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This chapter traces, in detail, the early history of the Dictionary, and the patterns of direction and redirection which appear between Johnson’s ‘Scheme’ of 1746, the Plan of the following year (and its various iterations), as well as the ‘Preface’ which accompanies the completed Dictionary of 1755, paying particular attention to Johnson’s changing relationship with Lord Chesterfield. ‘The scheme, the plan, and the preface are not consistent, nor do they always clarify the book’, writes Lipking: ‘Each successive stage of making the Dictionary seems to represent a falling away.’ Yet, as this chapter shows, to engage with the dictionary as journey and Johnson’s iterated use of travel as device, can offer a different — and productive — way of approaching this pattern, conceived not as decline but as a process of on-going movement and change.

This concluding chapter looks both at Johnson’s legacy as lexicographer and the problems of perfection and perfectibility which writing the Dictionary reveals. It focusses on Johnson’s assessment of lexicography at the conclusion of his task, and at his comprehensive analysis of the facts of linguistic changes in living languages. Drawing together the themes of prescription and description, empiricism and control, it provides an overview of the dictionary enterprise in Johnson’s hands, especially in terms of the tensions of both hope and experience. It also looks at the afterlife of the first edition, exploring attitudes to the dictionary, as manifested in reviews and private documents. Returning to the image of destination, it looks at the journey as educative experience, at discovery and self-discovery, and at lessons that are both learnt and forgotten.

This chapter explores the contours of Addison’s afterlife in the eighteenth century by looking carefully at Samuel Johnson’s varied criticism of his works over a lifetime of writing about him. In his final statement in his famous Life of Addison, Johnson declares Addison’s reputation secure from the ups and downs it underwent in the eighteenth century by determining that Addison’s works, like those of Shakespeare, had stood the test of time. In Johnson’s long journey to this conclusion, his work on the Dictionary is perhaps the most important landmark. By citing Addison so frequently and in illustration of so many common words, Johnson demonstrated that Addison’s prose had knit itself into the fabric of English and would therefore endure. Although the enthusiastic cult of Addison that saw him as a perfect Christian had faded by mid-century, Johnson saw his works enduring because they had, almost invisibly, become part of British social discourse, both linguistically and ethically, and thereby ‘given Addison a claim to be numbered among the benefactors of mankind’.

This chapter examines other eighteenth-century cultural phenomena that may be considered correlative to the modernization of printing conventions. There are four major examples: the publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755, which attempted to provide set definitions, spelling, and pronunciation for words in the English language; the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, which placed Britain in synch with time-keeping on the continent and facilitated commerce and travel; the regulation of painted, hanging shop signs in London and the imposition of house numbers in Westminster beginning in 1762; and the evolution of the English language and of English prose, culminating in a more elegant, refined, and “written” form of prose than earlier in the century.