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Familiarity in Life and Letters

Sarah M. S. Pearsall

in Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century

This chapter defines the concept of familiarity, a means by which even individuals not related by family could achieve family-like relationships. Such familiarity — distinguished from either ... More

This chapter defines the concept of familiarity, a means by which even individuals not related by family could achieve family-like relationships. Such familiarity — distinguished from either politeness or intimacy — allowed individuals adrift to join other circles and so find the support they implied. The chapter enumerates the ways familiarity could be established among non-family members by such means as the education and care of a child, or courtship and marriage. Letters helped to carve out a space of familiarity, even when distance separated family members, and forced them to rely on non-family members. Many printed letters, in epistolary manuals (such as The Complete Letter Writer), epistolary novels (such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela), and letter collections (such as that by Lord Chesterfield) helped to popularize this tone of familiarity. Family letters were a critical means of forging familiarity, and they did so in their tones and style, as well as their substance.Less

‘A Goose-Quill or a Gander's?’: Female Writers in Johnson's Dictionary

Charlotte Brewer

in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum

This chapter explores Johnson's quotations from female-authored sources in his Dictionary in the context of his attitude towards and relationship with women writers, and the view of women and women's ... More

This chapter explores Johnson's quotations from female-authored sources in his Dictionary in the context of his attitude towards and relationship with women writers, and the view of women and women's language that may be found in the Dictionary as a whole (as derived from quotations from male, often misogynist, writers). It identifies fewer than 30 quotations from female writers (19 from Charlotte Lennox), out of a total of around 140,000 altogether, and discusses this disparity in relation to the increase in women's published writing from the late seventeenth century onwards. It asks whether and how Johnson's Dictionary might have been different, if it had included more female-authored quotations, and briefly compares its treatment of such sources with that of the OED.Less

Writing the Dictionary: Departures and destinations

Lynda Mugglestone

in Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words

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 ... More

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.Less

The ordered state: Power, authority, and the written word

Lynda Mugglestone

in Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words

This chapter considers the state of the written language that is established by means of the Dictionary, in both intention and actuality. A particular focus lies in the conflicting models of order ... More

This chapter considers the state of the written language that is established by means of the Dictionary, in both intention and actuality. A particular focus lies in the conflicting models of order which Johnson’s writing on language reveals, as well as the political modelling of control by which Johnson was expected to assume dictatorship over an errant state of words. The nature — and limits — of power are, for Johnson, for his patron Lord Chesterfield, and for the booksellers who commissioned the text, of marked interest in terms of language. Paying close attention to spelling, the chapter probes the nature of order and its problematic imposition by means of a reference book, as well as Johnson’s scepticism in terms of individual attempts to reform the ways in which words are used.Less

Patriotism, Fame, and Death, 1743-1750

CHRISTINE GERRARD

in Aaron Hill: The Muses' Projector, 1685-1750

This chapter discusses the later years of Aaron Hill from 1743 to 1750. Hill's retirement to Plaistow revived his interest in public affairs. He became filled with a deep sense of unease at the ... More

This chapter discusses the later years of Aaron Hill from 1743 to 1750. Hill's retirement to Plaistow revived his interest in public affairs. He became filled with a deep sense of unease at the domestic and international crises that faced Britain during the 1740s. In 1747, dismayed by the fate of the allied troops in Flanders, Hill tried to use Lord Chesterfield, the Secretary of State, as a conduit for his idea on subjects ‘sometimes commercial, sometimes military’ — including treatment of dysentery among the troops. For Hill, writing became a substitute for action. Nearly all of his original works in this decade engaged to varying degrees with national and international politics. Hill's depression on his personal affairs spilled over into gloomy pronouncements on Britain. These works tackle the dangers of faction and self-interest in government and nation, and the demise of patriotism.Less

Defending the citadel, patrolling the borders

Lynda Mugglestone

in Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words

This chapter examines the border territories of language, and the nature of the ‘coast’ which the dictionary-maker might discover or need to defend. It examines the relationship of native and ... More

