JOHNSON, Samuel.

£12,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Dictionary of the English Language: First edition of this most famous of English dictionaries. Johnson's Dictionary "left an immense mark on its age. It soon became recognized as a work of classical standing, and in spite of some minor blemishes it has never lost its historical importance as the first great endeavour of its kind" (ODNB).Begun in 1746, the Dictionary was Johnson's greatest literary labour, comprising over 2,300 pages, 40,000 defined words, and 114,000 illustrative quotations. The result demonstrated "the fecundity of the language more comprehensively than any of its predecessors. Conscious that his primary role was to record the state of English vocabulary, rather than to legislate for its usage, Johnson registered the entire sweep of words from the crude and demotic to the most rarefied scientific terms and to recent fanciful forms imported from other languages" (ibid.).Johnson's innovations included "grounding his wordlist in the works of English authors, discerning subtle shades of meaning in numbered senses, and providing extensive quotations showing the words in context. Together, these qualities made Johnson's Dictionary, though not a chronological 'first', still the first English dictionary to be widely regarded as the standard of the English language" (Lynch, abstract).Provenance: Sir Richard Neave (1731-1814), British merchant and a governor of the Bank of England, with his bookplates. Neave developed interests in the West Indies and the Americas an

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