University of Virginia Library

Textual Transformations: The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus in Johnson's Dictionary
by
Anne McDermott

Johnson's Dictionary is such a large and complex work, and so time-consuming to analyse manually,[1] that scholars and critics have tended to rely on Johnson's own comments in the Plan and the Preface about his methods, procedures and objectives. His reasons for the inclusion of the vast number of illustrative quotations have been taken to be broadly those he states:[2] to

provide authority for his definitions by examples of usage in the best writers; to offer instruction by extracting passages which explain technical terms or philosophical concepts; to promote religion and morality by quoting from pious writers and excluding those, such as Hobbes and Samuel Clarke, whose moral principles or religious views were dangerous or unorthodox;[3] or simply to 'intersperse with verdure and flowers the dusty desarts of barren philology' by including passages which are poetically beautiful. But does the textual evidence support Johnson's claims? To answer this question it is necessary to examine the source texts in detail, noting the editions Johnson used, any changes he may have made to the text, and the context of the original passage. In order to test his claims more fully, I have chosen to examine his quotations from The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a text which seems to run directly counter to Johnson's stated principles of selection and about which he is subsequently scornful and dismissive.

Though Johnson confesses that 'Many quotations serve no other purpose, than that of proving the bare existence of words', most critics have found other, ideological reasons for the selection of particular texts, following Johnson's hint that 'I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word'. While it is broadly true that the majority of source texts in the Dictionary fulfil his criteria of being 'pleasing or useful', some appear to be neither and so raise the possibility of an unstated, unacknowledged principle of selection in operation. Where a text is quoted only once there is a strong prima facie case for assuming that he probably got the quotation from a secondary source,[4] but there are some texts which are

quoted frequently enough to exclude this possibility and which yet do not seem to qualify for inclusion according to Johnson's declared criteria. The Memoirs, jointly written by the members of the Scriblerus Club, Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Parnell and Harley, is quoted 146 times in the first edition and 143 times in the fourth, providing sufficient evidence against which to measure Johnson's principles of selection, yet it is a text which one might have expected Johnson to exclude, whether on the grounds of moral propriety or literary merit.

This text, like many other Scriblerian pieces, was considered rather vulgar in places; so much so that when Bishop Warburton published his edition in 1751 he omitted the Double Mistress episode, considering it as too indecent even for robust eighteenth-century taste. There is no evidence available of what Johnson thought of Warburton's edition, but he was generally in sympathy with Warburton's views and thought highly of his scholarship. In addition, Johnson expresses a low opinion of the Memoirs on literary grounds in his Life of Pope: 'If the whole [of the Scriblerus project] may be estimated by this specimen, . . . the want of more will not be much lamented' and he comments that 'it has been little read, or when read has been forgotten, as no man could be wiser, better, or merrier, by remembering it'.[5] All this is fairly damning and if it were not for the inclusion of the text in the Dictionary, no question would arise about Johnson's view of the work. As it is, the evidence provided by the Dictionary quotations needs to be carefully examined. It is, of course, always possible that Johnson changed his view of the Memoirs in the intervening years between publication of the first edition of the Dictionary in 1755 and the composition of his Life of Pope in 1780, but in the absence of any evidence for this, one is left with certain questions to consider. How far can one establish Johnson's view of a text from its frequency and manner of quotation in the Dictionary? Is it possible to reconcile that evidence with other available evidence about Johnson's view of a text? Is there textual evidence available in the changes which he makes to the quotations which might provide clues to Johnson's intentions?

Evidence about Johnson's general view of the Memoirs can be pieced together from various sources. Though he calls it a 'joint production of three great writers' in his Life of Pope, he evidently thought that Swift could not have written it, and indeed he credits Arbuthnot with the major share, 'with a few touches perhaps by Pope'. His reasons for excluding Swift are related to his generally low opinion of him as a writer, reflected in the relatively short length of his Life of Swift. 'In the Poetical Works of Dr. Swift,' he writes, 'there is not much upon which the critick can exercise his powers'.[6] According to Johnson, his defect lies in his style which is smooth, easy and clear without dazzling: 'he excites neither surprise nor admiration'. It is a suitable style for expressing new thoughts, which depend on clarity, but not for attracting

attention to old, universal truths, which are known already. Since moral truths are, according to Johnson's view, all of this latter kind, Swift's could not be a style suitable for moral purposes.

