The body of the pamphlet may be divided into five unequal parts. In the first (pp. 11-15), Callender launches a freewheeling attack on Johnson, accusing him of "ill-nature," a revengeful spirit, peevishness, and insolence (among other lamentable traits), and announces his chosen mode of chastisement: "From the Doctor's volumes I am to select some passages, illustrate them with a few observations, and submit them to the reader's opinion." In the second (pp. 15-47), he presents a disconnected string of quotations drawn from a number of Johnson's works and embellished with caustic strictures on their creator's presumed moral, intellectual, and literary shortcomings. In the third and longest section (pp. 47-82), separated from the second by a small printer's device, Callender, after "quoting [pp. 47-51] the remarks already made by a judicious friend,20 on this subject," begins a series of disjointed, angry comments on the supposed weaknesses of "the Doctor's English Dictionary." Thirty-one pages later, having vented his ire on the choice and definitions of hundreds of words in the Dictionary, he "take[s] leave" of the "enormous compilation," stigmatized as "perhaps … the strangest farrago which pedantry ever produced," and "return[s]" briefly, in part four (pp. 82-86; set off from part three by another small device), "to the rest of" Johnson's publications, extracts from which he again employs as a means of exhibiting his subject's supposed faults. Finally, he brings the rambling essay to a close (pp. 86-89) by recounting its origins, repeating his principal charges against Johnson, and reasserting his hopes for the Doctor's "reformation."
Although it contains some lively reading (with the author himself being the center of our interest about as often as his subject) and should certainly be readily accessible to students of eighteenth-century literature, the Deformities merits only restricted attention as a valid critique of Johnson's character and writings. Ostensibly employing, by and large, an inductive argument, it professes to demonstrate the pronounced ethical and mental flaws of the Great Cham, who enjoys, so Callender freely confesses, an unrivalled reputation among his contemporaries for his achievements in letters and lexicography. Besides the deplorable qualities mentioned above and excluding for the moment a consideration of those most evident in the Dictionary, Johnson's faults are alleged to include dishonesty, pride, vulgarity, slovenliness, dullness, contempt for other persons, prejudice (especially against the Scots), ingratitude, "gross expressions," turgid language, and, above all, ignorance, "nonsense," and countless inconsistencies. To this sweeping broadside of invective, the modern reader must respond with steady, sometimes amused, sometimes annoyed disbelief. He recognizes, to be sure, certain points of likeness between Callender's abusive imputations and (say) Boswell's highly laudatory portrait. But the former's accusations are so irresponsible and intemperate, so obviously the outburst of a quivering Scotsman's intense indignation, and the evidence adduced is so often wrenched from its context and misapplied, that the reader inevitably finds himself a partisan of Johnson even when he might be occasionally inclined to admit the tenability of Callender's criticism.
Among Johnson's works, the Dictionary, as already indicated, bears the brunt of Callender's heaviest, most sustained assault. Its principal "deformities," to judge from the amount of space devoted to them, occur in its definitions and word-list. In Callender's opinion, "most of the definitions … may be divided into three classes; the erroneous, œnigmatical, and superfluous" (p. 58); many of them explicate "indecent," "blackguard" expressions (pp. 54, 74); and some, exemplifying the lexicographer's "political tenets," are downright "seditious and impudent" (p. 13). Of the word-list itself, probably "two thousand" members, comprising a "profusion of trash," are "not to be found at all in any other book" (p. 70).
A short introduction is scarcely the place to examine the presumed existence of these defects in the Dictionary. Nevertheless, a few facts, based on a random sampling of passages in the Deformities, may provide a partial historical perspective for Callender's censures. Of the group of 210 words on pages 71-72 whose real currency he doubts or denies, 190 also appear in the second edition (1736) of Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum, a copy of which Johnson interleaved and used as he compiled his own Dictionary. Equally revealing, the OED includes 204 of the 210, the second edition of Webster's International 158, and the third edition 108. Again, of the 65 words on pages 51-53 whose definitions Callender objects to, 48 also appear, with comparable explanations, in Bailey's dictionary. Finally, an unsystematic comparison of Bailey's and Johnson's works reveals a much higher incidence of so-called "indecent" – at least sexual – terms in the former than in the latter. The author of the Deformities, it is quite obvious, knew what he disliked about the Dictionary; when pressing his strictures against the book, however, as when mounting his other attacks on Johnson, his violent passions rode roughshod over his faint pretensions to fairness and objectivity.
University of Chicago
Findlay College
Nihil rerum mortalium tam instabile ac fluxum est, quam fama– Tacitus.
The diversion of baiting an Author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teizing other animals because for the most part HE comes voluntarily to the stake.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Man is endowed with sagacity sufficient to discover his errors, but seldom has fortitude to forsake them. Hence it arises that even the weakest of the species can point out the follies of his companions, and fancies that he can reform his own. We are amazed that a being like ourselves should thus deliberately act below the dignity of reason, but we forget that our own conduct may also be reviewed with contempt and pity.
The world is buried in prejudice: Every department of knowledge is deeply infected by its fatal poison. Thus we frequently respect or reprobate a book without a perusal, merely on account of the Author's name. Not one in ten thousand of his panegyrists hath ever comprehended the system of Newton. – What then is the value of their approbation? The public have long heard that a late English Dictionary is a most masterly performance; but is there a single man in England who ever read it half through? No. The school-boy imagines that it is above his capacity: The man of letters feels it to be below his; but being considered as a fashionable decoration in a closet of books, it is bought without the least chance of being perused, and WE (for the first time to be sure) have been admiring we know not what.
However as the variety of our sentiments is without end, it often happens, that while a philosopher is celebrated by one part of his readers, he is despised by some of the rest. Almost all the great authors of the present age have been more bitterly reviled than any other subjects of England, the Ministry excepted. But in a matter so frivolous as the merit of a book, the public are seldom guilty of gross injustice. Indeed, when an acute historian continues, in contempt of his own conviction, to persist in a falsehood, merely because he hath once affirmed it – when an elegant poet, in search of sublimity, soars, or rather sinks beyond the kenn of common sense21 – when an astronomer treats his antagonist like a felon – when an advocate of piety impregnates his pages with slander, scurrility, and treason – then the world may be pardoned though they abate something of their veneration for the dignity of the learned.
We can hardly produce a stronger evidence of the prejudice, and the good nature of the public, than their indulgence to the foibles of Dr Samuel Johnson; nor a stronger evidence of the force of self-conceit, than that disdain of admonition which forms the capital feature in his character. He seems to fancy that his opinions cannot be disputed; and many of his admirers acquiesce in his idea; yet his volumes are of no great value; his personal appearance cannot much recommend him; his conversation would shock the rudest savage. His ignorance, his misconduct, and his success, are a striking proof that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Let us enquire by what singular series of accidents, such a man crawled to the summit of classical reputation?
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