Dr. Johnson’s House, 17 Gough Square, London, England. Little did this eighteenth century scholar know he would one day become Tumblr famous for his quotation “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was an English author, poet, essayist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer described as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history.” His best known work, A Dictionary of the English Language (published 1775) had an enormous effect on Modern English- until the Oxford English Dictionary happened along 150 years later, this was the pre-eminent English Dictionary of the world.
The pages of the original dictionary were 18 inches tall (46 cm) and nearly 20 inches (50 cm) wide, published on the finest vellum available at a cost of nearly £1,600, and would not have looked out of place in the Hogwarts Library.
There is a free Downloadable copy of Johnson’s Dictionary, 6th Edition, Volume 1 and Volume 2 at the Internet Archive site, if you would like to peruse!
