‘You can make a poem walking in the fields or lying in bed,’ said Samuel Johnson in 1777, ‘but composing a Dictionary requires books and a desk.’ Johnson needed more than books and a desk when he set out to compile his mammoth Dictionary of the English Language three decades earlier. He also required a suitable work space and a trusty team of assistants. To those ends, he used the garret at the top of his London house at 17 Gough Square, and he employed a group of specialist writers, readers, researchers, translators, collators and copyists. What Johnson needed most, though, was constant diligence, for the task he thought would take three years turned into a gruelling undertaking that lasted eight.

Perseverance paid off and on 15 April 1755 the first great English dictionary was published. Comprising more than 42,000 meticulously crafted entries and showcasing an enormous breadth of knowledge, not to mention wit, clarity and eccentricity, Johnson’s Dictionary was the most significant cultural achievement of the 18^th century. It ‘conferred stability on the language of his country,’ said James Boswell, and remained the definitive work of English lexicography for well over 100 years.

The main strength of the Dictionary is its rigorous enquiry into the meaning of all manner of words, from everyday vocabulary to professional jargon to more esoteric or archaic language. The more obscure the word, the greater the delight. An ‘abbey-lubber’ is someone who loiters in religious places ‘under pretence of retirement and austerity’; ‘effumability’ is ‘the quality of flying away, or vapouring in fumes’; a ‘kissingcrust’ is a ‘crust formed when one loaf in the oven touches another’; a ‘vaticide’ is ‘a murderer of poets’. Johnson’s definition of ‘lexicographer’ makes clear the toil that was involved in assembling his magnum opus: ‘A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words’. His definition of ‘garret’, on the other hand, is only clear up to a point: if it is ‘a room on the highest floor of a house’ then what do we make of the ‘cockloft’, which is ‘the room over the garret’?

A superb exhibition in Johnson’s garret in Gough Square spotlights certain aspects of the Dictionary’s production. Desks, Drudgery and the Dictionary: Samuel Johnson’s Garret Lexicography tells how that supreme man of letters charted and chronicled the English language – not, as Johnson stressed, to ‘teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts.’

One major section provides potted biographies of, and individual works by, Johnson’s dictionary assistants. Francis Stewart was the first to be recruited to the project. The son of an Edinburgh printer, Stewart had worked as a journalist and was able to help Johnson with definitions pertaining to the less salubrious side of city life, in particular the jargon of popular card games. He was responsible not just for copying the quotations on which the Dictionary relied but also ‘clipping’ them, that is reshaping and shortening the text to utilise space and economise on paper.

Hack writer Robert Shiells had an extensive knowledge of literature, especially poetry. His immense Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland appeared in 25 parts in 1752 and was republished in five volumes a year later. Despite writing the majority of it, his publisher put the disreputable playwright Theophilus Cibber’s name on the title page. Uncredited, Shiells died at the age of 26 of consumption – or what the London Evening Post called a ‘military fever’.

Two brothers, the Macbeans, were key contributors. The elder, Alexander, was well equipped for the job (‘a very learned Highlander’ according to Johnson), having previously worked on Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia in the 1740s and being comfortably multilingual in German, French, Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Dutch. He would go on to work with Johnson again on the Lives of the Poets. His brother, William, was an assiduous assistant, and his distinctive neat hand appears on surviving dictionary materials. He also returned to work with Johnson, in his case on the fourth edition of the Dictionary (1773), by which time he was, as he stated, ‘the last of the laborious brethren’.

A caption reveals that Gentleman’s Magazine in 1799 made mention of an amanuensis who left in disgrace after falsifying the amount of work completed and thus claiming more money than was due. Was it one of the two helpers of whom nothing is known, the men referred to only as Mr Maitland and Mr Stockton? Certain concrete facts about the last helper, V.J. Peyton, are also missing. His expertise in French was useful in the Dictionary, and his scholarly books on the language were praised by the future American president, John Adams, but was he ‘a fool and a drunkard’ as Johnson’s friend Giuseppe Baretti claimed? What is not in doubt is that Peyton, like his fellow assistants, was well acquainted with poverty. After Peyton died, penniless, Johnson paid for his funeral. Peyton had been, after all, more than just Johnson’s employee. As Henry Hitchings writes in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (2005), ‘The amanuenses were his servants, but also his companions – dogsbodies with the status of intimates, hirelings who doubled as friends.’

Many hands made lighter work and another section describes what kind of work that was. All of it was done by hand. Pencils, quill pens and ink were the main tools of trade. Breadcrumbs were used as erasers – not always successfully. One exhibit is a pot which would have contained ‘pounce’, a powder made from crushed cuttlefish bone, that was sprinkled on wet ink to prevent it from smudging.