But his criticisms go deeper than this, for he thinks Swift's writings lack thought, which is why he is reluctant to believe that Swift wrote A Tale of a Tub: 'it has so much more thinking, more knowledge, more power, more colour, than any of the works which are indisputably his'. And, crucially in terms of the Scriblerus project, he thinks that Swift's wit is inferior: 'Swift is clear, but he is shallow. In coarse humour, he is inferior to Arbuthnot; in delicate humour, he is inferior to Addison'.[7] All of this, whether true or not, suggests reasons why Johnson might exclude Swift's name from the citations to the Memoirs in the Dictionary. The form of the citation is most often given as 'Arbuthnot and Pope' or some abbreviation of this, significantly giving the precedence to Arbuthnot, but occasionally it appears as just 'Arbuthnot'. The reason for this cannot simply be shortage of space for the full citation because the name often appears as the only word on a line.[8]

Johnson's high opinion of Arbuthnot is attested by Boswell: 'I think Dr. Arbuthnot the first man among them [the eminent writers of Queen Anne's reign]. He was the most universal genius, being an excellent physician, a man of deep learning, and a man of much humour' (Life, I, 425). This opinion may come as a surprise to literary scholars who are used to thinking of Pope and Swift as the brightest stars in that particular firmament. Arbuthnot is also credited as being 'a wit, who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal',[9] so it seems probable that his works would qualify as 'pleasing and useful' according to Johnson's criteria. Seven of his works (including the Memoirs) are quoted in the Dictionary and he is quoted approximately 2000 times, which puts him in the middle rank according to frequency of citation.[10]

It should come as no surprise that Johnson admired Arbuthnot. He was a scholar and a medical man who was instrumental in initiating developments in medical practice, such as the study of the effects of diet on the human body. He was also a religious and deeply moral man who was popular and evidently

much loved. The puzzling thing is why Johnson apparently thought so little of a work which he credited mainly to Arbuthnot. Perhaps the answer has something to do with his attitude to the particular kind of satire practised by the Scriblerians.

Despite twice imitating Juvenalian satires in verse, and in spite of some elements of satire evident in other works such as his periodical essays, Johnson was not much in sympathy with the form as it was practised by the Scriblerians. He saw satire as primarily a moral form of writing, an emphasis shown in his Dictionary definition: 'A poem in which wickedness or folly is censured'. He then adds a comment which may suggest a reason why Pope and Swift did not always please him in their use of the form: 'Proper satire is distinguished, by the generality of the reflections, from a lampoon which is aimed against a particular person; but they are too frequently confounded'. Lampoon retains the disapproval and abuse of satire, but lacks the moral element. As Johnson pithily phrases it in his definition of 'lampoon', it is 'censure written not to reform but to vex'. Johnson regarded satire as primarily a useful rather than a pleasing form: 'All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment',[11] and an indication of his priorities is present in his criticism of Gay's Beggar's Opera on the ground that 'The play . . . was plainly written only to divert, without any moral purpose'.[12] Johnson viewed the Scriblerians as thinking of satire especially as entertainment and as regarding ridicule as a legitimate means to that end, whereas for him the purpose of satire is always to instruct and ridicule is only legitimate if it achieves that end.

