People who inspire me: Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson inspires me through his love of words and the sheer determination behind his extraordinary achievement. His magnum opus, A Dictionary of the English Language, was published on 15 April 1755 after more than eight years of work. It contained nearly 43,000 entries, exploring words’ meanings, origins and uses. Johnson undertook the enormous intellectual task himself, supported by a handful of assistants who helped copy and organise material. By comparison, the French Academy, with its forty members, had taken more than half a century to produce its dictionary. What an astonishing feat of sustained attention and perseverance.

His achievement is all the more remarkable given the difficulties he lived with. Johnson was almost blind in one eye, had impaired hearing, and bore scars from a childhood illness. He also experienced recurring depression and involuntary movements and vocalisations that later specialists have interpreted as likely Tourette syndrome, although this cannot be diagnosed with certainty retrospectively. Knowing that he accomplished so much while dealing with these challenges adds another dimension to my admiration.

As a lover and collector of quotes, I find his approach especially inspiring. Johnson was not only a wonderful source of wit and wisdom himself; he also filled his dictionary with approximately 114,000 quotations, drawing on writers such as Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden to illustrate the words he defined. Rather than leaving words isolated in their definitions, he showed them alive in literature, carrying thought, feeling and insight. His dictionary became, in the process, an extraordinary collection of other people’s writing.

There is something deeply appealing to me about that combination: creating something of your own while gathering and honouring the words of others. I recognise the pleasure of finding a passage that captures something beautifully and wanting to preserve it and share it. Johnson took that impulse and made it the work of years. His dictionary reminds me how much a love of words, patiently followed, can bring into the world.