Lexicography and Samuel Johnson's House of Words to Be Brought to Life

Trinity Lecturer in English Lynda Mugglestone will be undertaking a knowledge exchange project to create a permanent exhibition for Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in the London house where he composed it.

Beginning in August 2023, the TORCH Knowledge Exchange project ‘Rethinking Johnson’s House of Words’ will invite new forms of engagement with the idea of ‘garret lexicography’ and the life of the harmless drudge. Professor Mugglestone’s project will be based at 17 Gough Square, London, in the garret of which Samuel Johnson, along with six amanuenses (and a revolutionary reading project) slowly composed his iconic Dictionary, by hand, between the late 1740s and 1755.

A new permanent exhibition will, in particular,  refocus the garret as the birthplace of a book of international significance, getting behind the print text to explore its hands-on making, and reuniting dispersed evidence of Johnson's preliminary work with its original home.

While Johnson’s work on English is often described as monumental, colossus-like, or compared to St Paul’s Cathedral, the garret is a reminder of the realities of production. The Dictionary paid the rent, courtesy of advance payments from Johnson’s publishers. His printer lived across the square, sending paper, proofs, and demands for both copy and compression.

Professor Mugglestone notes of the project: ‘On one hand, seen in heritage and historical terms, the garret is a unique space – a rare survival of a place where we can locate earlier dictionary-making in situ. On the other, the modern visitor to Johnson’s House will find the garret sadly anti-climactic – a few reminders of dictionary-making stand in a corner, alongside dressing-up and memories of the blitz.

‘The project will invite us, on a range of levels, to reconsider what it really meant to 'define your world' in the liminal territories of a historic house, while documenting the garret as a collaborative space, bound in critical ways to the challenging life of Grub Street and the professional writer.’

The project has links to Trinity College’s own history as well – not least in Johnson’s lengthy visit to Oxford in 1754 where he stayed in Kettell Hall, working on the history and preface in the final summer before the Dictionary’s completion, courtesy of his friendship with the poet and writer Thomas Warton.