Exhibition ‘Desks, Drudgery, and the Dictionary’ opens at Dr Johnson’s House in London
Exhibition ‘Desks, Drudgery, and the Dictionary’ opens at Dr Johnson’s House in London
The exhibition ‘Desks, Drudgery, and the Dictionary’ opened in Dr Johnson’s House in London on July 3rd 2024. It is located in the dictionary garret where Johnon, together with his assistants, crafted his celebrated Dictionary of the English Language between 1747 and 1755. It focusses, however, not on the finished text – though a first edition is on display – but on the garret as a working space, and the slow and painstaking work that eighteenth-century dictionary-making required, as well as on the advantage of this particular word-workshop in the garret in Gough Square.
Visitors can have a go at writing with a quill pen, on hand-made paper, to get a sense of the physical labour that a dictionary by hand involved. They are also invited to give their own opinion on Johnson’s ‘dictionary desk’ which has also returned to the garret as part of the exhibition. Whether this is the ‘real deal deal desk’ remains, a conundrum. Johnson certainly worked at a deal desk in the garret as he wrote the Dictionary, The deal desk on display – on loan from Pembroke College, Oxford and discovered in Deptford in the poverty-stricken home of Johnson’s goddaughter, Ann Lowe, in 1855 – was part of a national and international campaign, set up by the writers Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Forster to raise money for Ann and her sister Frances. Its history, as the exhibition explores, certainly includes a range of Victorian luminaries. But the link to Johnson himself is more obscure (see The Real Deal Deal Desk? (drjohnsonshouse.org) and also Our Patron, Stephen Fry, Ruminates on the Meaning of Desks at the Launch for Desks, Drudgery and the Dictionary (drjohnsonshouse.org) where Stephen Fry provides his own take on desks, authenticity, and the literary relic).
Importantly, in other new stories, the exhibition also showcases the hitherto unseen voices – and contributions – of Johnson’s dictionary assistants. Long seen as mere copyists, we can now see them as active participants in the process of dictionary-making, while the garret also emerges as a far more collaborative space than previously assumed – including, in this, a new appreciation of the hard work of Hodge the Cat.
