A Dictionary Of The English Language: In Which The Words Are Deduced From Their Originals, And Illustrated In Their Different Significations By Examples From The Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, A History Of The Language, And An English Grammar. by JOHNSON, Samuel

London, J. and P. Knapton, 1755. . First edition; 2 vols, folio (420 x 250 mm.); titles printed in red & black, light toning, occasional mild ripling to some leaves (not from damp), the odd mark but in the main, very good indeed; modern calf, gilt-lettered spines.
'The work of a single person and composed in a period of time very inconsiderable when compared with the extent of the work' (Adam Smith). 'I have... attempted a dictionary of the English language, which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the ignorance, and caprices of innovations' (Preface).

In the 1740s 'a group of booksellers headed by Robert Dodsley perceived the need for a new English dictionary to replace the Dictionarium Britannicum of Nathan Bailey (1730). They found a receptive ear in Johnson, who had pondered for many years on the absence of an English equivalent to the great continental glossaries sponsored by public bodies and academies. What was envisaged was something quite different, a commercial venture financed by a consortium of leading figures in the trade, and one which would be compiled essentially by a single hand—that of a poverty-stricken journalist and pamphleteer, who had dropped out of university and who had never left England. Johnson prepared a short prospectus for the undertaking, and then signed a contract on 18 June 1746. The compiler was to be paid 1500 guineas, out of which he had to defray the cost of his copyists, and delivery was due in three years. It seems miraculous today that the job took as few as nine years to complete.

For this task, the Johnsons took a substantial house in Gough Square, the garret was fitted out as workroom for the staff, which amounted to five or six assistants, most of them Scots. Johnson used an interleaved copy of Bailey's dictionary in its 1736 edition; he also consulted a wide range of technical and specialist manuals to expand the range of vocabulary. He sought out illustrative quotations in a huge collection of books, from which his amanuenses transcribed marked extracts. Before the mammoth work was completed, a number of distractions held up its progress. Johnson quarrelled with his intended patron, the earl of Chesterfield, to whom he had dedicated a recast version of the prospectus as The Plan of the English Dictionary (1747). Ultimately the work appeared in two folio volumes on 15 April 1755, with a preface of extraordinary dignity and eloquence.

The Dictionary left an immense mark on its age. It soon became recognised as a work of classical standing, and in spite of some minor blemishes it has never lost its historical importance as the first great endeavour of its kind. Notable above all for definitions of pith and occasional wit, the dictionary was even more original in the way in which every word, as Johnson put it, had its history. Each entry is organised under the headword to exemplify graduated senses of a term, a procedure which redirected the course of English lexicography. Further, the quotations used to exemplify the usage of a given word combined to form an anthology of moral sayings and helped to define the canon of literature: they show Johnson's taste and piety, for he would not admit extracts from irreligious writers such as Hobbes, Bolingbroke, and Hume. Notoriously, a handful of entries display some of the author's prejudices, as when he glossed 'whig' as 'the name of a faction', or when he defined a 'patron' as 'commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery'. Conscious that his primary role was to record the state of English vocabulary, rather than to legislate for its usage, Johnson registered the entire sweep of words from the crude and demotic to the most rarefied scientific terms and to recent fanciful forms imported from other languages.' (ODNB).

Courtney & Smith, p.54; Chapman & Hazen, p.137; Rothschild 1237; PMM 201.