Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  The Dictionary was not in one sense unique or unusual. Many dictionaries had already been written, the first of them being Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall published in 1604. The eighteenth century itself was the epoch of dictionaries, with John Kersey’s A New English Dictionary in 1702 and Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological Dictionary published nineteen years later.

  The first Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1768. A rage for order permeated public consciousness, with a new interest in sources and beginnings, derivations and definitions.

  But Johnson’s work was different. He was not an etymologist or a lexicographer, but a writer. He poured all his eloquence, and his learning, into the anatomy of words with abundant examples of their use from a multiplicity of authors. In the definitions of ‘brim’ and ‘brimful’ he enlists Bacon and Crashaw, Swift and Dryden, Milton and Sidney, and others, but he is more than a hunter-gatherer of allusions. He called it ‘my Book’ and it was for him the book of books, a distillation of the language which was a history and an encyclopaedia, a treatise and a moral tract. It was the expressive world of the English.

  He spent his youth in his father’s bookshop on Breadmarket Street in Lichfield, from which he was dispatched to a dame school and then to the local grammar school where he first encountered the sacred mysteries of Greek and Latin. In the Dictionary ‘school’ is defined as ‘a house of discipline and instruction’. He attended Pembroke College, Oxford, for a while until a shortage of funds drove him home to Lichfield. A spell of schoolmastering there did not endear him to the life of a pedagogue and, with David Garrick as his companion, he moved to London where a world of hackery awaited him. This was his proper home, and he embraced it like a lover. The Dictionary was his first major work.

  He has become a representative eighteenth-century personage and in truth he could not have flourished in any other century. His melancholy was nothing new, but his melancholy madness smacks of the age of Christopher Smart, William Cowper and George III. Like Cowper he believed himself to be in imminent danger of perpetual damnation; he took large quantities of opium and desired to be confined and whipped. One of his diversions was the new taste for travel literature; his first published work in 1735 was a translation of Father Jerome Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia, and he never lost that contemporaneous taste for the exotic and the unknown.

  He is also deemed to characterize the eighteenth century as a result of his enormous eccentricity. The engravings of Hogarth and the fictions of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne afford ample evidence of the same preoccupation with extraordinary characters. In the work of artists and novelists London becomes a pantomime and a masquerade populated by grotesques. Johnson’s most famous biographer, James Boswell, noted that ‘while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand’. In the intervals between talk ‘he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen . . .’.

  When he walked ‘it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon’. He wandered in his walk, swerving from one side of the path to the other in a zig-zag, and he had the obsessive habit of touching every post he passed in the London streets; if accidentally he missed one, he hastened back to tap it. He might stop in the middle of a thoroughfare and raise his arms above his head; before he crossed any threshold he would whirl around in order to make the sudden leap. He enjoyed rolling down hills and climbing trees. He was deeply marked by the scars of scrofula, contracted in his childhood; he was slovenly, often dirty and dressed absent-mindedly. He may be seen as the epitome of the way in which the eighteenth century developed an interest in, and relish for, human character.

  The century also marked the true beginning of a taste for reading among the newly literate that included a section of the labouring population; a French observer, César de Saussure, noted in the 1750s that ‘workmen habitually begin the day by going to the coffee-house in order to read the latest news’. Instruction manuals and even novels were scrutinized to learn the principles of good behaviour, of dress and diction; books of practical education, in trade and in agriculture, were greatly in demand. Two years after he had finished his dictionary Johnson persuaded the managers of the London Chronicle to begin reviewing books in its pages. It was an ‘age of authors’, as Johnson had written. Johnson himself was of course one of the most celebrated. That is a prime reason for his emblematic status.

  The style of the Dictionary, at once sonorous and peremptory, accounts for some of its power. He himself was sometimes obliged to be ‘Johnsonian’. He once said of a drama that ‘it has not wit enough to keep it sweet’ and then corrected himself with ‘it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction’. When he said of somebody that ‘the woman had a bottom of good sense’ there was general laughter; he bridled at that and continued, in solemn fashion, ‘I say the woman was fundamentally sensible.’ The registers of eighteenth-century speech could be measured and taught. The purpose of the Dictionary was didactic as well as creative, and was very much in the spirit of the age.

  He began his preparations by excessive and intuitive reading. He was an omnivore of books, sometimes literally tearing them apart to get at their contents. When he came upon a word he liked or needed, he would underline it and then mark out the extract in which it was embedded. His small and sometimes ragged retinue of assistants, sometimes four and sometimes six, occupied the upper chamber of his house in Gough Square where they sat at tables like clerks in a counting house. Johnson himself sat on an ancient elbow-chair, with three legs and one arm, propped against a wall.

  When he had finished with a book it was passed to one of his companions who would then copy the marked passages onto a quarto sheet; when the sheet was filled with a column of references it was cut into single slips which were then deposited into a number of ‘bins’. In the first edition of the completed work there were 40,000 words and more than 110,000 quotations. It was a wholly practical method of dealing with recalcitrant material, and must compare favourably with the prolonged discussions among the learned scholars of Paris or Florence about their own dictionaries. But it was also the great business of his life, expelling idleness and therefore melancholy. He wrote it, as he said, ‘amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’, but the majesty and importunity of his work sufficiently elevated him.

