1149. This week, we look at the life and legacy of Samuel Johnson, the man behind the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. We talk with John Overholt, curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library, about Johnson's eclectic career. We also look at what it’s like to manage a collection of 4,000 rare books and why even the most "unremarkable" items deserve a home in a library.
1149. This week, we look at the life and legacy of Samuel Johnson, the man behind the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. We talk with John Overholt, curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library, about Johnson's eclectic career. We also look at what it’s like to manage a collection of 4,000 rare books and why even the most "unremarkable" items deserve a home in a library.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with John Overholt, a curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson and early books and manuscripts at Harvard's Houghton Library. And I have to say, he is one of my favorite people to follow on Mastodon. He is always sharing amazing photos of rare and interesting and odd items. John Overholt, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
John Overholt: Thank you. I was really pleased to be asked.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I know we've followed each other for years and years, so, it's just great to finally meet you. So I think we have a lot of listeners who are all over the world and of different ages, and I think, you know, Samuel Johnson is an important figure, but maybe not as well known as Webster, for example. So to start, can you explain who Samuel Johnson is and why he's so important?
John Overholt: Sure. Johnson was one of the foremost writers of 18th-century England. The thing he is probably best known for is his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, but that's just one small part of what Johnson did. He wrote in just about every genre you can think of: literary criticism, biography, plays, poetry, a novel.
He was also regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of his time period. He had a whole circle of leading literary lights of London in that time period. And, was renowned as a conversationalist and just a man of really prolific talents. But, of course, the thing he's most famous for today is his dictionary, which is certainly not the first dictionary of English, but it's a real landmark in terms of the evolution of lexicography, of how dictionaries should be built. Johnson really believed in describing the whole language and not just obscure or hard words. And he believed in explaining how language was used through the works of great writers. So as much as the dictionary is made up of definitions, it's also full of quotations showing words in their context.
Mignon Fogarty: Did he favor his friends in the quotations?
John Overholt: I don't think that he did. It's a pretty eclectic mix of works from, I would say, mostly the 17th and 18th century. And, you know, Johnson had certainly very strong feelings about who was a great writer and who wasn't. And we're lucky to actually have a couple of books in the collection that show Johnson at work in that process. He would take a book off the shelf and go looking for words that he wanted to use these illustrative quotations for, and we can see him taking a pencil and, you know, sort of marking off where the quotation starts and ends, and then underlining the word that he's using it for, and then writing the first letter of that word out in the margin. So it's always exciting when we can get that kind of inside glimpse at the process of him at work.
Mignon Fogarty: So you have the books he took quotations from. So you have this enormous collection. What all is in it?
John Overholt: Yeah, it's an incredibly diverse and comprehensive collection about Johnson, but not just Johnson. Also his circle of friends. We have over half of Johnson's surviving letters, which is about 750 in total. As I say, books from his library, manuscripts of his writings, and a pretty much bibliographically complete collection of every edition of his work published during his lifetime. And collections about the people he was most associated with, like James Boswell, for example, his biographer.
Mignon Fogarty: Who has the other half of his letters?
John Overholt: They are scattered various places. As you may know, the Meineke Library at Yale has the world's biggest Boswell collection, and they also have a significant Johnson collection as well. And there's a substantial collection at the Bodleian, at the Morgan Library and various other special collections libraries around the world. But I think ours is number one.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you aspire to get some of those? Like, are they something you are eyeing for acquisition, or is it good that they're scattered all around?
John Overholt: Well, I mean, if they are in other libraries like ours, then I expect that they will stay there. I'm never eager to see things that have, you know, found an institutional home where they're accessible to scholarship. I think those should probably stay where they are. There are, you know, still some things in private collections that I might hope one day to have the opportunity to acquire for Houghton. You mentioned that my title is the Donald and Mary Hyde Curator of Samuel Johnson. And that's because the bulk of our collection came from Mary Hyde when she died in 2004. But it also comes with an endowment that pays for my salary. So I'm personally very grateful for it, but also provides for the opportunity to make new acquisitions for the collection. In the case of Samuel Johnson, the collection's so good already, the opportunities are pretty few and far between, but I do have the chance to pursue them when they become available.
Mignon Fogarty: I was wondering actually, who were Donald and Mary Hyde?
John Overholt: They were a couple that lived in Somerville, New Jersey, and Mary was a scholar of English literature. She had a PhD in Elizabethan drama from Columbia, or I guess from Barnard at the time. And Donald was a corporate lawyer who had studied at Harvard and I believe taken a course in Johnson. And for their first Christmas together as a present Mary got Donald a first edition of the dictionary and of Boswell's Life of Johnson, and that was in 1939. And by the end of another decade, they had already amassed one of the best Johnson collections in the world. It just became a real passion for them, and they continued to add to it throughout the rest of Donald's life.
