Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  The booksellers of Paris have long been part of a kind of literary underworld, spreading subversive ideas by printed pamphlets, books, leaflets and newspapers. And in the eighteenth century the cafés, or coffee houses, were the places where all these ideas were discussed. In Paris and in London like-minded thinkers congregated to read, as well as learn from and to debate with each other. The Café Procope is one of the oldest and most famous, where writers, philosophers, intellectuals, politicians and anyone who liked an argument would hold court and exchange ideas and gossip. ‘There is an ebb and flow of all conditions of men, nobles and cooks, wits and sots, pell mell, all chattering in full chorus to their heart’s content,’ was how one contemporary writer described the scene. Voltaire used to go there and, so the story goes, get through forty cups of coffee a day, mixed with chocolate. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, Jean-Jacques Rousseau – they were all players at the Procope.

  This was café society at its most potent, a sort of borderless intellectual republic of letters and ideas and free thought where the driving forces of the Enlightenment – the critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs and morals, the central belief in rationality and science – had free rein. In a way, this period began the process that has ended with the internet and social networks.

  The Café Procope in Paris, meeting place for revolutionary thinkers

  What better place, then, to find Dr Kate Tunstall, an Enlightenment scholar, to talk about the book that embodied the new way of thinking and the extraordinary man behind it – the Encyclopédie and its editor, Denis Diderot. The Encyclopédie – ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des sciences, des arts and des métiers (‘Encyclopaedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts’) was originally commissioned as a translation into French of the Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers, which first appeared in 1728, but in the hands of the polymath Denis Diderot it grew into something huge, radical and utterly contemporary.

  ‘Diderot knew English and he was also known to be subversive and, therefore, marketable,’ says Kate. The booksellers behind the project were businessmen as well as publishers, and they had an eye to a successful commercial enterprise. And if they were looking to make a splash with their main choice of editor, Diderot was the right man.

  Denis Diderot was a novelist, playwright, art critic, man of science and philosopher – and the most talkative man of his generation, according to one contemporary. The Enlightenment was a time when science and reason began to challenge the authority of the Church, and Diderot worked under threat of exile during most of his life because of his controversial, subversive views. In fact, he landed in prison for three months not long before the first volume of the Encyclopédie came out in 1751. ‘We know he had these dinners at his home where he openly declared himself an atheist,’ says Kate, ‘and one of the reasons he was arrested, we think, is that his parish priest had been reporting on him to the police.’

  The Encyclopédie publishers were extremely upset at Diderot’s imprisonment because they feared financial ruin. ‘So they wrote to the authorities,’ continues Kate, ‘saying, “Please let him out.” And one of the things they explain is that, if they had to bring all the manuscripts to Diderot in prison, even at this early stage, they would fill a whole room! So you have to imagine Diderot sort of surrounded by paper, trying to fit it all together.’

  It’s a vivid image of just how massive an undertaking the Encyclopédie was. Diderot, and his co-editor d’Alembert (who left the project after a couple of years), commissioned essays and articles, not just on the academic and scientific knowledge of the day, but on the technologies, industries and trades of the working people. ‘An encyclopedia … should encompass not only the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human knowledge,’ Diderot wrote. And by doing so, he maintained, it would ‘change the way people think’.

  And it would do it, too, by influencing opinion and thought, by challenging authority, introducing new ideas, looking at things differently. Diderot was clever, though, in suggesting radical ideas rather than headlining them. He used irony and strategies of subversion within the text. Articles say that they’re going to be about one thing, and then they turn out to be about something slightly different. Or they have cross-references to a directly opposing point of view. That was Diderot’s way of changing the normal way of thinking. So if you look up ‘cannibal’, for example, there’s a cross-reference to Eucharist and Communion – so he’s making a point about, or mocking the idea of, the eating of the body and blood of Christ in church. And there’s a streak of mischievous wit, too, in some of the entries where Diderot plays about with the notion of what should and shouldn’t be in an encyclopaedia, and what some people are expecting to find. Kate’s favourite one is ‘aguaxima’: some kind of plant found in Brazil. But Diderot’s entry (and we know it’s his because it’s preceded by an asterisk, which was his sign) is completely tongue-in-cheek. He has nothing interesting to tell about it, so he just mocks the convention of including it in an encyclopedia at all. This is plainly not the challenging and ground-breaking material he was interested in.

  Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1751

  Aguaxima, a plant growing in Brazil and on the islands of South America. This is all that we are told about it; and I would like to know for whom such descriptions are made. It cannot be for the natives of the countries concerned, who are likely to know more about the aguaxima than is contained in this description, and who do not need to learn that the aguaxima grows in their country. It is as if you said to a Frenchman that the pear tree is a tree that grows in France, in Germany, etc. It is not meant for us either, for what do we care that there is a tree in Brazil named aguaxima, if all we know about it is its name? What is the point of giving the name? It leaves the ignorant just as they were and teaches the rest of us nothing. If all the same I mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something stupid than to find no article at all.

