part v

. the universal hunger for the monthly parts had risen to a furore. The book was promptly translated into French and German. The author had received little assistance from press or critics, he had no influential connexions, his class of subjects was such as to "expose him at the outset to the fatal objections of vulgarity," yet in less than six months from the appearance of the first number, as the _Quarterly Review_ almost ruefully admits, the whole reading world was talking about the Pickwickians. The names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Jingle, Snodgrass, Dodson & Fogg, were as familiar as household words. Pickwick chintzes figured in the linendrapers' windows, and Pickwick cigars in every tobacconist's; Weller corduroys became the stock-in-trade of every breeches-maker; Boz cabs might be seen rattling through the streets, and the portrait of the author of _Pelham_ and _Crichton_ was scraped down to make way for that of the new popular favourite on the omnibuses. A new and original genius had suddenly sprung up, there was no denying it, even though, as the _Quarterly_ concluded, "it required no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate--he has risen like a rocket and he will come down like the stick." It would have needed a very emphatic gift of prophecy indeed to foretell that Dickens's reputation would have gone on rising until at the present day (after one sharp fall, which reached an extreme about 1887) it stands higher than it has ever stood before.

Dickens's assumption of the literary purple was as amazing as anything else about him. Accepting the homage of the luminaries of the literary, artistic and polite worlds as if it had been his natural due, he arranges for the settlement of his family, decrees, like another Edmund Kean, that his son is to go to Eton, carries on the most complicated negotiations with his publishers and editors, presides and orates with incomparable force at innumerable banquets, public and private, arranges elaborate villegiatures in the country, at the seaside, in France or in Italy, arbitrates in public on every topic, political, ethical, artistic, social or literary, entertains and legislates for an increasingly large domestic circle, both juvenile and adult, rules himself and his time-table with a rod of iron. In his letter-writing alone, Dickens did a life's literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of writing such letters; that is to say, letters of such length and detail, for the quality is Dickens's own. He evidently enjoyed this use of the pen. Page after page of Forster's _Life_ (750 pages in the _Letters_ edited by his daughter and sister-in-law) is occupied with transcription from private correspondence, and never a line of this but is thoroughly worthy of print and preservation. If he makes a tour in any part of the British Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of everything that happens, and writes it with such gusto, such mirth, such strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other private letters ever given to the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances, a holiday gave him the exhilaration of a schoolboy. See how he writes from Cornwall, when on a trip with two or three friends, in 1843. "Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their immense variety of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below.... I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckles off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield"--the painter--"got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him."

The animation of Dickens's look would attract the attention of any one, anywhere. His figure was not that of an Adonis, but his brightness made him the centre and pivot of every society he was in. The keenness and vivacity of his eye combined with his inordinate appetite for life to give the unique quality to all that he wrote. His instrument is that of the direct, sinewy English of Smollett, combined with much of the humorous grace of Goldsmith (his two favourite authors), but modernized to a certain extent under the influence of Washington Irving, Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Lamb, and other writers of the _London Magazine_. He taught himself to speak French and Italian, but he could have read little in any language. His ideas were those of the inchoate and insular liberalism of the 'thirties. His unique force in literature he was to owe to no supreme artistic or intellectual quality, but almost entirely to his inordinate gift of observation, his sympathy with the humble, his power over the emotions and his incomparable endowment of unalloyed human fun. To contemporaries he was not so much a man as an institution, at the very mention of whose name faces were puckered with grins or wreathed in smiles. To many his work was a revelation, the revelation of a new world and one far better than their own. And his influence went further than this in the direction of revolution or revival. It gave what were then universally referred to as "the lower orders" a new sense of self-respect, a new feeling of citizenship. Like the defiance of another Luther, or the Declaration of a new Independence, it emitted a fresh ray of hope across the firmament. He did for the whole English-speaking race what Burns had done for Scotland--he gave it a new conceit of itself. He knew what a people wanted and he told what he knew. He could do this better than anybody else because his mind was theirs. He shared many of their "great useless virtues," among which generosity ranks before justice, and sympathy before truth, even though, true to his middle-class vein, he exalts piety, chastity and honesty in a manner somewhat alien to the mind of the low-bred man. This is what makes Dickens such a demigod and his public success such a marvel, and this also is why any exclusively literary criticism of his work is bound to be so inadequate. It should also help us to make the necessary allowances for the man. Dickens, even the Dickens of legend that we know, is far from perfect. The Dickens of reality to which Time may furnish a nearer approximation is far less perfect. But when we consider the corroding influence of adulation, and the intoxication of unbridled success, we cannot but wonder at the relatively high level of moderation and self-control that Dickens almost invariably observed. Mr G. K. Chesterton remarks suggestively that Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. He is overwrought by happiness to the verge of exasperation, and yet as a matter of fact he does keep on the right side of the breaking point. The specific and curative in his case was the work in which he took such anxious pride, and such unmitigated delight. He revelled in punctual and regular work; at his desk he was often in the highest spirits. Behold how he pictured himself, one day at Broadstairs, where he was writing _Chuzzlewit_. "In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins, as if he thought he was very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-colour porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that, he may be viewed in another bay-window on the ground-floor eating a strong lunch; and after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back on the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him, unless they know he is disposed to be talked to, and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a berry, and they do say he is as good as a small fortune to the innkeeper, who sells beer and cold punch." Here is the secret of such work as that of Dickens; it is done with delight--done (in a sense) easily, done with the mechanism of mind and body in splendid order. Even so did Scott write; though more rapidly and with less conscious care: his chapter finished before the world had got up to breakfast. Later, Dickens produced novels less excellent with much more of mental strain. The effects of age could not have shown themselves so soon, but for the unfortunate loss of energy involved in his non-literary labours.