This chapter examines the border territories of language, and the nature of the ‘coast’ which the dictionary-maker might discover or need to defend. It examines the relationship of native and non-native words, as well as the ways in which citizenship might be conferred — or, indeed, denied to — those who are already (at least in terms of language practice) inhabitants of the nation state. Notions of purism and ‘barbarism’, as well as the question of invasion and settlement, can, in a range of ways, inform the desire to control (and patrol) the borders of the language/dictionary. The dualities of defence and protection likewise frame Johnson’s changing positions on the dictionary-maker as border-guard. Johnson’s categorization of loanwords into ‘aliens’ and ‘denizens’ is equally significant, while multilingualism and Johnson’s own brand of French resistance, and careful engagement with naturalization as process, provide other points of reference.Less

The Rewards of Authorship

in The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America

In an age when patronage often defined power, James Boswell's attribution to Samuel Johnson of the view that booksellers were “the patrons of literature” was significant. It was an assertion that ... More

In an age when patronage often defined power, James Boswell's attribution to Samuel Johnson of the view that booksellers were “the patrons of literature” was significant. It was an assertion that publishers constituted the driving force behind serious writing—an assertion borne out in this particular case by the evidence of Johnson's own career as a writer who regularly responded to commissions from booksellers. This passage occurs at the end of a long section on the making of the Dictionary, and must be understood within that context. Early in the section Boswell reproduces Johnson's caustic letter to Lord Chesterfield, in which Johnson spurns the earl's pretense of patronage on the eve of publication by pointing out that it was when he was struggling to complete his work that he was badly in need of support.Less

The Battle of the Word-Books: Competition, the ‘Common Reader,’ and Johnson's Dictionary

Lynda Mugglestone

in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum

While Johnson's Dictionary served to ‘delight the critic’ as well as ‘instruct the learner’, it met a very different response from contemporary lexicographers who, as Gwin Kolb has noted, found ... More

While Johnson's Dictionary served to ‘delight the critic’ as well as ‘instruct the learner’, it met a very different response from contemporary lexicographers who, as Gwin Kolb has noted, found themselves not a little discomfited by a work heralded as stupendous and extraordinary, especially (as Adam Smith commented in his own review), when ‘compar[ed] …with other dictionaries’. This chapter examines the oppositional discourses which characterize lexicographical acts of reception in aftermath of Johnson's first edition. Rather than adopting the discourse — and passivity — of the ‘harmless drudge’, dictionary-makers engaged in individual campaigns of both active sniping and verbal attack, waged within a highly competitive marketplace. Johnson offered his own challenges to prevailing assumptions about the ‘good’ dictionary. It is the complex nature of the ensuing debate — and the battle for the ‘common reader’ which this involved — on which this chapter focusses, placing Johnson's work within an era in which the dictionary as commodity was increasingly important.Less

History and the flux of time

Lynda Mugglestone

in Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words

This chapter engages in detail with Johnson’s reading of time and language in the Dictionary, as well as embedding it within contemporary readings of time (and its desired control). If languages, for ... More

This chapter engages in detail with Johnson’s reading of time and language in the Dictionary, as well as embedding it within contemporary readings of time (and its desired control). If languages, for Johnson, are the real ‘pedigrees of nation’, it is time which can emerge as the true ‘tyrant’ in the forms of national history which emerge. Time easily deposes the lexicographer by forces which cannot be controlled. The chapter examines Johnson’s engagement with the history of English, alongside the conflicting demands of etymology, semantic shift, and language practice, as well as innovation, obsolescence, and lexical death. The interconnectedness of time and change emerges as a salient theme in Johnson’s approach to language, poised between images of decay and mutability on one hand, and the natural and ineluctable on the other.Less

The Persistence of Casuistry

Marilyn Morris

in Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics

This concluding chapter discusses the conflict between ethics or good culture and various forms of hypocrisy in the eighteenth century. David Hume favored civility while Lord Chesterfield proposed ... More

This concluding chapter discusses the conflict between ethics or good culture and various forms of hypocrisy in the eighteenth century. David Hume favored civility while Lord Chesterfield proposed taking a hypocritical view to further personal goals. But the monarchical tradition, combined with the progressive liberalization of politics and enhanced through print media, perpetuated the concept of gallantry as an idealistic domestic virtue. This chapter concludes that should the focus of political issues be on the character of the speaker rather than on the rationality of his arguments, politics would just be moral performances trying for clever cover-ups.Less