  Diderot was the spider in the middle of this vast web of ideas, essays, learning and information, receiving articles from about 150 contributors, writing many himself, editing, arranging and cross-referencing them. There was a huge range of contributors, from big names like Voltaire and Rousseau to doctors, chemists and academics we don’t know much about and who are not named. Rousseau wrote some of the articles about music, but he went off in a huff after d’Alembert wrote an entry about Geneva, Rousseau’s home town, and said it was a very boring place that needed a theatre. The Encyclopédie didn’t just include written descriptions of the sciences, arts and crafts, but hundreds of plates that illustrate the subjects. Diderot got into trouble for being rather vague about the sources of some of the illustrations and diagrams, and he was accused of plagiarism, but the plates are a magnificent feature.

  Diderot was particularly fascinated by what was called ‘the mechanical arts’, all the trades and artisan crafts of the time. He was surely influenced by his own background. His father, Didier, was a master cutler, a maker of cutting tools, in the provincial French town of Langres, and was particularly well known for surgical knives, scalpels and lancets, which were stamped with his hallmark of a pearl. The young Diderot must have visited his father’s workshop and watched the cutters at their work, grinding the knives and forging blades, and he himself wrote the article about ‘cutler’.

  There are dozens of other plates, illustrating everything from tile-making to how pack saddles and harnesses are assembled; from the work of the button-maker and confectioner to cabinet-making and the silk factory. There are plates showing tools, diagrams of machinery, people at work and factories, and the fact is, no one had really seen these things illustrated before. The tradition up to then had been to illustrate the beaux arts and nature – not the craft of the working man and woman.

  The Encyclopédie
was an astonishing achievement. It was only supposed to be a few volumes at the start; in the end, Diderot devoted twenty-five years of his life to it and produced thirty-five volumes, with 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations between 1751 and 1772. It is a work which stands for the Enlightenment in its scope and curiosity, its boldness and its thirst for knowledge and the free exchange of ideas. It’s big and sprawling, a baggy monster – and you can look at it for yourself online.

  The nineteenth-century literary critic C. A. Sainte-Beuve wrote of the Encyclopédie: ‘It has been compared to the impious Babel; I see in it rather one of those towers of war, one of those siege-machines, enormous, gigantic, wonderful to behold …’ In a way, the encyclopédistes were laying siege to their world of the eighteenth century, looking it full in the face, surveying it, undermining it and challenging accepted wisdom. Truly capturing their world in words.

  Dr Johnson’s Dictionary

  In the middle of the eighteenth century, while Denis Diderot was assembling his vast Encyclopédie just across the Channel, an English man of letters was single-handedly writing another reference book, so famous that it’s simply referred to as ‘Dr Johnson’s Dictionary’.

  Samuel Johnson was one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment, a man of enormous wit, learning and literary brilliance. Many TV viewers find it difficult to think of him without remembering that episode of Blackadder with Johnson, played by Robbie Coltrane, as an annoying show-off obsessed with his great work; he comes to tell Hugh Laurie’s Prince George all about his Dictionary – and Baldrick uses the manuscript to light the fire. The real Dr Johnson was, doubtless, a dinner party bore about his Dictionary but with good cause. No one had ever written a dictionary like it before. There had been several attempts before Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, but they were really just markers along the way. A schoolmaster called Robert Cawdrey had written a book of word definitions in 1604, but it only had a couple of thousand or so entries in it. Twenty years later, another scholar, Henry Cockeram, had a go at improving things and was the first to call his book a ‘Dictionary’. Others made their contributions, too, but by the middle of the century there was still no authoritative lexicon of the English language. By contrast, the French and Italians were cantering ahead with academies and armies of scholars dedicated to the production of detailed, accurate dictionaries.

  Britain needed a proper dictionary; it was a matter of national pride and academic necessity. It was also a tremendous commercial opportunity in a society where books and reading were the life blood of the Enlightenment. So it’s no surprise that the impetus came from a group of booksellers – who were also publishers in those days – with an eye on the market.

  The consortium was led by one of the foremost publishers of the day, Robert Dodsley. He had been a playwright before he went into bookselling, and published all the big names, including Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray and Oliver Goldsmith. He also knew and had published Johnson, and he picked him as the ideal man to take on the dictionary. Johnson was a prolific writer, at this time in his early career (he was only thirty-seven) a hack, someone who earned his living and put food on the table entirely through the power of his pen. It’s said he could churn out 10,000 words a day on anything and everything, in the form of magazine articles, parliamentary sketches, the odd poem and verse drama, prefaces, introductions. For two years he single-handedly wrote an entire, twice-weekly periodical, The Rambler. His industry and output were prodigious, and he had a reputation for a thorough and committed approach to every writing commission.

