Pinning them down: the work of verifying quotations from Johnson's Dictionary

When the editors of the First Edition of the OED needed to fill gaps in the quotation evidence they had acquired either by their own research or from readers' contributions, other dictionaries were an obvious source of material.

Although earlier dictionaries had occasionally given named authorities for some definitions, Johnson's great Dictionary of the English Language, published in two folio volumes on April 15, 1755, was arguably a pioneer in the use of illustrative quotations as we regard them today.

Johnson typically presented his evidence in this style, with his dictionary's headword italicized where it appears in the quotation:

This grant destroy's all you have urg'd before. Dryden

Set it in rich mould, with neats dung and lime mingled. Mortimer's Art of Husbandry

Over a hundred years later, the creators of the OED were more than happy to take advantage of Johnson's labours: just over 2,000 quotations incorporated into the OED by James Murray and his colleagues were marked (J.), to signify that they had been adopted from Johnson's Dictionary:

a1700 Dryden (J.), This grant destroys all you have urg'd before.

1707 Mortimer Husb. (J.), Set it in rich mould, with neats dung and lime.

The first of these is fairly typical: the name of an author is the only reference attached to the quotation attributed to him by Johnson, so the nearest date OED can give is ante the author's death in 1700; the second offers a useful extra in the form of a title, cited here in OED2 style.

The OED generally aims to provide full bibliographic details of works it cites as sources, giving publication date, author's name, a readily identifiable title for the work, with location details (volume, chapter, page number as appropriate), followed by an accurate illustrative quotation.

In contrast, most of Johnson's references tended to be brief — not to say terse; nevertheless many of his citations of writers simply in the titleless style ‘Addison’, ‘Bacon’, ‘Swift’, etc., were necessarily accepted at face value by Murray and his team. If any ungrateful doubts arose concerning the accuracy of Johnson's transcription, or perhaps of his memory, resolving all the adopted ones simply wasn't a practical proposition. (In fact many of the quotations drawn by OED editors from secondary sources such as Johnson were successfully tracked down in their original sources, but at the cost of considerable effort.)

A few years ago, however, tracing the remainder of these Johnson quotations to their source — and thence to the earliest findable edition in which they appear — became one of the intriguing sub-projects of the OED revision process. The task only became a realistic one with the advent of the Internet, and the introduction there of an invaluable resource in the form of searchable full-text literature databases. Here the subscriber can view the complete texts of major (predominantly literary) works which have been either keyed or scanned by optical character recognition techniques and mounted on a database. The texts may not be the first edition, but they constitute a fully searchable resource, and are ideal for locating such needles in the haystack as the Dryden quotation above.

These databases were used to identify as much as possible of Johnson's illustrative literary material and, crucially, were buttressed by the assistance of several dedicated OED readers (in conjunction with Anne McDermott, Fred Nicholls, and colleagues of the Johnson Project at the University of Birmingham), who have between them trawled through Addison's Works, Atterbury's Sermons, Raleigh's History of the World, and other texts, as well as offering more serendipitous one-off discoveries from (for example) Bishop Wilkins's Mathematicall Magick.

This work has enabled the two Johnson examples above to be presented in the revised OED as

1667 Dryden Indian Emperour ii. ii. 19 This grant destroys all you have urg'd before.

1704 J. Mortimer Whole Art Husb. II. 167 Set it in rich mould, with neats dung and lime.

Some 1,600 of the original 2,000 Johnson quotations have so far been tracked down; but we still need help with the remainder.

There are 45 unidentified quotations from Johnson's contemporary John Arbuthnot in the OED today, including the possibly theatrical

a1735 Arbuthnot (J.), He put off the representation of pantomimes till late hours, on market-days.

We also have a selection from Nehemiah Grew, such as this, apparently from his Musæum Regalis Societatis:

1681 Grew Museum (J.), Of the upper beak, an inch and a half consisteth of one concamerated bone.

And there remain sets of untitled quotations from the Earl of Clarendon (d. 1674), R. L'Estrange (d. 1704), and J. Woodward (d. 1728) which have so far defeated all comers.

The list of quotations adopted from Johnson's Dictionary can be found on the OED Online web site, at http://www.oed.com/readers/johnson-alpha.html. Those that have already been traced are given in pale grey type, with the finder's name in parentheses. If you have a little time to spare, or a favourite author that Johnson quoted, perhaps you too would like to take part in OED's quest and join our list of successful detectives.

Since Murray and his editors drew in the same way upon later lexicographers' illustrative material, we shall in due course be turning our attention to identifying and verifying text quoted in Richardson's New Dictionary of the English Language (he featured John Jortin, Bishops Hall and Taylor, Vicesimus Knox, and Edmund Burke among his sources); Latham's Dictionary (the Bishops again, Lamb's Letters, Macaulay) or Nares's Glossary (L. G. D. Acland, Thomas de Witt Talmage, and many contributors to New York periodicals such as the Voice, the Globe, and the Homiletic Monthly).

If you are working on one of these dictionaries, or an author quoted in them, we would be very pleased to hear from you.