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From: Humanities
Date: 20050901
Author:Wishna, Victor

Two-and-a-half centuries after the publication of Samuel Johnson's landmark dictionary, a new critical edition illuminates his best intentions.

As great figures of eighteenth-century English literature go, Samuel Johnson was something of a complainer. He wrote of being forced to write "amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow" as well as "in this gloom of solitude."

Then again, writing a dictionary-even one that is largely considered the first authoritative volume on the English language and which served as the standard for a century and a half-is something of a ...

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