  Dodsley met with Johnson, and the deal was struck: 1,500 guineas to produce the English dictionary. It was a handsome fee which allowed Johnson to set himself up in a house off Fleet Street and dedicate himself – for the next nine years – to his monumental work.

  How on earth does one man set about producing a dictionary of the English language? When he signed the contract, Johnson seemed undaunted. He declared he would complete it in three years and mocked the French Academy for appointing forty scholars who took forty years to write their dictionary. ‘This is the proportion,’ he commented drily. ‘Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.’

  In fact, it took Johnson three times as long because he quickly realized that his initial plan was flawed. At first he began trawling through other dictionaries, starting with ‘A’ and plucking out lists of words, but almost immediately he decided he had got things the wrong way round. Instead, he started from words in action: he turned to books, to English literature, and selected his words from those sources. In this way he put together his wordlist from illustrations, rather than listing words and then finding examples. Workhorse that he was, he tackled the challenge head on: he simply immersed himself in reading and books for years and years. Everything from medical tracts, plays and novels to political pamphlets, poetry and theology written over the previous century and a half, a staggering 2,000 books, nibbled, tasted, chewed or swallowed whole in his search for examples of how we used our language.

  Johnson ranged widely across topic and author, but the vast majority of the 100,000-plus quotations he used were drawn from the big guns of literature: the Bible, Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift. And from these illustrations he assembled a dictionary of 42,773 words, many of them with multiple entries to cover the range of meanings of the same word.

  Dr Samuel Johnson assembled the first major English-language dictionary

  That was another discovery he made early on in his work: he was not content to produce a dictionary that was prescriptive, i.e. which set out how the language should be. He wanted it to be descriptive – to be faithful to the richness and flexibility of English as it was used. When he was drawing up his plan at the start, he thought that a word might have, at the most, seven or eight different meanings: in the event, he found words with twice or even three times as many subtle differences of usage. For the word put, he included 134 different meanings, among them to ‘lay’ or ‘place’; to ‘repose’; to ‘urge’; to ‘state’; to ‘unite’; to ‘propose’; to ‘form’; to ‘regulate’ – the list goes on and on. Time had twenty definitions and fourteen illustrative quotations; turn had sixteen definitions and fifteen examples.

  The point was, here was language sorted and illustrated by the standards of literature – and for literature read ‘how the language was actually being used, in all its invention and shades and evolutions of meaning’ – not language as it ought to be, or language bound for ever to some elegant, academic fixed standard. In his preface to the book Johnson described the ‘energetic’ unruliness of the English tongue. ‘Wherever I turned my view,’ he wrote, ‘there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.’ His original aim, he said, was ‘to refine our language to grammatical purity’. But it was his genius to recognize that language is impossible to set in stone, because its nature is to change and evolve. And so, he said, he realized his role was to record the language of the day, rather than to form it. It was an approach which would have a lasting influence on the future writing of dictionaries.

  Johnson didn’t work entirely alone. He employed a handful of secretaries and assistants – all but one hailed originally from Scotland – to collate the thousands of passages and words he marked up in his reading. He turned the top floor of his house into a study and his atticful of Scotsmen laboured through the mind-numbing process of cutting up the definitions and quotations into little slips, ordering and arranging them, copying them into notebooks and adapting the process as the dictionary grew ever larger. Imagine the energy and dedication, the sheer concentration required to continue this painstaking, repetitive, exhausting work day after day for nine years. No wonder Johnson was thoroughly fed up – even depressed, probably – by the end. One of the illustrations he used for the word ‘dull’ he made up himself: ‘To make dictionaries is dull work’, and another famous one
is his definition of a ‘lexicographer’: ‘a harmless drudge’. And in the preface he doesn’t pretend that the process has been anything other than long, hard and draining: ‘I have protracted my work,‘ he writes, ‘till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds.’

  However hard it was to compile, it’s a brilliant, endlessly fascinating book to dip into. There’s such flair and wit, such colour and life in it. There is an ease and facility in Johnson’s writing, an economical elegance of some of his definitions. Take dotard:‘one whose age has impaired his intellect’; embryo: ‘the offspring yet unfinished in the womb’; envy: ‘to repine at the happiness of others’, or the words which show an earlier, more literal meaning, like eavesdropper: ‘a listener under windows’; or jogger: ‘one who moves heavily and dully’. And then there are the curmudgeonly, witty definitions which are one part linguistic definition and three parts personal prejudice. The pleasure is not in the accuracy or strict factual truth of the definition, but in the amusement and entertainment it provides, like the famous oats: ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’; or excise: ‘a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid’.