For Johnson, satire degenerates into mere lampoon if there is no universal applicability of its censure in the interests of moral reformation, and there is plenty of evidence that Johnson thought of Pope's use of the form in this way. In the first place, he suspected Pope's motives were those of revenge and self-importance, rather than a desire to improve morals: 'He was not likely to have been ever of opinion that the dread of his satire would countervail the love of power or of money; he pleased himself with being important and formidable, and gratified sometimes his pride, and sometimes his resentment . . .'. Secondly, he thought much of Pope's satirical writing was aimed at targets which it was beneath him to notice. He should have ignored Cibber's attacks on him because answering them made them respectable: 'Cibber had nothing to lose. . . . Silence only could have made him despicable'; and by arbitrarily changing the main target of The Dunciad from Theobald to Cibber, Pope compounded the fault by making his satire seem random: 'he reduced himself to the insignificance of his own magpye, who from his cage calls cuckold at a venture'.[13]

Johnson was never emotionally attracted to attacks in print as a form of revenge on his enemies. His way of dealing with printed abuse was either to

ignore it or to welcome it as a sign that his own writing had had its effect.[14] This form of writing for personal vengeance would, in any case, have a short life, because the target of the attack would be unknown to future generations and they could have no interest in the dispute. This has been the fate, in Johnson's view, of Pope's invectives against Hervey in his poems and letters: to 'a cool reader of the present time' they exhibit 'nothing but tedious malignity'.[15] A telling example of his views on this matter is his judgment on Three Hours After Marriage, which he speculates was jointly written by Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay. In it these writers satirise Dr John Woodward, a geologist and physician who had a great interest in fossils. This was a man, in Johnson's view, 'not really or justly contemptible' and he calls their satire an 'outrage'.[16] Woodward is also targeted in the Memoirs, presumably to Johnson's further disapproval.

One might think that Johnson would be sympathetic to some of the aims of the Scriblerus Club. Its overall purpose was to satirise the various follies of the learned world, and Martinus Scriblerus was intended to exemplify every learned folly from medical quackery to absurd scientific experimentation. Johnson's portrait of Quisquilius, the virtuoso, in Rambler 82 is obviously drawn from the same model. He collects rarities with an obsession which allows no time for consideration of their significance or intrinsic worth, and finally spends or is tricked out of his entire fortune on this activity so that he is forced to sell the collection he spent so much time amassing.

But in the very next issue of The Rambler Johnson warns that while it is not easy to 'forbear some sallies of merriment' when faced with virtuosi who spend their lives and their fortunes investigating 'questions, of which, without visible inconvenience, the world may expire in ignorance', yet these are men who are engaged in harmless activity and are pursuing 'innocent curiosity'. Their activities, which seem contemptibly minute and trivial, may ultimately contribute to the sum of human knowledge, 'for all that is great was at first little'. The only censure which Johnson offers is that these men of ability have enlisted in 'the secondary class of learning' and avoided the 'drudgery of meditation', but as far as broader moral considerations go, they 'cannot be said to be wholly useless'.[17] Johnson's ridicule is always tempered by tolerance and sympathy for his victim. We are always aware of a sense of common humanity, and though we may not share the particular weakness which is being satirised, Johnson makes us feel that we all have equivalent temptations to which we are susceptible. Though there is room for amusement and gentle mockery, there is none of that sense of intellectual and moral superiority that there is in the Scriblerians.

On the other hand, Johnson had some sympathy with the tradition of burlesque exemplified in works such as Don Quixote and Hudibras, and there are traces of this tradition in the Memoirs.[18] Johnson thought that the Memoirs were not original, for 'besides its general resemblance to Don Quixote, there will be found in it particular imitations of the History of Mr. Ouffle'.[19] Charles Kerby-Miller, in his splendid edition of the Memoirs, identifies this as a 'curious and now almost forgotten work by the Abbé Laurent Bordelon', first published in Paris in 1710, but comments: 'that [the Scriblerians] derived any significant amount of literary inspiration from its turgid pages is difficult to believe'. Bordelon's work is 'a slight and episodic narrative' in which the hero, a man of 'boundless credulity who has spent a great part of his life reading books on magic, witchcraft, astrology, and various superstitious practices', commits various follies. The learning in the work is immense, so that 'the footnotes total almost two-thirds of the whole work'.[20] Hudibras is a similar kind of work. There is a loose narrative framework holding everything together, but the digressions into learned matters of sectarian religious disputes, arcane issues in logic, metaphysics and philosophy, alchemy, witchcraft and astrology have marked similarities with parts of the Memoirs.

