Literary history: Samuel Johnson's English dictionary was a landmark in many senses, and it was largely to it that he owed the almost reverential admiration and respect with which mid-18th century British opinion treated him.
Before he took on the daunting commission, he had been generally (and on the whole deservedly) regarded as just a busy professional writer, almost an upmarket hack. When he had completed and published it in 1755, he was well on his way to becoming England's premier writer-scholar-critic, the Grand Cham of literature, a social lion sought after by London hostesses and a heavyweight pundit of the drawing-room and the dinner table.
This was the celebrity whom his future biographer, Boswell, encountered with a mixture of awe, snobbery and amusement, the man whose huge, ungainly figure was one of the sights of London, whose erudition and eccentricity were daily topics and who could administer such crushing put-downs to anyone who disagreed with him in company. Nobody then would or could have believed that Boswell's Life would eventually take precedence over the sage's own writings - which in many ways seems unfair and one-sided. Johnson was one of the great all-rounders and men of letters, who put his stamp on many genres and had a mind of the first rank, packed by immense reading and knowledge.
When Johnson was first approached by the London bookseller Robert Dodsley about the dictionary project, he bluntly refused it. He was then a struggling writer in his mid-30s, who had left his native Lichfield after failing as a schoolmaster and had also quit Oxford without a degree. Married to a widow much older than himself, he had the social handicap of being scarred and unsightly from smallpox and other diseases of his youth, apart from his massive and uncouth shape. However, the following year (1746) he changed his mind about the offer and announced that he hoped to complete the task in three years. This caused consternation - the entire French Academy had laboured for four decades over its French Dictionary, so how could one man rival their achievement in a fraction of that time? Johnson stuck to his guns and was offered a fee of £1,575 by the various booksellers who by now had banded together for the project. It was to be paid to him in instalments.
At first he had a team of six helpers, who seem to have been rather a poor lot both individually and collectively and were in fact little more than emanuenses. They drudged together in a three-storey house Johnson had moved to in Gough Square, where he gutted books by the hundred and handed his assistants the results to be indexed and entered. He borrowed books from most of his friends, and the actor Garrick - his former pupil in Lichfield - had the mortification of getting back a valuable Shakespeare folio badly handled and marked. Understandably, he refused to lend it a second time.
The whole work eventually took eight years, with various mishaps and changes of methodology along the way. Work and money strains apart, these were not happy years for Johnson, whose elderly wife, "Tetty", was taking more and more to her bed and - according to the testimony of friends - to alcohol and opium as well. She also refused to go on sharing her husband's bed, which he found a major deprivation in spite of her age and faded looks. Another rebuff was the offhand attitude of the famous Lord Chesterfield, who at first promised his patronage but treated Johnson so slightingly that he revenged himself with the notorious Letter rebuking the peer for his discourtesy. (Chesterfield took it in fairly good part.) The dictionary proved an instant critical success and Johnson's reputation was made, but it was not a sellout. As Henry Hitchings remarks: "at €4.10s it was beyond the means of all but the most prosperous readers. This, after all, was the price of a year's dental care or an everyday suit of clothes". The publishers soon brought out a second edition in monthly instalments, which also sold slowly, and it was 10 years before a third one appeared. Then came a fourth, revised edition and a fifth, two-volume folio one in 1784, the year of Johnson's death. Almost to the last he continued to correct, revise and expand it, proving that the accepted view of his natural laziness (endorsed by Boswell) was largely a myth.
Though Johnson was an excellent Greek and Latin scholar, as well as being impregnated with his own country's literature, he knew few modern languages well apart from French. His etymology, then, was sometimes shaky - though it was largely through his example that the study of linguistics grew so rapidly in late 18th-century Britain. But his reading and intellectual curiosity were vast, he consulted the standard authorities in areas where his own knowledge ran short, and he supported many of his definitions with apt, illuminating quotations from the best English authors.
Of course, some of his blunders became notorious - how many people, for example, have not heard of his definition of "pastern" as "the knee of a horse"? Or of how, when asked by a female admirer why he had committed such a solecism, he boomed back : "ignorance, madam, pure ignorance"? Or his definition of a net as "anything reticulated or discussated, with interstices between the interstices"? When two ladies of his acquaintance remarked thankfully that rude works in general were omitted, he cried: "What, my dears, then you have been looking for them?" The dictionary made a massive impact abroad and served as the model for many of its kind on the Continent; at home it held its own until supplanted by the Oxford English Dictionary, begun in 1860 but not completed until 1928. Even this, however, drew heavily on its great predecessor. His lexicographic labours did not make Johnson a rich man - in fact, he was arrested for debt at least once, and not until the Government awarded him a pension did he know any real financial security. And even then, though a figure of European fame, his private charity and susceptibility to a hard-luck story kept him a relatively poor man to the end of his life.
Hitchings combines genuine erudition with an easy, urbane style, and his system of relating his chapter headings organically to his subject matter is apt and ingenious.
He also knows - as Johnson himself, unfortunately, only rarely did - when he has said enough and precisely when to stop.
Brian Fallon is a former literary editor and visual arts critic of The Irish Times
Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World. By Henry Hitchings. John Murray, 378 pp. £14.99