  He wrote a ‘Plan’, a ‘Preface’ and a ‘History of the English Language’ to accompany his work. He believed that the Dictionary itself would uncover ‘the exuberance of signification’ and would in the process comprise ‘principles of science’, ‘remarkable facts’, ‘complete processes’, ‘striking exhortations’ and ‘beautiful descriptions’. Yet these were essentially ‘the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer’. He began his quest in the time of Philip Sidney and ended at the Restoration, because the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries was the one in which ‘the wells of English undefiled’ were to be found and tasted.

  He treated his sources with the bravura of a master; sometimes he quoted them whole but, more often than not, he abbreviated them or condensed them. He refused to quote from Thomas Hobbes because he believed his works to be wicked; he quoted much from Milton’s verse but only once from his prose, on the understanding that the prose-writer Milton was a radical and subversive. Johnson considered his Dictionary to bear a moral as well as didactic purpose; he furnished even the simplest words with devotional or ethical associations. ‘Table’ was defined by a sentence from John Locke that ‘children at a table never asked for any thing, but contentedly took what was given
them’. It was a work of practical morality. He was a devout and orthodox member of the Anglican communion, for whom words were the building blocks of faith. The first illustration of ‘teach’ comes from the Book of Isaiah with the sentence that the Lord ‘will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths’.

  In the course of his survey he came upon words that in a later period would seem hard or strange, but were then part of common discourse. So in succession we find ‘breedbate’, a starter of quarrels, ‘brontology’, the science of thunder, ‘brunion’, a fruit somewhere between a plum and a peach, ‘bub’, strong malt liquor, ‘bubbler’, a cheat, ‘bubby’, a woman’s breast and ‘budget’, a bag. A ‘bedpresser’ was a heavy or lazy man, while ‘pension’ was ‘generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country’.

  He lists 134 uses for ‘take’, in an account which covers five pages and amounts to 8,000 words. Johnson, however, was not omniscient. He often stated that ‘I know not the meaning’. ‘Tatterdemalion’ is defined as ‘tatter and I know not what’. Of ‘plication’ he merely remarks that it is ‘used somewhere in Clarissa’. Words fade or disappear while new ones emerge; some glimmer for a while before being extinguished while others thrive to become great roots for new systems of thought. In his Plan for the Dictionary Johnson remarked that ‘all change is of itself an evil’ but in the end he was obliged to realize that words are born and die like mortal beings. In that sense it is both a very personal and a very necessary book. To browse through it is to walk through the eighteenth century rendered more vivid by flashes of lightning.

  At dawn on the morning of 6 September 1769, a triple discharge of seventeen cannon and twelve mortars on the shores of the Avon at Stratford announced the opening of the Shakespeare Jubilee. It was to be a national festival lasting three days, designed by David Garrick in honour of the nation’s greatest writer; there were to be pageants and plays and processions, attended by all the notables of the time. Dukes, duchesses, actors, politicians, admirals and generals came out in force. Boswell turned up, dressed as a Corsican in order to boost sales of his recent account of that island. He wrote that Garrick ‘observed me. We first made an attitude to each other, and then cordially shook hands.’

  The first day passed well enough but on the second the rains of autumn intervened; the cobbles of the town were under water and the waters of the Avon were rising dangerously. Many of the public events were cancelled or abandoned, and the audiences for what remained were wet and miserable. It had not been altogether a triumph but it was in its own terms a succès d’estime; it was the beginning of the festive commemoration of Shakespeare that at a later date would be termed half-ironically as ‘bardolatry’. It also marked the beginning of the national celebration of English drama as an expression of the national spirit. The playwright was a token of growing cultural self-confidence and an emblem of patriotism.

  Boswell’s sense of occasion was immaculate since, in the period, drama was the form and substance of the age. Everyone, from the politician to the preacher, took his cue from the stage. The dialogue was noted down and copied. The costumes, of the actresses in particular, were observed. When Boswell ‘made an attitude’ on first seeing Garrick he was copying a gesture from the stage. Snatches of stage dialogue became catchphrases. The most popular performers became the object of burlesque and street theatre. The whole of London was a theatre with even the mendicants ‘dressing up’ for their roles on the streets of the city; there was a costume for the parlour maid, and a costume for the fishwife. When people began to dress ‘above their station’, as was often reported, then social chaos beckoned. The names of Congreve, Sheridan and Aphra Behn are familiar; but every hack writer or journalist, every out-of-work actor or Oxbridge scholar down on his luck, turned to the stage as the most likely means of earning a living.

