J. Davidson - Planet Word

Diderot was the spider in the middle of this vast web of ideas, essays, learning and information, receiving articles from about 150 contributors, writing many himself, editing, arranging and cross-referencing them. There was a huge range of contributors, from big names like Voltaire and Rousseau to doctors, chemists and academics we don’t know much about and who are not named. Rousseau wrote some of the articles about music, but he went off in a huff after d’Alembert wrote an entry about Geneva, Rousseau’s home town, and said it was a very boring place that needed a theatre. The Encyclopédie didn’t just include written descriptions of the sciences, arts and crafts, but hundreds of plates that illustrate the subjects. Diderot got into trouble for being rather vague about the sources of some of the illustrations and diagrams, and he was accused of plagiarism, but the plates are a magnificent feature.

Diderot was particularly fascinated by what was called ‘the mechanical arts’, all the trades and artisan crafts of the time. He was surely influenced by his own background. His father, Didier, was a master cutler, a maker of cutting tools, in the provincial French town of Langres, and was particularly well known for surgical knives, scalpels and lancets, which were stamped with his hallmark of a pearl. The young Diderot must have visited his father’s workshop and watched the cutters at their work, grinding the knives and forging blades, and he himself wrote the article about ‘cutler’.

There are dozens of other plates, illustrating everything from tile-making to how pack saddles and harnesses are assembled; from the work of the button-maker and confectioner to cabinet-making and the silk factory. There are plates showing tools, diagrams of machinery, people at work and factories, and the fact is, no one had really seen these things illustrated before. The tradition up to then had been to illustrate the beaux arts and nature — not the craft of the working man and woman.

The Encyclopédie was an astonishing achievement. It was only supposed to be a few volumes at the start; in the end, Diderot devoted twenty-five years of his life to it and produced thirty-five volumes, with 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations between 1751 and 1772. It is a work which stands for the Enlightenment in its scope and curiosity, its boldness and its thirst for knowledge and the free exchange of ideas. It’s big and sprawling, a baggy monster — and you can look at it for yourself online.

The nineteenth-century literary critic C. A. Sainte-Beuve wrote of the Encyclopédie : ‘It has been compared to the impious Babel; I see in it rather one of those towers of war, one of those siege-machines, enormous, gigantic, wonderful to behold …’ In a way, the encyclopédistes were laying siege to their world of the eighteenth century, looking it full in the face, surveying it, undermining it and challenging accepted wisdom. Truly capturing their world in words.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, while Denis Diderot was assembling his vast Encyclopédie just across the Channel, an English man of letters was single-handedly writing another reference book, so famous that it’s simply referred to as ‘Dr Johnson’s Dictionary’.

Samuel Johnson was one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment, a man of enormous wit, learning and literary brilliance. Many TV viewers find it difficult to think of him without remembering that episode of Blackadder with Johnson, played by Robbie Coltrane, as an annoying show-off obsessed with his great work; he comes to tell Hugh Laurie’s Prince George all about his Dictionary — and Baldrick uses the manuscript to light the fire. The real Dr Johnson was, doubtless, a dinner party bore about his Dictionary but with good cause. No one had ever written a dictionary like it before. There had been several attempts before Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, but they were really just markers along the way. A schoolmaster called Robert Cawdrey had written a book of word definitions in 1604, but it only had a couple of thousand or so entries in it. Twenty years later, another scholar, Henry Cockeram, had a go at improving things and was the first to call his book a ‘Dictionary’. Others made their contributions, too, but by the middle of the century there was still no authoritative lexicon of the English language. By contrast, the French and Italians were cantering ahead with academies and armies of scholars dedicated to the production of detailed, accurate dictionaries.

Britain needed a proper dictionary; it was a matter of national pride and academic necessity. It was also a tremendous commercial opportunity in a society where books and reading were the life blood of the Enlightenment. So it’s no surprise that the impetus came from a group of booksellers — who were also publishers in those days — with an eye on the market.

The consortium was led by one of the foremost publishers of the day, Robert Dodsley. He had been a playwright before he went into bookselling, and published all the big names, including Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray and Oliver Goldsmith. He also knew and had published Johnson, and he picked him as the ideal man to take on the dictionary. Johnson was a prolific writer, at this time in his early career (he was only thirty-seven) a hack, someone who earned his living and put food on the table entirely through the power of his pen. It’s said he could churn out 10,000 words a day on anything and everything, in the form of magazine articles, parliamentary sketches, the odd poem and verse drama, prefaces, introductions. For two years he single-handedly wrote an entire, twice-weekly periodical, The Rambler . His industry and output were prodigious, and he had a reputation for a thorough and committed approach to every writing commission.

Dodsley met with Johnson, and the deal was struck: 1,500 guineas to produce the English dictionary. It was a handsome fee which allowed Johnson to set himself up in a house off Fleet Street and dedicate himself — for the next nine years — to his monumental work.

How on earth does one man set about producing a dictionary of the English language? When he signed the contract, Johnson seemed undaunted. He declared he would complete it in three years and mocked the French Academy for appointing forty scholars who took forty years to write their dictionary. ‘This is the proportion,’ he commented drily. ‘Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.’

In fact, it took Johnson three times as long because he quickly realized that his initial plan was flawed. At first he began trawling through other dictionaries, starting with ‘A’ and plucking out lists of words, but almost immediately he decided he had got things the wrong way round. Instead, he started from words in action : he turned to books, to English literature, and selected his words from those sources. In this way he put together his wordlist from illustrations, rather than listing words and then finding examples. Workhorse that he was, he tackled the challenge head on: he simply immersed himself in reading and books for years and years. Everything from medical tracts, plays and novels to political pamphlets, poetry and theology written over the previous century and a half, a staggering 2,000 books, nibbled, tasted, chewed or swallowed whole in his search for examples of how we used our language.

Johnson ranged widely across topic and author, but the vast majority of the 100,000-plus quotations he used were drawn from the big guns of literature: the Bible, Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift. And from these illustrations he assembled a dictionary of 42,773 words, many of them with multiple entries to cover the range of meanings of the same word.