Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes

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       Prologue

      When Samuel Johnson was compiling his great Dictionary of the English Language, which defines more than forty thousand words, he decided to illustrate his definitions with suitable literary quotations. ‘I therefore extracted,’ he explained in his Preface, ‘from Philosophers principles of science, from Historians remarkable facts, from Chymists complete processes, from Divines striking exhortations, and from Poets beautiful descriptions.’

      To do this, he read and annotated over two hundred thousand passages from innumerable English authors across four centuries. He marked up these passages, and handed them to his clerks in his attic at Gough Square to be entered into eighty large vellum notebooks.

      He was working at great speed, and he chose his illustrations entirely at random. Most of them are from the great classics of English literature, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Pope. But of the 116,000 quotations eventually included, he chose seven from the works of his strange friend Richard Savage. These quotations, and the seven words they illustrate, may have a curious significance. Since they were chosen rapidly and at random, from such a vast source, they could be thought to reveal unconscious links and symbolic meanings. If considered as a form of ‘association-test’, these seven words must instinctively have brought Richard Savage to Johnson’s mind. Thus, to an analyst they might suggest something about the nature of that most puzzling relationship. Here are the seven words, and their illustrations, in alphabetical order.