  The two principal licensed London theatres were the Theatres Royal at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, to which the usual variegated London crowd thronged. The gentlemen and those who considered themselves gentlemen were happy to pay 3 shillings to sit on benches in the pit, close to the action, while citizens and their wives paid 2 shillings for the first-floor gallery. The lower sort had the higher seats in the upper gallery, where fruit-sellers and prostitutes wielded their various wares. The most celebrated or wealthy patrons had already hired boxes for their private pleasure. These two theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane were alone licensed to present spoken drama, but of course this did not prevent other venues from providing theatre of a different kind.

  Some old relics, used in Elizabethan and Stuart times, were pressed back into service. In 1728 the ‘Old Theatrical Booth’ by the Bowling Green in Southwark, for example, presented operas and ‘an entertainment of dancing in grotesque characters’. The same theatre promised dramatic entertainments on Jack Sheppard, the notorious criminal and escapee, as well as ‘dramatic operas’ and ‘ballad farces’. Other theatrical booths were set up in the courtyard of the George Inn along Borough High Street and by the hospital gate at Smithfield. We read in the Daily Advertiser of 22 October 1776, that ‘the beautiful Patagonian Theatre’ has reopened in ‘the Great Room, over Exeter Change’ with a burletta entitled Midas and a pantomime called The Enchanter. Most of these venues were eventually abandoned, decayed, or burned down. But they are a reminder of London’s teeming theatrical life. By the beginning of 1726 some thirty-six theatrical productions were being advertised.

  Everything was of the moment; the jokes and remarks were topical, the allusions immediate, the objects of satire were such modern phenomena as Methodists and ‘bubble’ speculators. People came to hear the latest news or the latest rumours, no doubt from the other members of the audience as much as from the stage. Romances, melodramas and what another age would call variety shows, were also played.

  The audience was just as much a matter of attention and speculation as the actors; the chatter of gossip and comment continued through the performance, and there were times when the actors could hardly make themselves heard. The denizens of the pit ate plum cake and blew on tin whistles if they disapproved of any action; the sounds became known as ‘cat-calls’. The theatre was an occasion when the town came to regard itself, as well as to look upon its image on the stage. It was truly a communal experience. The auditorium itself was better lit than the light of day, and the audience had some of the characteristics of the London crowd from which they came – violently so on those occasions when riots took place over the price of seats or the presence of foreign performers. There were times when the interiors of the theatres were wrecked, even, and especially, after the manager had come upon the stage and appealed for calm.

  In the world of the eighteenth-century theatre the spectator could often take on the role of the actor. Well-known theatre-goers were the talk of the town. One spectator in the upper gallery of the playhouse signalled his approval of the action of the stage by giving loud knocks, with an oaken staff on the benches or on the wainscot, that could be heard all over the house. He was, according to Addison, ‘a large black man whom nobody knows’ and was known as ‘the trunk maker in the upper gallery’ after the noises made by those workers. Another ‘lusty fellow, but withal a sort of beau’, again according to Addison, would leap from one of the side boxes onto the stage before the curtain rose; here he took snuff and made several passes at the curtain with his sword before facing the audience. ‘Here he affected to survey the whole house, bowed and smiled at random, showed his teeth which some of them indeed were very white. After this he retired behind the curtain, and obliged us with several views of his person from every opening.’

  The paucity of playhouses in the capital meant that several were built without a formal royal licence; demand prompted supply. Two were opened in the Haymarket, for example, one for the opera in 1705 and one for miscellaneous variety in 1766. A third theatre had been established in Ayliffe Street, Whitechapel, in 1727; there had been an earlier theatre in that vicinity in 17
03 where yet another playhouse was created in 1732. So Whitechapel was the second home of drama. The unlicensed playhouses were given tacit permission to open on the understanding that, if their plays gave serious offence, they would be immediately closed.

  The Licensing Act of 1737, which obliged plays to be corrected by the lord chamberlain, had an immediate effect upon the stage. There would be no oblique passes at obscenity or blasphemy; there were to be no more political satires. From the defenestration of the eighteenth-century theatre emerged a moral and sentimental drama with appeals to right feeling and right thinking. As Dangle says in Sheridan’s The Critic (1779), ‘Now egad, I think the worst alteration is in the nicety of the audience – no double entendre, no smart innuendo admitted, even Vanbrugh and Congreve obliged to undergo a bungling reformation.’

  But the restrictions of the Act not only created a theatre of moral sentiments. They also prompted writers in new directions, thus changing the nature of fiction itself. All the inventiveness and energy, all the wit and drama, were transferred from the stage to the page. The Licensing Act heralded the rise of the serious and successful novel in England. Previously fiction had been considered by Defoe and his contemporaries as simply a digression from journalism, but now it took on a wholly independent life.

  Fielding and Smollett, for example, had previously turned their attention towards the stage, Fielding being so successful that he was dubbed ‘the English Molière’. Now their comedy found a new form of expression. What could no longer be seen on stage could still be described in Tom Jones or in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. The comedy and the innuendo, the dramatic confrontation and the melodramatic reversal, had become the stuff of fiction.