He died in 1966, but as I say, Mary lived until 2004. During that time, she remarried a British viscount and became the Viscountess Eccles. She was just an unstoppable force when it came to collecting materials related to Samuel Johnson. It wasn’t their only collecting interest. There's, a really great collection of Oscar Wilde material that's now at the British Library. That was another one of her bequests upon her death. You know, it's the kind of singular collecting vision and ambition that makes it possible to amass something really great and something that is really valuable to researchers for generations to come.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, your bringing up the British connection reminded me Samuel Johnson was British, and I remember in Gabe Henry's book he said that Samuel Johnson hated Americans. He was anti-American, or at least American language. I'm not sure which now. But how do you know you've gone through his collection, how do you think he would feel about having this enormous collection of his work at an American institution?
John Overholt: Yeah, was definitely a man of strong opinions. He was not shy about expressing them. I think one thing he hated in particular was the institution of slavery and America's deep enmeshment with it. I'm doing an exhibition next summer for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And in a case about sort of dissenting voices and alternative perspectives, I'm going to be showing a pamphlet Johnson wrote where he very directly confronts the hypocrisy of Americans demanding liberty for themselves, but also enslaving people.
I think in general, Johnson would've been very uncomfortable with the idea of anybody having a collection of him. I think he had a very conflicted attitude, for example, about James Boswell's obsessive interest in documenting everything he could about Johnson's life. We know that Johnson burned quite a bit of his personal papers and letters, a couple of weeks before his death in 1784 because he, I think, was anxious about other people seeing those things after he was gone. So, you know, I can only apologize; it's a testament to his legacy that there is still so much intense interest in Johnson's life and work, you know, so many years later. And I hope he won't be too mad at me.
Mignon Fogarty: That's fascinating. So did he not think his work was important, or why did he not want people to know more about his work?
John Overholt: I think it was a feeling of privacy and discomfort having too much of the personal details of his life sort of being exposed to the public. Not that there was anything particularly unusual or shameful about Johnson's life that I'm aware of, but I think he was uncomfortable with it and kind of preferred to let his writing speak for itself.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, this puts your, you put together an exhibition for the Grolier Club for Johnson for the 300th anniversary, I think, of his birth. And I was reading that it had his teapot in it and that he was an avid tea drinker. And now that sort of puts that in a whole new light that maybe he wouldn't have liked that. What else was in the, tell me more about the Grolier exhibition?
John Overholt: Yeah, sure. So, we did, you know, the collection came here in 2004, and we knew his 300th birthday was coming up in 2009. So it seemed like the obvious time to put on a big celebration of this collection and of Johnson's legacy. I was actually hired originally as the cataloger for this collection. So every book of the 4,000 books in the collection, I, you know, took down off the shelf and made a record for it in our online catalog so it would be accessible to researchers. And that process had just recently been completed. So I had the pleasure of going through and trying to pick out the things I thought would be the most interesting and the most significant to sort of represent the amazing strengths of the collection.
So, it included, you know, the kind of things I've mentioned: the manuscripts and letters and books from his library, first editions of his sort of best-known works, material about his household and his friends, and also things sort of reflecting on Johnson's legacy in the couple of centuries following his death. And we did that both here at Houghton and also at the Grolier Club in New York. Mary Hyde was one of the first class of female members of the Grolier Club. For many years, it was men only. And oftentimes after the Grolier Club held its annual meeting, Donald would bring folks back to Four Oaks Farm in Somerville so that Mary could, you know, take part in some of the life of the club in that way. But when they did allow female members, she was one of the first. And it was an institution that was very important to her. And so it seemed like a logical place to bring the exhibition. And it also is great for me as a curator because they have a bigger exhibition space than we do at Houghton. So I could put even more stuff in the exhibition. I would say the challenge of curating exhibitions is often not finding stuff to put in, but figuring out what to take out because you've run out of room in the case.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. What else was in the exhibition there that might, that was a particular interest?
John Overholt: We were able to bring some of the artwork down, like the portrait of Johnson that you can see behind me. We brought, as I say, a number of first editions and letters and manuscripts from the collection. We produced eventually a printed catalog that I still have copies for so I can, if you come in and visit and you're a big Samuel Johnson fan, I have a copy that I can let you have.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, very cool. I have to take a little diversion, a little aside because I'm fascinated by the Grolier Club. Ever since I learned about it, the idea of a private club of Bibliofiles. When I was in New York once I like went in the front door and, like peeked around before they sort of asked me to leave. So what is it like?