Johnson was, though, of a different age and temperament from the Scriblerians and was not likely to be inspired by the same burlesque models as they. He was himself an accomplished scholar and was not so apt to see the futility of modern learning. He writes frequently about the vanity of learning from the point of view of its failure to bring happiness or contentment, and he would have appreciated the section in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy which deals with the misery of scholars, but he did not see the pursuit of learning as in itself a futile endeavour, however small the addition to human knowledge. He was very fond of chemical experiments which he performed as a pastime and he recommends to Susannah Thrale, a young girl of fourteen, that she should go to see Herschel's telescope because the acquisition of learning is itself of intrinsic value:

The enthusiasm for all kinds of learning here is the same as that which drove the encyclopédistes to include mechanical processes in their Encyclopédie along with more traditional forms of learning. As Johnson remarked to Boswell on another occasion, 'All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or so inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not' (Life, II, 357).

All this is a long way from the satire contained within The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. Its combination of personal abuse, lack of distinct moral direction, and ridicule of kinds of learning which to Johnson were not at all ridiculous would have made it, in his eyes, an ephemeral, insubstantial sort of work, a venting of spleen against paper targets. Yet much of this is true of other Scriblerian texts which nonetheless appear in the Dictionary with sufficient regularity to suggest that these deficiencies presented no great obstacle to their status as authorities. Pope and Swift are both criticised by Johnson for having 'an unnatural delight in ideas physically impure', yet both Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad appear fairly frequently in the Dictionary. It may be significant, though, that there is in each case a substantial reduction in frequency of quotation in the fourth edition.[22] The revisions to the Dictionary, carried out just six years before the publication of The Lives of the Poets, may have caused Johnson to reassess the judgment of these works which led him to include so many quotations in the first edition.

If frequency of citation is to be the test, no such reassessment can be suggested in the case of the Memoirs, for Johnson omits just three quotations from the fourth edition.[23] So why does Johnson quote so frequently from this Scriblerian text? One possible reason is that the text has many obscure and unusual words in it arising from the satirical treatment of pedants with their love of technical terms. The words which might qualify for inclusion under

this principle are: abductor, aduncity, chicanery, chirographist, chromatick, constrictor, contentation, effossion, embolus, enthymeme, extensor, flexor, hebetate, hermaphrodite, hydraulick, pathognomonick, physiognomist, pineal, sesquipedalian, troglodyte and vectitation.[24] Of these twenty-one 'hard words' which are quoted in the Dictionary, twelve are unaccompanied by quotations from other texts to illustrate the definition, suggesting the rarity of most of these words.[25] This would seem to support the notion that quotations from the Memoirs are included because Johnson could not find these obscure words elsewhere, but it is difficult to draw a hard and fast rule here. Some words in the Memoirs are obscure and unusual (e.g. arietation) and appear in the Dictionary, but Johnson does not use the quotation from the Memoirs to illustrate them. On the other hand, the vast majority of the quotations which do appear are neither obscure nor technical terms, but perfectly ordinary words which he could have found in any text.

An alternative explanation might be that the Memoirs were first printed in The Works of Alexander Pope, in Prose. Vol. II. in 1741 and continued to be published as part of Pope's works. The implications of this arrangement might simultaneously raise the work in the public esteem, by suggesting it was the work of the major poet of the day, and damage its reputation by burying it among the poet's minor prose writing. Johnson may have been attracted to the piece because of its associations with Pope, from whom he quotes extensively in the Dictionary,[26] but we know that he was not convinced of Pope's major role in the writing of the Memoirs when he came to write his Life of Pope, for he credits him there with only 'a few touches'.

