Samuel Johnson and Francis Stewart: collection and collaboration in the Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Johnson’s “single-handed” lexicography remains a commonplace of critical discussion of his work, particularly in relation to his selection of the words and evidence which his Dictionary of the English Language contains. Based on a new examination of primary data, this article instead explores the collective and collaborative realities on which Johnsonian lexicography rested. Focusing on the work of Francis Stewart, and the evidence preserved in the seven extant volumes of the edition of Shakespeare that Johnson (and his assistants) used in making the Dictionary, it examines patterns of shared reading to challenge conventional expectations about Johnson’s data selection (including structural patterns such as phrasal verbs). While the article argues for a significant recuperation of the invisible labor on which Johnson’s Dictionary depended, it also provides a case study of Stewart’s work, between 1746 and 1752, as part of the community of practice in Johnson’s dictionary garret.