John Overholt: Well, I should say they do let folks go into their exhibition galleries on the first floor, and they do fabulous exhibitions. So, you know, I do encourage folks to take advantage of that opportunity. I am not a member myself, but I, you know, I've been there on a number of occasions. So in addition to their exhibition space, they have a very significant research and special collections library of their own, with a focus on the history of the book and the history of book collecting. And then they have a sort of a clubhouse space for members to hang out and lounge and chat with one another. So, you know, it's a lot like other of these kind of old-line gentlemen clubs from that tradition, but with this very specific focus on loving books and wanting to put together really interesting and useful collections of them.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Fascinating. So, I had some questions from some of our followers on Mastodon. I said you were going to be doing this interview. Jessiman wanted to know what is your most unremarkable item? They said people often ask about what's your most remarkable one. What's the most, like, unremarkable thing in the Samuel Johnson collection?
John Overholt: We have a few things that are, you know, just kind of modern 20th-century editions that aren't of any great significance. But, you know, we have them because the goal was to create a collection that was really thorough and complete. And if somebody, you know, does need to know what that particular edition was like, they'll have that opportunity to draw on. A collection that is not actually from the Hydes but was already here when the Hyde Collection came here is… in the 19th century the thing Johnson was most famous for was not his dictionary, but a novel called Raus that was reprinted, I don't know, a hundred, 200 times. It was really prolific in the number of editions. A particular collector made it his goal to collect every one of those editions that he could get his hands on. And I would say individually they are pretty unremarkable. They, you know, they're not usually fancy copies. They don't have any special scholarly significance. But in the aggregate, it's a really interesting collection because it's such a good and thorough reflection of the phenomenon of Rasselas being this incredibly widely read book in this time period. And I think there's a lot to learn even from these individual editions, which aren't all that exciting.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that is interesting. I guess it's a bigger question in curation: you know, would you ever get rid of anything that was in someone's collection? Like, do you ever look at a collection, look at something and think, "Well, this wouldn't ever matter." It's, you know, a bus ticket or something. But I can imagine how that might matter. So, do you just keep everything?
John Overholt: We don't. It's a difficult decision to make because there is so much arrogance involved in saying, "Well, I know nobody will ever care about this." As a curator who looks at the history of an institution like Harvard that's been collecting for hundreds of years, it's easy to see how decisions were made in the past about what does and doesn't matter may not reflect what our interests and values are today. So I try to be cognizant of that in the work that I'm doing and think, as best I can, about what's going to be and useful to folks in the future. But obviously, there's only so much crystal ball gazing I can do; I just have to make my best judgments.
We don't have infinite space. We have to make our best judgments about what we can preserve for the future. At the point of intake, we will make decisions. If we're getting a big collection, this is more so, you know, I do pre-1800 books and manuscripts in addition to the Johnson collection. I'm responsible for most of our collections from that time period. So this is more a thing that the curator of modern books and manuscripts, which is 1800 to the present, deals with because she's more likely to get a big archival collection of somebody's papers that they collected throughout their lifetime and have to make some decisions, you know, when she's taking that in about what we're going to keep and what we're not. My acquisitions tend to be more one at a time just because stuff from the 18th century doesn't usually stay in one piece throughout all those years.
It used to be at Houghton, before, long before I started, that we would sell off things that we considered to be duplicates even if they were from the pre-1800 collection. We don't do that anymore for a couple of reasons. One of which is a bad practice in terms of collection security because it makes it harder to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that if something used to be in your library, it still should be. And if it's not there anymore, then something has gone wrong.
