Samuel Johnson by John Wain

Johnson's Dictionary is, in the strictest sense, a one-man work.
he chose the words,
defined them,
fitted them out with derivations and
illustrated the correct use of each one with a nosegay of quotations. for the entire colossal undertaking, from first to last, he accepted sole responsibility. but it the work was ever to be completed there must be help in the purely mechanical business of transcription. while he was reading and thinking, others must be writing and pasting up. having decided that 6 was the most convenient number to employ (for he had to balance their wages, to be paid out of his own funds, against the probable speed of of their work), Johnson looked round for suitable amanuenses. with his knowledge of the world of letters, it was no trouble to make enquiries in the right places and come up with 6 men literate enough to do the work and poor enough to be attracted by the wages.

as it happens , 5  of the 6 were Scotsmen. probably this was no more than an accident. J did not particularly go out looking for Scotsmane; he just happened to find them. 18th-century London was in any case full of Scots. they had thrown in their lot with England in the Act of Union in  1707,  a step taken only after prolonged heartsearchings and dubities not at all unlike the crosscurrents of feeling that accompanied Britain's entry into the European Economic Community in 1973.  the Scots were afraid of losing their national identity; the English were afraid that their country would be invaded by a swarm of job-hungry Scots who would work any hours and accept any wages rather than go home. to some extent both sets of fears were justified by events. Scotland, especially after 1745, declined into a provincial version of England, while many an Englishman had to endure being pushed off the ladder of his career by the sharp elbows of a hungry Scot. both nations have by now accepted this situation as part of the normal order of things, but in the  18th century

136  the Scots were definitely unpopular in England and especially in London. 

that J did not feel any hostility towards them is evidenced by his choosing to work, for years on end, with a 6 man team of whom 5 were Scots. indeed, Scotland was an enormous recurring fact in his consciousness. his closest disciple was to be a Scot; so was his most ferocious literary antagonist;  his most memorable journey was to be made through Scotland. he enjoyed making anti-Scotch remarks, because he relished an argument and any Englishman who makes an anti-Scotch remark.  is certain of a strong and immediate comeback. that is about as much as his celebrated 'prejudice' amounted to.

...he regarded them all  as his dependents - Stewart who never lived to see the Dictionary completed, Shields who died later of consumption, the Englishman Peyton whom Johnson helped again and again and finally buried and  and his wife too. as a team, they evidently fell far short of perfection...on one occasion, as Johnson later told Boswell, they or some of them, made a blunder that cost him a lot of money. the printer would only handle sheets that were written on one side only: too sleepy to realize this, they copied such a vast amount of material on to both sides that it cost J 20 pounds - that is,  4 or 500 pounds in modern money - to have the work redone.

but he was patient with them, as he always was with simple ordinary people, the common men and women who do the world of the world. to be among such people answered an emotional need in him. his combativeness, his determination not to be put down, came out when he was confronted by wealth, rank, brilliance, power of any kind; never among the poor and the humbly useful. as the years of toil brought them all closer together, they must have enjoyed many a pause for conversation. during on of these breaks J played a prank he recalled years later. among the Scots who had invaded England was James Thomson, one of the most successful poets of the day but not much to the taste of J, who disliked his blank verse and rather inflated language. Shiels  particularly admired Thomson and this made him a target. 'I took down Thomson', J recalled...and read aloud a large portion of him and them asked -is not this find? Shiels having expressed the highest admiration,  Well, sir (said I), I have omitted every other line'.

*137  with interludes like this, the work proceeded. J's procedure was simple, though massively arduous.
first of all he chose the words to be listed; sometimes from other dictionaries, sometimes from his reading or from conversational usage. he provided each word with a definition and an etymology,  and this much of the material he seems to have written out in his own hand. I say 'seems' because the precise method followed by J is not clear to me. probably he did not follow one unvarying procedure during the whole 9 years. according to an ex-employee of Strahan the printer, writing in The Gentleman's Magazine in  1799, the copy was written on separate sheets of the size know as 'quarto post',  each sheet divided into 2 columns. J wrote the words, with their derivations and etymologies, usually 2 or 3 to a column and the intervening spaces were filled up by slips pasted in by his assistants. these slips contained the illustrative quotations. presumably the man was remembering Johnson's process correctly; what puzzles one is how, in that case, the amanuenses came to copy large quantities of it on to both sides of the paper, when Johnson used only one side. perhaps he arrived at that method after expensive trial and error, as something foolproof.

at all events, the work of the amnuenses was to write out the quotations which J selected to illustrate the clearest and most correct use of each word. these quotations he provided from his vast reading, the bulk of which he did at an early stage in the work. broadly peaking his method was to read first and make word lists later. when he found a word used in the best way, he underlined it and wrote its initial letter in the margin, using a pencil; he also indicated, by vertical lines,  the extent of the context to be quoted. the book was then handed to the nearest amanuensis, who copied out the relevant passage on to a slip, which was then arranged in correct alphabetical order and finally pasted up.

J chose the quotations from what he considered the classic period of English, going back no further than Sir Philip Sidney and coming forward, as a rule, no nearer than 1660.  the provision of quotations, which enabled the reader to see each word on the hoof as well as in a bald definition, was j's original contribution to lexicography. it has since become standard, particularly of course in the Oxford Dictionary; the difference being that in the oxford Dictionary the examples are chosen with a view to charting the historical evolution of the word, whereas J was concerned with setting a standard of correctness. where the 20th century work follows each listed word through all its adventures, noting every significant use whether worthy of imitation or not, the  18th century work follows each listed word through all its adventures, noting every significant use whether worthy of imitation or not, the  18th century was more interested in establishing a standard, each reflects the characteristic preoccupation of its age.
sometimes one reads the mis-statement that j set out to fix the English language, to anchor it in  a settled state. the best refutation of this is in J's own Preface, where he gives a succinct enumeration of the reasons why such an attempt is impossible, words, he remarks, are like the men who utter them:

when they are not gaining strength, they are generally losing it. though art may sometimes prolong their duration, it will rarely give them

*138  perpetuity and their changes will be almost always informing us that language is the work of man,  a being from who permanence and stability cannot be expected.

on the other hand, he shared with his age a general willingness to slow down the rate of change as far as possible. the 18th century aim was a language which would not seem obsolete in  2 generations and this aim was brilliantly achieved. we nowadays can read 18th century English with complete and immediate comprehension.. in spite of the colossal changes of the last 200 years, we share with that epoch an English which, while it differs from ours in many points of idiom and usage, is recognizably the same language. but if we take a similar jump backwards from where they were standing, if we compare the English of the  18th century with that of the 16th, we shall find much greater differences. Elizabethan English grew so fast, putting on muscle so swiftly and in such unforeseeable places, that it was both exciting and unpredictable. the English of Shakespeare is like a young racehorses just arrived at its strength: very fast, very much a race-winner, but very hard to control. as J was himself to write, 'The style of Shakespeare was in itself perplexed, ungrammatical and obscure'.  all 3 epithets are justified and all 3 apply to 16th century English generally. it is the same story with orthography.  (def - writing words with the proper letters , according to accepted usage.