Dictionary of the English Language
London: J. F. and C. Rivington, L. Davis, T. Payne and Son, et al. 1785. Two quarto volumes, modern three-quarter speckled calf gilt, red and green spine labels, marbled boards. Half-title and frontispiece portrait of Samuel Johnson in Volume I. In Volume II, the section ROU-RYE transposed with WRE-ZOO, text complete. Traces of dampstaining to top margin of a few pages in Volume I, occasional light foxing.
Sixth edition, and the first authorized quarto edition, of Samuel Johnson's extraordinary dictionary, published one year after his death. In 1746, a group of London booksellers approached Johnson with a proposal for an English dictionary. While the forty scholars of the Académie Française had taken forty years to produce a standard French dictionary, Johnson announced his intention to finish a comparable English work in three years: “forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three is to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman" (Boswell). In fact, it took Johnson nine exhausting years, working without help from his nominal patron Lord Chesterfield, to compile his massive dictionary, a vivid interpretive account of the English language. In his definitions, Johnson quotes thousands of examples from English writers, giving his dictionary a lasting literary interest that surpasses its utility as a reference work: as he explains in the preface, he set out to extract “from philosophers principles of science; from historians, remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions." This was the standard English dictionary for more than a century, consulted by the Romantics and the Victorians; it is Johnson's Dictionary that Becky Sharp tosses out of the carriage in Vanity Fair. A handsome early edition of a landmark of English literature and lexicography.