Samuel Johnson and Chaucer

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter investigates the presence of Chaucer in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755, 2nd edn, 1773). There are considerable difficulties in reconciling remarks in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, his plans for an edition of Chaucer, and his references to Chaucer in different parts of the Dictionary. Johnson presented Chaucer with difficulties of every kind, as a historian of the language, as a historian of the course of English poetry, and as a literary critic. His decision to confine his illustrative examples to works composed during and after the sixteenth century should have excluded Chaucer entirely. But Chaucer creeps in (often via Junius’s Etymologicon). Johnson cites lines that appear nowhere in Chaucer’s texts, and misquotes some that do. Some Chaucerian words and phrases (‘Mars armipotent’, ‘gladder’) are attributed to Dryden rather than to their source in Chaucer, and the reader of the Dictionary is offered a great many passages of Chaucer via Dryden. So frequent, indeed, is citation of Dryden’s Chaucerian versions, that some works (e.g. The Character of a Good Parson) appear piecemeal almost entire in the Dictionary.