Dr Johnson’s desk or not? New exhibition explores the origins of the famous dictionary

July 3, 2024

There is currently a small mystery in Dr. Johnson’s house: a small desk has arrived, which may be the desk that Dr. Johnson used when compiling his famous dictionary.

Or maybe not.

The writer’s desk was put up for sale in 1855 when two impoverished sisters, one of whom had been Dr Johnson’s goddaughter, announced they must sell it. This sparked a celebrity-backed fundraising campaign that included Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle.

The desk was rescued and given to Pembroke College, Oxford, and is now displayed in the attic of Dr Johnson’s house, where it came from.

Or maybe not.

When Lynda Mugglestone, Professor of English History at the University of Oxford, began researching this story, the first problems arose.

As she explained to me, the main reason is that there is no documented evidence that this is the actual desk. It is possible that it is a desk from the house that was used by one of the many people who worked with Dr. Johnson to compile the dictionary. So it is important, but how important?

There is nothing to indicate that it is his actual desk.

During his research, however, Professor Mugglestone found older letters from the impoverished sisters in which they complained that they were so poor that they did not even have any furniture.

Did the furniture-less sisters actually own a valuable desk?

Or is it perhaps a fake?

This mystery is to be revealed in the new exhibition at Dr. Johnson’s House Museum, which examines the origins of his famous dictionary.

Dr. Johnson was not a rich man when he rented a house just off Fleet Street. He chose this house specifically because it had a large attic room with numerous large windows that could not be seen by the neighbors, making the study very bright.

The desk on display is the kind a man of modest means might have used for his work, so that at least fits.

The picture that emerges is that, contrary to the common notion of the learned doctor issuing orders from above to his students, the work was more collegial: educated researchers worked for Dr. Johnson, who coordinated the work. Even the cat Hodge was more involved than initially expected. At one point, mice were caught eating the papers, so a cat was hired to keep them away.

The pine desk was stained darker at some point, possibly as recently as a century ago, when pine was completely out of fashion and it was completely unthinkable that such an important man as Dr. Johnson would have sat at such a cheap desk.

This alone says a lot about the romanticism that surrounds Dr. Johnson, and how the Victorian embellishments of his story give us the image of a much richer and greater man than he was in life.

In the Indiana Jones movies, one of the villains assumed that Jesus would drink from a golden chalice because he was the King of Kings, and that’s what kings do. As movie fans know, he was a poor choice.

Here too, Dr Johnson is the king of words, but the exhibition aims to tell the broader story of this man rather than his myth, and shows how simple his life probably was when he was working on the great dictionary.

After the dictionary was published, his life improved significantly.

But back then he might have been sitting at a cheap pine desk.

In a sense, the facts don’t really matter, because the desk can become a vessel in which we imagine the man who might once have sat there trying to compile his great dictionary.

The desk is a lexicographer’s Shroud of Turin. Just as the Shroud is probably not real but people still revere it for what it represents, we can look at this humble desk and realize that it represents one of the greatest works in the English language.

So now it is possible to visit Dr. Johnson’s house, climb the same stairs as him and see “Dr. Johnson’s desk.”

The exhibition also tells the stories of the other people (and the cat) who worked in the room, and addresses lesser-known aspects, such as the fact that the dictionary rarely included quotes from female authors.