. Then as now, coffee houses were meeting places, where customers (predominantly male) could convene to discuss politics and current affairs. By the time of the Dictionary they were not so much gentlemanly snuggeries as commercial exchanges. As the cultural historian John Brewer explains, ‘The coffee house was the precursor of the modern office’; in later years Johnson would sign the contract for his Lives of the English Poets in a coffee house on Paternoster Row, and the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s have their origins in the coffee-house culture of the period. ‘Besides being meeting places’, the coffee houses were ‘postes restantes, libraries, places of exhibition and sometimes even theatres’. They were centres, too, of political opposition and, because they were open to all ranks and religions, they allowed a rare freedom of information and expression.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“As he told the guests at a dinner hosted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘A man cannot with propriety speak of himself, except he relates simple facts; as, “I was at Richmond”, or … “I am six feet high.”’ The rodomontade of lavish self-recall was a vice he left to others.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“In my first chapter I mentioned Robert Browning, who chose to do just this, working his way right through the Dictionary in order to equip himself for a literary career. He thought of its contents as a sort of poem. Its appeal was threefold: it contained a vast amount of poetic language, provided definitions that were often sumptuously lyrical, and comprised tens of thousands of quotations from a wide variety of authors, many of whom were forgotten but worthy of recall, and whose writings, as presented by Johnson, bodied forth a history of human psychology. Browning’s attention to the Dictionary was exceptionally dedicated,”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Webster was a dry, humourless man whose character we can deduce, I think, from the title of his Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“More enduringly significant than the European influence of the Dictionary was its influence across the Atlantic. The American adoption of the Dictionary was a momentous event not just in its history, but in the history of lexicography. For Americans in the second half of the eighteenth century, Johnson was the seminal authority on language, and the subsequent development of American lexicography was coloured by his fame. America’s”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“On his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773, he used the word ‘depeditation’ in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted he had made the word up, before adding mischievously ‘that he had not made above three or four in his Dictionary’. Horace”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“In other words, at the time of Johnson’s death in 1784, and thirty years after its first publication, there were about 6,000 copies of the complete English editions of the Dictionary in circulation, in addition to a few hundred copies”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“He declined to point out ‘what appear to us as defects’, on the grounds that ‘most of them will be obvious’ and he had no wish ‘to feed the malevolence of little or lazy critics’.1”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“The total cost of printing was £1,239. 11s. 6d. In addition to Johnson’s £1,575, at least £1,500 was spent on paper—a large, though not freakish, figure, since the purchase of paper was usually reckoned to account for half the cost of publishing a book. Still, this meant the outlay was in the region of £4,500.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“He got Strahan to print fifty advertisements to be run in ‘country papers’, along with 250 showcards for booksellers’ windows. Although none of this was expensive, the final account that Strahan presented was for more than £800, a sum that was not fully paid off until almost four years later. The”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Initially, 2,000 copies were printed. Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge: as late as the 1790s Edmund Burke estimated the reading public at below 100,000.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Johnson insists: It must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, … words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water. Perhaps”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“THE AUTHOR OF almost every book retards his instructions by a preface,’ wrote Johnson, less than two years after the Dictionary was published. This was in an introductory essay for the New Year issue of Dodsley’s evening paper the London Chronicle. Johnson was paid just one guinea for the piece, but, as was his wont, made the best of a job that others would have executed in more desultory fashion. He was a prolific author of prefaces and introductions, and was aware of the faults of the work he did in this strain. Prefaces, he knew, are usually attempts to avert criticism, or to respond to it. They are opportunities to improvise a few paragraphs of complacent autobiography. They are excuses to lambaste the deficiencies of other writers, or of the republic of letters, or of the world at large. The”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary