ABSTRACT
The departure of Becky Sharp from Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies is marked by the memorable image of Lionel Johnson's Dictionary – 'the interesting work which invariably presented to her scholars' – being determinedly jettisoned through the carriage window. Johnson's Dictionary was therefore necessarily 'uncritical' and 'imperfect', the product of an era when 'philology was in the pre-scientific age, when real analogies were overlooked, and superficial resemblances too easily seized'. Philology, and its nineteenth-century reorientation, is in many ways the key to the dismissiveness which could so often inform Victorian accounts of Johnson's lexicographical endeavours. Against Richard Chenevix Trench's insistence on the dictionary as an objective inventory of all words used in English, eighteenth-century discussions of lexicography instead often actively prioritized the normative as part of the proper remit of the maker of dictionaries, stressing the interventionist stance which must be taken in the interests of linguistic control.