Johnson adopted a different approach to previous compilers. We learn that he was wary of words recorded in earlier dictionaries and so in 1746 embarked on an ambitious reading programme, gathering first-hand evidence of English by means of a vast collection of quotations taken from literary and non-literary texts. Another departure he made in his Dictionary was allowing women’s voices to be heard by citing their publications. On show are quotations from the novelist Charlotte Lennox under ‘pique’, ‘simplicity’ and ‘talent’; from Margaret Cavendish under ‘just’; and from Johnson’s friend Elizabeth Carter under ‘proportion’.

An intriguing section is devoted to other definitions. Pages from the Dictionary show how there are 48 different ways to use the word ‘hand’ and 66 for ‘put’. Some words are defined and then their meanings are reinforced by way of Shakespeare references. ‘Cockled’ throws up this definition: ‘Shelled; or perhaps cochleate, turbinated’. There follows this line from Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible, / Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.’

A section on translation looks at words from different languages that were included in the Dictionary. These entries demonstrate Johnson’s interest in how many, and to what degree, they had been absorbed into English. Judging from the examples here, Johnson didn’t approve of every loanword. ‘Ruse’ is described thus: ‘Cunning; artifice; little stratagem; trick; wile; fraud; deceit. A French word neither elegant nor necessary.’

Later parts of the exhibition focus on Johnson’s garret and desk. William Hogarth’s painting The Distressed Poet depicts the worst kind of garret: a cramped and gloomy fire hazard that was not only a work place but also living quarters. In contrast, Johnson’s fifth-floor garret was, and still is, light, spacious and airy. In addition, it was well positioned: high enough to avoid the hubbub of street sellers down below; and close enough to William Strachan’s printing business in Little New Street to enable a speedy exchange of messages, proofs and completed work.

Johnson’s desk is the star attraction of the exhibition, notwithstanding its 19^th-century description as ‘the plainest of deal desks, just such a one as formerly was often seen in schools of the humbler kind.’ Its remarkable history, and indeed mystery, proves fascinating. When Johnson left Gough Square in 1759, the desk effectively disappeared. It showed up in 1855, on the centenary of the Dictionary, at the Deptford home of Johnson’s god-daughter, Ann Elizabeth Lowe, and her sister, Frances. The siblings were living in poverty and so Ann made a direct appeal to the writer Thomas Carlyle, known for his charitable activities on behalf of literary figures and their families. Carlyle’s interest was aroused and he enlisted the help of his close friends, Charles Dickens and John Forster.

Displayed letters attest to Ann’s distress and desperation. Correspondence and newspaper reports detail the energetic 15-month campaign the men waged to save the sisters and salvage the desk. The Dictionary was ‘a Cathedral of St Paul’s,’ Carlyle wrote, ‘silently reminding every English soul of much that it is necessary to remember.’ But the desk was its point of origin, ‘a proud possession to the English Nation.’ A host of eminent Victorians including William Makepeace Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli and Samuel Wilberforce, all gave donations. After Ann’s death, the desk was bequeathed to the vicar who ministered to the Lowes in their final years. He in turn generously gifted it to Johnson’s alma mater, Pembroke College, Oxford. Only last year was the desk returned to the garret for the first time since the Dictionary was written there.

At this point, the exhibition casts doubt over the story. Did Ann act honourably or did she hoodwink Carlyle and petition him to save a desk that didn’t in fact belong to Johnson? Modern editors of Carlyle and Dickens have become sceptical. Carlyle’s wife, Jane, aired her mistrust in her journal, writing ‘it was as plain as a pikestaff to me that the two old creatures had no management…or they might keep themselves decently on what they already had without asking for more…the “god-daughter” was a greedy conceited fantastic little Body.’ Some of Ann’s surviving letters reveal her straitened circumstances and need to sell off the family’s possessions – but there is never mention of Johnson or the desk. Visitors to the exhibition are asked to sift the evidence, weigh up the facts and place a vote as to whether the desk before them is the real deal.

While perusing other items here – Johnson’s will, a first edition of his Dictionary and pages of his Prayers and Meditations which were composed while he was at work on it – we come across a quote that lays bare lexicographers’ limitations and readers’ expectations. A dictionary, Johnson explained in his preface, can record language but not safeguard it.

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.

Even as dictionaries are ‘hastening to publication’, Johnson added, ‘some words are budding, and some falling away.’

His dictionary also fell away when it was gradually superseded by each successive volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. This exhibition shows that while the Dictionary might not have been the last word, it still stands tall as a landmark work of great skill, effort and erudition.

Desks, Drudgery and the Dictionary: Samuel Johnson’s Garret Lexicography is at Dr Johnson’s House in London.