Another possible explanation is similarly excluded. Bishop Warburton published an edition of Pope's works in 1751 which contained the Memoirs, and we know that Johnson had a very high opinion of Warburton, so it would not be unnatural for him to quote from this edition. He used Warburton's edition of Shakespeare for the most part as the base text for his own edition of Shakespeare and for quotations from Shakespeare in the Dictionary,[27] and Warburton's version of the text of the Memoirs would have had the apparent advantage of omitting the most vulgar parts of the text, including the Double Mistress episode. It is to the inadequacies of Warburton's edition that Charles Kerby-Miller in his edition attributes Johnson's 'sweeping and ill-considered

judgment of the piece' (66). But the fact is that Johnson did not use Warburton's edition in quoting from the text in the Dictionary, and there is no evidence that he based his opinion on that edition.

In a detailed and informative article for Review of English Studies, Tread-well Ruml II discusses the evidence concerning the texts of Pope's works which Johnson knew when collecting authorities for the Dictionary.[28] In some cases he conflated two versions of the same passage from different editions, possibly because he was quoting from memory, but more frequently the variations from the received scholarly text stem from Johnson's use of a variant text. It seems that Warburton's edition probably appeared too late for him to use, since by 1751 Johnson had already marked up most of the illustrative passages he intended to include as authorities. There are some exceptions to this rule, but Ruml reports that in no case has he found a reading in the Dictionary text of Pope that first appeared in Warburton's edition. From the evidence of textual variants in the quotations he examines, Ruml draws the interesting conclusion that Johnson used different editions of Pope's works for different poems.[29] The evidence seems very complex and it is not always possible, as Ruml concedes, to determine whether what appears to be a textual variation may not be just a coincidence arising from errors of memory or transcription, but it does seem clear that identifying Johnson's exact source is no simple matter.

Ruml suggests that Johnson used the first 1742 octavo issue of the Works, Vol. III, Part II (Griffith No. 566) for quotations from the Memoirs, and some readings support this view. The most obvious is the following passage: 'The Cretans wisely forbid their servants Gymnasticks, as well as Arms; and yet your modern Footmen exercise themselves daily in the Jaculum at the corner of Hyde Park, whilst their enervated Lords are softly lolling in their chariots (a species of Vectitation seldom us'd among the Ancients, except by old men)'. This quotation appears, variously abbreviated, under Enervate, Gymnastick and Vectitation, and in each case the word 'softly' is included, a word omitted in every edition other than the first 1742 octavo. Other readings which point to this edition are quoted under Billet ('carrying' instead of 'carry'); Contentation ('whereof a cut' instead of 'a cut of which'); Fatner ('the wind was at West' instead of 'the wind was West'); Heedlessly ('whilst' instead of 'while').

There is, however, one reading which points to a different edition. Under Bobcherry the following passage is quoted: 'We shall only instance one of the most useful and instructive, Bob-cherry, which teaches at once two noble Virtues, Constancy and Patience; the first in adhering to the pursuit of one end,

the latter in bearing a disappointment'. Johnson quotes the passage from 'Bob-cherry' onwards, but where the 1742 octavo edition has 'Constancy and Patience', the Dictionary quotation has 'patience and constancy'. This is a reading which appears in the folio and quarto 1741 editions of the Works, Vol. II, but it is not necessarily evidence that Johnson used that edition. This may be one of those coincidences where memory has intruded or the passage has been mistranscribed. It is hard to believe that Johnson preferred this reading because it makes a nonsense of what follows (adhering to an end can only be an example of constancy, and bearing a disappointment can only be an example of patience), and it was clearly a mistake in the earlier editions.

