The eighteenth-century context

A large number of persons habitually speak of ‘the Dictionary’, just as they do of ‘the Bible’ or ‘the Psalms’; and who, if pressed as to the authorship of these works, would certainly say that ‘the Psalms’ were composed by David, and ‘the Dictionary’ by Dr Johnson' (Murray 1900: 2). As James Murray (editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 1878–1915) here indicates, it is Johnson who, at least in popular belief, towers over eighteenth-century lexicography, often being accorded the status of writer of the prototypical dictionary, as well as – mythically if erroneously – of writer of the ‘first’ dictionary. In reality, of course, the centenary of the first monolingual dictionary – Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604) – was fast approaching even as the eighteenth century began. As John Marchant moreover stressed, it was ‘the Number and Variety of English Dictionaries’ which was instead more accurately to characterise this period (1760: b1r). Against the canonical pre-eminence of Johnson (the ‘stupendous Undertaking’ praised by David Baker (1764); the ‘indefatigable industry’ by which Johnson ‘from the best authorities, corrected the mistakes, retrenched the superfluities, and supplied the defects of those who went before him’), stand therefore a whole range of other works, diversified by size and price, by audience and addressees, by contents and language attitudes, as well as by their differential positioning within a genre which was by no means either monosemic or capable of being reduced to a single representative text.