Emma Bown, a student at the University of Birmingham, recently completed a placement at the Birthplace Museum. Here she shares her research into Johnson’s creation of his famous Dictionary, including the important role played by his assistants, known as amanuenses.
Fascinated by some of the books in our collection that have been annotated in a modern hand imitating Johnson’s annotations, I have researched the process that Johnson and his amanuenses followed to create Johnson’s Dictionary.
The below image has been taken from our collection’s 1677 edition of Cocker’s ‘Arithmetick’ (2001.1875) and closely resembles how Johnson annotated his own copy of the book. It was these markings that influenced the work of his amanuenses – those tasked to help assemble the Dictionary by copying and ordering Johnson’s abundant highlighted definitions and quotations.
Johnson embarked on the ambitious task of creating a dictionary that consolidated the current English language by providing a comprehensive list of the usage and the exhaustive meanings of each word, colloquial or idiomatic, jargon or slang. To demonstrate the usage of these words, he aimed to include exemplary quotations from the authors and scholars he believed to be most praiseworthy from the preceding 200 years.
Faced with the challenge of creating an extensive dictionary, Johnson began to read and ‘deface’ his own books, and those of his friends, that he had borrowed to ensure that his dictionary would include a wide selection of important authorities. When he encountered key words, definitions or good examples of usage, he marked each book in the same distinct way, like in the image above. While reading Cocker’s ‘Arithmetick’, Johnson was impressed by the example of the usage of ‘addition’. So, he underlined the noun ‘addition’ and wrote the letter ‘A’ in the margin; then, he marked the beginning and end of the passage on ‘addition’ that he wanted to use in his Dictionary with diagonal slashes.
While Johnson continued to search for key sections from over 500 different books, the amanuenses started their invaluable job of compiling. Between 1746 and 1755, Johnson employed six amanuenses: one Englishman, five Scots. A maximum of four would have been employed at the same time. These men included: Francis Stewart (d.1752), Alexander and William Macbean, Robert Shiels (d.1753), Peyton (the Englishman) and Maitland. Johnson was kind to his amanuenses and even offered them accommodation when they were struggling financially.
Thirteen of Johnson’s annotated copies have survived and from these, we understand how the Dictionary was compiled.
After annotating some books, Johnson would pass these to the amanuenses who would work in pairs on one book at a time. They would then copy the underlined word on to a sheet of paper that had been folded into quarto sections and divided by a pencil line into two columns. On the far left of the margin, they wrote the main word and underneath, they wrote the definition/example from the book with a large enough gap above and below, so that Johnson could later add his own definitions, explanations and etymologies. Having done this, the amanuensis would strike through the letter in the margin to show that that word has already been copied.
Interestingly, each amanuensis had their own style of striking through the letters and this can be seen in the second image. From the extant books, we can see how many of their transcriptions entered into the Dictionary and these books show that some amanuenses had the job of transcribing only certain letters. The different strikes have not yet been linked to each amanuensis.
After transcribing quotations on to the sheet, it was cut into separate slips, each containing only the information for one word. Next, these slips were deposited into separate containers. Later, some of the alphabetised slips were copied or pasted onto large pieces of paper and some were likewise inserted into small, unbound notebooks (Johnson’s method changed several times over the years). Eighty notebooks were filled with the entries and supporting quotations; sometimes Johnson wrote the examples from his books straight into these. The amanuenses wrote at the top of each page the first three letters of these word lists, as shown at the top of each page in the Dictionary.
Next, Johnson wrote extra lexical additions in the gaps surrounding the words and quotations. Comparing his wordlists to those of previously published dictionaries, Johnson ensured that he had not omitted anything important. This was when Johnson edited some of the quotations, such as shortening them for clarity. He changed some spellings, such as ‘poyson’ to ‘poison’, in an attempt to standardise the English language.
The amanuenses did not just passively and laboriously copy Johnson’s annotations; they contributed to the writing of the Dictionary, too. Although at the editing stage, Johnson refused the majority of their additions from the meanings of certain words in the Scottish dialect to their quotations from Scottish authorities. Some that did receive Johnson’s approval include the definition of ‘scambler’ and quotations from the Scottish poet, James Thomson.
Once the additions had been entered, pages were sent separately to the printer and Johnson was paid for each delivered leaf.
Overall, the amanuenses had essential roles in the compilation process and contributed to the publication of more than 110,000 quotations to support the Dictionary’s 42,773 entries.
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