I have found examples of variations in the text quoted in the Dictionary which correspond to none of the published editions of the Memoirs. The following passage is quoted under Birdcage, Percussion, Vice and Whirligig: 'For example, he found that Marbles taught him Percussion and the Law of Motion; Nut-crackers the use of the Leaver; Swinging on the ends of a Board, the Balance; Bottle-screws, the Vice; Whirligigs the Axis and Peritrochia; Bird-cages, the Pully; and Tops the Centrifugal motion'. Under Birdcage Johnson has 'centrifugal force' instead of 'centrifugal motion', yet under Percussion, where this particular part of the passage is also quoted, he has 'centrifugal motion'. Thinking that this might be an example of a familiar phrase suggesting itself in place of a less familiar, I searched the Dictionary for the word 'centrifugal' and found that, apart from these two quotations from the Memoirs, the word only appears twice, and one of these instances is under Centrifugal itself. Both here in a quotation from Dr. George Cheyne and under Spirtle in a quotation from William Derham 'centrifugal' is associated with the word 'force' rather than 'motion'. This seems to conform to what has been called by linguists 'the idiom principle', whereby 'a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments'.[30] 'Centrifugal force' was probably such a 'semi-preconstructed phrase' for Johnson, so that when he read the word 'centrifugal', he automatically supplied the word 'force' as its collocate, thereby misreading the original text.

Most of the variations in the text which appear in the Dictionary are changes to the spelling. When Johnson alters words, he does so for the most part to make them conform to the spelling he adopts in the headword. For example, under Hydraulick the spellings of 'hydraulic', 'chemical' and 'elastic' are changed to 'hydraulick', 'chymical' and 'elastick'. It is interesting to note in this example that none of the changes which Johnson made in an attempt to 'fix orthography' was finally adopted into the language. One curious example is the quotation under Bestiality in which the word 'centre' is spelled 'center' by Johnson, but he adopts the former spelling in the headword list. The two spellings appear in roughly equal numbers in each edition ('centre' 137 times in the first edition and 112 times in the fourth, as against

'center' 112 times in the first edition and 96 times in the fourth), and not all the occurrences of the spelling 'center' are in quotations. In the first edition approximately 24% of the occurrences of 'center' are in Johnson's own prose, and, interestingly, his definition of Semidiameter contains both spellings within the one sentence. This suggests that the spelling of the word was unstable at that time.

One example in which Johnson makes his views clear is under Chirographist where he quotes the following passage: 'Let the Physiognomists examine his features; let the Chirographers behold his Palm; but above all let us consult for the calculation of his Nativity'. Johnson has 'chirographist' in place of 'chirographer', but he notes the improper usage of this word: 'This word is used in the following passage, I think improperly, for one that tells fortunes, by examining the hand; the true word is chirosophist or chiromancer'. Chirographer is included as a headword with the definition: 'He that exercises or professes the act or business of writing'. Here, too, is an example of Johnson spelling a word (phisiognomists) differently from the way it appears both in the source text and in his own headword list (where it is spelled 'physiognomist').

Johnson offers 'physiognomick' and 'physiognomonick' as alternatives in the headword list, but he offers no similar alternative for 'pathognomonick'. The only quotation to appear as an illustration for this word is from the Memoirs, but he changes the original spelling of 'pathognomick'. The reason for his preference here may be etymological since he gives the Greek source as παθογνωμονιΚὸζ, but the same is true of 'physiognomick' which he allows as an alternative.

Another example of Johnson changing the spelling of a word occurs in the passage quoted under Puss: 'I will permit my son to play at Apodidiascinda, which can be no other than our Puss in a Corner'. This whole chapter in the Memoirs is heavily dependent on Julius Pollux' Onomasticon, the famous encyclopedia of Greek culture. Kerby-Miller suggests that it was probably known to the Scriblerians in the Amsterdam edition of 1706, and it is possible that Johnson also knew this edition because he spells the game 'apodidrascinda', the same way as Pollux.

