By the early eighteenth century, France and Italy had impressive lexicons, but there was no authoritative dictionary of English. Sensing the deficit, and impelled by a mixture of national pride and commercial expedience, the prodigious polymath Samuel Johnson embraced the task, turning over the garret of his London home to the creation of his own giant dictionary.
Johnson imagined that he could complete the job in three years. But the complexity of English meant that his estimate was wildly inadequate. Only after he had expended nearly a decade of his prime on the task did the dictionary finally appear - magisterial yet quirky, dogmatic but generous of spirit, and steeped in the richness of English literature. It would come to be seen as the most important British cultural monument of the eighteenth century, and its influence fanned out across Europe and throughout Britain's colonies - including, crucially, America.
Brilliantly entertaining and enlightening, Defining the World is the story of Johnson's heroic endeavor, 250 years after the first publication of the Dictionary. In alphabetically sequenced chapters, Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's adventure - his ambition and vision, his moments of despair, the mistakes he made along the way, and his ultimate triumph.
The New York Times -
Charles McGrath
As Henry Hitchings points out in Defining the World, his concise and informative history of Johnson's dictionary and how it came to be written, the impulse behind it was the great 18th-century passion for organization and taxonomy - the belief that all knowledge could be codified and, indeed, that all of it was knowable. Johnson was assisted by a half-dozen amanuenses (most of them Scots, as it happened), but the dictionary was essentially a one-man operation, both the product and reflection of his prodigious learning. As Hitchings's title suggests, Johnson's dictionary really did encompass the world as it was then understood. It incorporates the latest in scientific knowledge (defining worlds like atom, gravity, parallax and gymnospermous) and also such new fads and innovations as toyshops, tobacconists, beauty spots and umbrellas.More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Henry Hitchings received his Ph.D from University College, London. He has written for numerous newspapers and periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, the New Statesman and the Financial Times. Defining the World is his first book. He lives in London.
