BBC Proms - 2009 - Proms Plus - Proms Literary Festival - Samuel Johnson

In a programme recorded in front of a Proms audience, Ian McMillan is joined by Lynda Mugglestone of Pembroke College, Oxford, and journalist Matthew Parris to explore the myth and reality of Dr Samuel Johnson, and his continuing hold on the English language. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, held centre stage in defining and describing the English language for at least 150 years until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary. Personally unimposing - he was blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and suffered from an assortment of physical tics which may have been Tourettes - Johnson rose from a modest background as the son of a bookseller in Uttoxeter to become one of the most quoted men of English letters. His idiosyncratic dictionary is laden with his own personality, and he refers to words like lunch as 'as much food as one's hands can hold' and lexicographer as 'a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words'.