And the other is that we've really changed our thinking about what is a duplicate. And the period before industrialization, in particular, when bookmaking is a by-hand process. The pieces of type are all set by hand. The paper is all made by hand. The printing is all done by hand. There are inevitable variations, as there are with anything that's handmade. And after that process is complete, then books have a couple hundred years of existence to pick up marks of ownership or marks of use, or other things that happen to them during that lifespan that makes them distinctive from one another. So there's a sense in which no two of those books really are duplicates of each other. So these days we tend to, once something is in the collection, it's usually going to stay in the collection.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. You've talked about a piece that's in your collection called "A Short Scheme for Compiling a New Dictionary of the English Language" that is handwritten by Johnson that's particularly fragile. And, it's digitized, so I was looking at it online last night. And it's just a really interesting document. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
John Overholt: Yeah, so this is a prospectus or introduction for "The Dictionary of the English Language." It's written at the outset of the process of working on it. Johnson thought initially he could knock the dictionary out in about three years, and it ended up taking nine. And during that process, he actually kind of had to tear up his manuscript and start—I mean, not tear up, but take it apart and sort of put it back together and start over with a new method of working because the project was just so much larger than he realized. But in what was eventually published as "The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language," he's sort of working through how am I going to go about the process of creating a dictionary? What will it look like when it's done? And, you know, what are my goals? A secondary goal of writing the document is to hopefully obtain patronage and support from a particular figure, the Earl of Chesterfield, whom Johnson consulted with on writing The Short Scheme. In fact, we have a second draft. That first draft that you've seen is in Johnson's own hand. We also have a second draft where the Earl of Chesterfield has made some corrections or annotations. And the idea was that it would be a powerful endorsement to have somebody like the Earl of Chesterfield, who was, you know, both noble and wealthy, but also regarded as somebody who was a really elegant writer, to have him endorse the dictionary and Johnson's work on it, but also maybe to support it financially.
He did not do that during the course of Johnson's writing it. When the dictionary came out, the Earl of Chesterfield said how great he thought it was, and kind of implied that he'd been, you know, helping Johnson out all along, which infuriated Johnson since it wasn't true. And he wrote Chesterfield an absolutely scathing letter in which he says, "Is that a patron, my Lord? One who looks on a drowning man with unconcern, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with offers of help?" He's saying, "You did nothing for me during the nine years I was laboring away on this, and now you want to horn in on my glory."
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, good for him.The handwriting surprised me. I don't know why, but it was loopier than I expected. The descenders on the Gs were like swirling, and we'll see if we get a picture up of it on the YouTube channel. The capital Ds almost looked like Xs, kind of like a capital letter X that was connected at the bottom. There's something about seeing something in handwriting that has a special feel to it. It gives you sort of a feeling for the person almost. And I also had trouble; it seemed like he was maybe more careful with the title than with the body of the document. I had trouble reading it. And I wonder, do you get better at reading the old handwriting as you practice? I imagine you do; you get better at reading it.
John Overholt: Yeah. I would say on the scale of 18th-century writers, Johnson's handwriting is more on the legible side than plenty that I have seen. And you definitely do get better at any particular hand the more time you get to spend with it. But I, you know, I have trouble all the time too. I'm not a real paleographer, you know, somebody who really studies handwriting. My expertise is more in the history of printing and publishing. But I certainly, you know, work with manuscript material all the time. And I've worked with Johnson's enough that I am more used to it than some others.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it reminded me of something I recently saw. There was a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. His name is Mark Humphreys, and I saw an interview with him where he was just wildly excited about the potential for AI to translate old handwriting. He had used it on a variety of documents and found it, in his use, to be exceptional. So he was saying, "This is going to change everything." And I was wondering if you had seen that or if you had thoughts about that since you are someone who works with those kinds of documents.
John Overholt: Yeah, if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would’ve said, "Oh, they'll never crack the problem of handwriting in my lifetime." You know, we’re getting good at character recognition for printed things, although, you know, it still struggles a little bit with very early letter forms. Everybody's handwriting is so different. There's no way.” And it’s starting to look like I was wrong about that. They do seem to be making real strides in what kind of automated recognition you can do with handwriting, and that does have tremendous potential to unlock things that people, you know, don't necessarily have the time to read through looking for the information that they're looking for.
We run into a lot with reference questions that the library receives is, you know, somebody's looking for a letter where they're writing about X subject. And that is mostly not how our collections are cataloged. You will, you know, find a very clear description that, you know, this is a letter that Samuel Johnson wrote to James Boswell on this date or what have you. But we mostly do not have the resources to describe the substance of that letter in any detail. And if it were possible to simply point a computer at the digital images and say, "Okay, tell me what this says," that would be really useful to a lot of people.
The one note of caution that I always want to sound is, I'm very anxious as a librarian about what I feel like is the core value of our profession, which is providing access to accurate information. So much of what I see about AI these days is about its use to make inaccurate and deceptive information. There is, I think, a great reservoir of trust in librarianship that we're going to do everything in our power to give our users the right tools and the right information. And I want us to be very cautious about doing anything that would jeopardize that trust. So if we're going to deploy a system like that in conjunction with our collections, then I think we've got to be really confident that it's giving people accurate information.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, it makes me think. Like, I know obviously your work is very useful to scholars, and it sounds so amazing, but I think I wouldn't even know where to begin. Like, if I were to visit your library, which I'd love to do someday, where would I even start? Do you give tours, or do you even teach courses on, you know, what is available in your collections? If, you know, if I were to come in, like where would I even start?