The most frequently occurring type of change to the text is a simple editorial amendment to the syntax, declensions or parts of speech in order to make the abbreviated and condensed passage grammatical. The general sense of the original passage is not changed. A straightforward example of this kind of alteration appears under Porcupine, where this original passage from the Memoirs:

is amended in the quotation to:

Another case in which changes are made to the text is in the hyphenation of words, so that sometimes he represents hyphenated words as single words (e.g. 'hotcockles' for 'hot-cockles'), and at other times he represents single words or hyphenated words as two separate words (e.g. no body). The interesting thing here is that all of the examples in which hyphenation is removed appear in that form as headwords in the Dictionary: browbeaten, greyhound, handydandy, hotcockles, lighthouses, numskulls, and puppetshow. The exception is cudgel-playing, which appears under Fence as a single word and under Cudgel as hyphenated, but which is not itself included as a headword. On the other hand, of the hyphenated words which are represented as two separate words (bomb vessels, mad men, no body, quill darting, tennis court), the only three to appear in the headword list are represented as hyphenated (Bomb-vessel) or as single words (Madman and Nobody). Hyphens are notoriously tricky with wide variations in practice, and mistranscription or misreading by the printer are always possibilities that cannot be discounted.

It is less easy to dismiss or explain the more substantial changes which Johnson makes to the text. One puzzling example is the part of the passage cited earlier that is quoted under Vice and Whirligig: 'For example, he found that Marbles taught him Percussion and the Laws of Motion; Nut-crackers the use of the Leaver; Swinging on the ends of a Board, the Balance; Bottlescrews, the Vice; Whirligigs the Axis and Peritrochia; Bird-cages; the Pully; and Tops the Centrifugal motion'. In both quotations the phrase 'axis and peritrochia' is altered to 'axis in peritrochio', but I am unable to suggest an explanation for this. This is not the reading of any of the editions up to 1742 and 'peritrochia/peritrochio' does not appear as a headword in the Dictionary.

Two other examples of substantial changes are more readily explained. The following passage from the Memoirs (suitably abbreviated) appears under Universal: 'Cornelius told him that he was a lying Rascal; that an Universale was not the object of imagination, and that there was no such thing in reality, or a parte Rei'. The context of the passage makes it clear that the target of the satire is philosophers who speak of abstract ideas or concepts; when asked if he can frame the idea of a universal Lord Mayor, Crambe replies that he can conceive of one 'not only without his Horse, Gown, and Gold Chain, but even without Stature, Feature, Colour, Hands, Head, Feet, or any Body', to which Cornelius gives the above response. A universal is an abstract idea or concept supposed to be common to all members of a class, and as such it has no empirical substance or reality, so it cannot be 'imagined' (pictured in the mind) in the way Crambe pretends.

Johnson may not have fully comprehended the meaning of the passage, because the quotation in the Dictionary under Universal omits the crucial 'not' and asserts that 'An universal was the object of imagination, and there was no such thing in reality'. Johnson may have assumed that the contrast was intended to be between imagination and reality, a common dichotomy, whereas, in this context, the imagination can only image something which has empirical existence in reality, and so it cannot be applied to universals. The definition which Johnson gives: 'Not particular; comprising all particulars'

does not hint at the broader meaning and is, in any case, confusing because he is defining a noun adjectivally.

The other example shows Johnson acting more deliberately and confidently. Under Straddle he quotes from the chapter on the Case of a Nobleman: 'Let him surprize the Beauty he adores at a disadvantage; survey himself naked, divested of artificial charms, and he will find himself a forked, stradling Animal, with bandy legs, a short neck, a dun hide, and a pot-belly'. The humour of this passage in the original text is that the disease the young nobleman is suffering from is diagnosed as self-love, and looking at himself naked in a mirror is the recommended cure. But the passage also has echoes of more serious texts such as King Lear: 'Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art'.[31] Johnson deliberately enhances this effect by changing 'him' to 'man' in the quotation in the Dictionary and condensing the passage so that it reads: 'Let man survey himself, divested of artificial charms, and he will find himself a forked stradling animal, with bandy legs'. The original text has been transformed into a statement about the human condition and effectively lost its humour.

