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But in England no such body had ever managed to generate itself, though the Royal Society—that great scientific organization, founded in 1660, whose early members included Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and John Locke—had set as one of its earliest tasks the formation of "a committee for improving the language." One member of that committee was the reigning Poet Laureate of England, John Dryden, and it is interesting to note that one of his chief concerns was a tendency to "corrupt our English Idiom by mixing it too much with French." (This mirrors today's obsession, in the Académie francais, with the elimination of "Franglais," that is, the appropriation of English words by French speakers. In this matter I sympathize with the Académie, since the widespread use of terms like "le parking" and "le weekend" threatens to make the entire nation sound like Pépe le Pew.)
The Royal Society's committee soon disbanded, however, without producing anything, and for the next fifty years or more some of the major English writers would lament the absence of a true British "Academy" to prevent, or at least control, linguistic abuse. For Daniel Defoe, the chief pestilence was lewd, rude slang—"Vomit of the Brain," he called it; for Jonathan Swift it was the fashionable cant of "illiterate Court Fops, half-witted Poets, and University Boys." In the face of such abuses, Swift thought, the only remedy was to discover "some method … for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever." This is a recurrent theme among linguistic academicians and their allies: a deep conviction that the dominant usage of their own time—or, more precisely, the usage into which they were educated, the usage of their youth and young adulthood—is a pure or ideal form of the language, any deviation from which marks a decline.
But no British Academy was formed, and though dictionaries of one kind of another had been produced in England almost since the invention of the printing press, by the time Dodsley came to Johnson, it seemed clear that none of them met the perceived need. This was largely because such dictionaries tended to focus on specialized topics, or were simple lists of words to facilitate more regularity of spelling, or were explanations of particularly difficult words only. (Thus William Tyndale once hoped to add a glossary of unusual words to his translation of the New Testament, though he did not live long enough to do so.) As Henry Hitchings points out, "in the very year that Johnson began his task, [the bishop and literary scholar] William Warburton was still mournfully reflecting … , 'We have neither Grammar nor Dictionary, neither Chart nor Compass, to guide us through this wide sea of words.' "
A good bit of the history I have just recounted is found in Hitchings' new book, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World. It's a delightful and informative book, despite its subtitle. (Hyperbolic and extended subtitles are all the rage in publishing these days: see also Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, or Thomas Cahill's The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. It's a trend that can't end too soon.) Hitching describes the making of Johnson's dictionary, examines its character, and charts its future influence, all with real skill.
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