John Overholt: Yeah, so it's important to note that we are absolutely open to anybody. The building is open from 10 to 5, Monday through Friday. You can come in and see exhibitions that we have done from things in the collection. You can always talk to a reference librarian if you have questions about using our collections. We do have a tour for the public every Friday at two o'clock. You can go into some of the spaces that aren't normally open to the public, like the room I'm in right now, because there's sort of collections out in the room. We can't have it open unattended, but we do take people through on the Friday tour, and you get to see not just the Samuel Johnson space, but also a room devoted to Emily Dickinson with a couple of pieces of furniture from her library, including the little desk where she wrote her poems.
So I always encourage people to take advantage of the fact that, unlike most of the libraries on the Harvard campus, Houghton is open to everybody. And I will put in a plug for a book that we did and that I helped write for our 75th anniversary in 2017 that is called "Houghton Library at 75: A Celebration of Its Collections." Anyway, it is highlights of things from ancient papyrus to a writer's laptop, just sort of spanning the breadth of the collections. And that's a really interesting starting point for understanding what kind of library Houghton is and what it does and why people come here to do research.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that sounds amazing. It sounds like a wonderful thing to do on a Friday. It sounds like you're kind of a leader in making your collections accessible. You've said, "Preservation without use is an empty victory," and I loved this. “Please touch, this is here for you. You are special enough for special collections.” I thought that was wonderful.
John Overholt: Yeah, it's really important to me because I know it can be intimidating. You know, not all of Harvard feels equally welcoming to a first-time visitor. And I am just so excited about the things that we have here and how interesting they are. And I want everybody else to be as excited as I am and to know that they do have this opportunity to come here and see fun stuff. And we're actually very friendly once you come and meet us and that we want to help you explore the things that you're interested in.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, for people who can't make it, how much of your work is digitized?
John Overholt: A ton and also a tiny fraction. You know, speaking of things that will not get finished in my lifetime, we will not get everything digitized. Of that I am very confident. We've done an incredible amount of work. Harvard was one of the earliest university libraries to have a major digitization program, so we've been doing it for more than 25 years at this point. Everything that's not under copyright is freely accessible to anyone to look at and to reuse. I'm very proud of the fact that we have an explicit policy that we don't try to assert any additional copyright on our digital images. If it's in the public domain, then it's free for you to use.
So, you know, there is always more to do because the demand just so outstrips our capacity.
But we do take requests, as it were. If you, you know, have a particular thing that you know we have a copy of and that you need in digital form, there's a process to put in a request for that. There's kind of a backlog. I think it's a couple of months, but we will get to it eventually and we will send you, it'll be through that process. It's either like cell phone photos or we have kind of an overhead scanner to take pictures of books. So it's not the preservation-quality scans, but it'll definitely be good enough for you to read the thing you need to read. If you do need something that has to look perfect and pristine like you need for publication, there's a separate process. But there are some fees for that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. No, that's really nice. And I read that you have, at least, you had hired the library's first Wikipedian in residence. Is that a position that still exists?
John Overholt: It does not; it was a sort of limited term position. But all of the work that Rob Alexander did in that role is still accessible through the images that he deposited in Wikimedia Commons. You know, doing the image uploading and the metadata so that they will be accessible. And, you know, again, like I mentioned, we have this free-to-use policy so that people can use those images any way they'd like.
Mignon Fogarty: So if someone finds something in your digitized collection, they can just put it on Wikipedia.
John Overholt: They could. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Oh, I hope more people do.
John Overholt: I hope so too.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, John Overholt, thank you so much for being here. We're going to, for the Grammarpaloozians, for our supporters on Patreon and elsewhere we're going to have a bonus episode. We're going to talk a lot more about your social media, how one gets a job as a curator, and some of the more outlandish requests you've had. But for everyone else, this is the end of the main show. Thank you for being here. Where can people find you and about Samuel Johnson's collection at Houghton?
John Overholt: Yeah, so the Houghton Library website. I think if you just Google Houghton Library and maybe add Harvard, because there are a couple of other Houghton libraries in the world. Most of the information about us and our collection can be found on our website. And you can find me, as you mentioned, on Mastodon. I'm @Overholt, my last name, at the Glammr.us server. That's G-L-A-M-M-R.us.
Mignon Fogarty: And why don't you tell people why it's glammr.us.
John Overholt: "GLAM" is an acronym for “galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.” And so it sort of describes that of related professions in memory and collecting. And so it's a server that's specifically designed for folks who work in that field.
Mignon Fogarty: I love that. Thanks so much, John.
John Overholt: You're very welcome.