This loss of satirical edge is a more general effect applying to many of the quoted passages in the Dictionary. Taken out of their original context, it becomes impossible to read some passages with the irony they possess in the source text. An example of this is a passage quoted under Abortion, in which Cornelius is the butt of many satirical jokes about his anxiety over the birth of his offspring: 'His Wife miscarried; but as the Abortion proved only a female Foetus, he comforted himself, that, had it arrived to perfection, it would not have answer'd his account; his heart being wholly fixed upon the learned sex'. In the first edition, under Abortion, the whole passage up to 'account' is quoted in full, but, without the contextual material of the remainder of the chapter, it can be read with a serious tone and without recognizing the humour of the original text. The effect is even more pronounced in the fourth edition where the quotation ends at 'himself'.

Another example of this effect is contained in the passage quoted under Heedlessly: 'Consider also by how small Limits the Duty and the Trespass is divided, lest, whilst ye discharge the duty of Matrimony, ye heedlessly slide into the sin of Adultery'. The passage is intended to be comic. Martinus Scriblerus and Prince Ebn-Hai-Paw-Waw of Monomotapa have fallen in love with the Siamese twins Lindamira and Indamora. Many jokes are made of Martin's courtship of Lindamira, including the fact that Indamora is really in love with Martin and jealous of her sister, but if she breaks up their relationship she will also lose Martin. Finally the case between Martin and the Prince is decided at law, with an opportunity for jokes at the expense of the judicial system, where the Judge decides that Martin and the Prince may both marry, but that they must 'lie in bed each on the side of his own wife', and he then adds the warning contained in the passage quoted above.

Not only is the satirical humour lost, but the passage reads entirely differently in the Dictionary: 'Whilst ye discharge the duty of matrimony, ye heedlessly slide into sin'. It has become a rebuke aimed at those who allow the thoughts to be polluted even whilst engaged in the lawful 'duty of matrimony'. It also changes the meaning of the word 'heedlessly' from the suggestion of carelessness in the original to something indicative of moral negligence. The interesting point to note from both these examples is that a text can be changed in the Dictionary even if the wording remains exactly as it does in the original, because the Dictionary provides it with a context entirely different from the source text.

If it were not for certain evidence to the contrary, one might be tempted to account for Johnson's inclusion of quotations from the indecent Double Mistress episode and from the following Case at Law[32] by demonstrating that in the Dictionary they are no longer vulgar because of the change of context or because Johnson condenses them in the same way as he does the quotation under Heedlessly. But, in fact, some of them retain the hint of impropriety that they have in the original, and, in any case, Johnson does not need to look in these two chapters to find indecent material. For example, under 'duenna' he quotes the following passage from the Introduction to the Reader: 'I felt the ardour of my passion increase as the season advanced, till in the month of July I could no longer contain. I bribed her duenna, was admitted to the bath, saw her undress'd and the wonder displayed'. Here rarity of examples may be one explanation why this passage is included, since it is the sole illustration for the word, but, nonetheless, Johnson could have edited the quotation so that it was not quite so sexually powerful. An abbreviated version of this same quotation appears under Contain as: "I felt the ardour of my passion increase till I could no longer contain'.

Turning again to the question of whether we can rely on Johnson's statements about his reasons for choosing certain texts as authorities in preference to others, one is forced to conclude that his standards of morality were not so rigid as to exclude entertaining and humorous texts which might have slightly vulgar contents, and he was not above quoting the indecent passages from those texts. We cannot, I think, ignore his comment to Hester Thrale that he would never quote 'any wicked Writer's Authority for a Word, lest it should send People to look in a Book that might injure them forever',[33] but it seems that he excluded quotations from texts which were doctrinally suspect or which contained moral theories which were dubious or misleading in his view. Texts which one might regard as indecent rather than immoral seem not to have troubled him overmuch. As for the literary merit of the Memoirs, I think we can only assume that Johnson did not have such a low opinion of it in the years when he was marking up texts for the Dictionary as he developed later on. He declares that he intends to quote from the best writers

and he adheres to this principle more or less steadily, with the odd exception in favour of personal friends or particular favourite writers. The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus seems to have been regarded by Johnson as having sufficient status to be quoted unproblematically as an authority in the Dictionary, and he evidently did not have a radical change of view about the text when he came to make revisions for the fourth edition.

Notes