While the public were still rejoicing in the first sprightly runnings of the "new humour," the humorist set to work desperately on the grim scenes of _Oliver Twist_, the story of a parish orphan, the nucleus of which had already seen the light in his _Sketches_. The early scenes are of a harrowing reality, despite the germ of forced pathos which the observant reader may detect in the pitiful parting between Oliver and little Dick; but what will strike every reader at once in this book is the directness and power of the English style, so nervous and unadorned: from its unmistakable clearness and vigour Dickens was to travel far as time went on. But the full effect of the old simplicity is felt in such masterpieces of description as the drive of Oliver and Sikes to Chertsey, the condemned-cell ecstasy of Fagin, or the unforgettable first encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger. Before November 1837 had ended, Charles Dickens entered on an engagement to write a successor to _Pickwick_ on similar lines of publication. _Oliver Twist_ was then in mid-career; a _Life of Grimaldi_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ were already covenanted for. Dickens forged ahead with the new tale of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and was justified by the results, for its sale far surpassed even that of _Pickwick_. As a conception it is one of his weakest. An unmistakably 18th-century character pervades it. Some of the vignettes are among the most piquant and besetting ever written. Large parts of it are totally unobserved conventional melodrama; but the Portsmouth Theatre and Dotheboys Hall and Mrs Nickleby (based to some extent, it is thought, upon Miss Bates in _Emma_, but also upon the author's Mamma) live for ever as Dickens conceived them in the pages of _Nicholas Nickleby_.

Having got rid of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and resigned his editorship of _Bentley's Miscellany_, in which _Oliver Twist_ originally appeared, Dickens conceived the idea of a weekly periodical to be issued as _Master Humphrey's Clock_, to comprise short stories, essays and miscellaneous papers, after the model of Addison's _Spectator_. To make the weekly numbers "go," he introduced Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and his father in friendly intercourse. But the public requisitioned "a story," and in No. 4 he had to brace himself up to give them one. Thus was commenced _The Old Curiosity Shop_, which was continued with slight interruptions, and followed by _Barnaby Rudge_. For the first time we find Dickens obsessed by a highly complicated plot. The tonality achieved in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ surpassed anything he had attempted in this difficult vein, while the rich humour of Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, and the vivid portraiture of the wandering Bohemians, attain the very highest level of Dickensian drollery; but in the lamentable tale of Little Nell (though Landor and Jeffrey thought the character-drawing of this infant comparable with that of Cordelia), it is generally admitted that he committed an indecent assault upon the emotions by exhibiting a veritable monster of piety and long-suffering in a child of tender years. In _Barnaby Rudge_ he was manifestly affected by the influence of Scott, whose achievements he always regarded with a touching veneration. The plot, again, is of the utmost complexity, and Edgar Allan Poe (who predicted the conclusion) must be one of the few persons who ever really mastered it. But few of Dickens's books are written in a more admirable style.

_Master Humphrey's Clock_ concluded, Dickens started in 1842 on his first visit to America--an episode hitherto without parallel in English literary history, for he was received everywhere with popular acclamation as the representative of a grand triumph of the English language and imagination, without regard to distinctions of nationality. He offended the American public grievously by a few words of frank description and a few quotations of the advertisement columns of American papers illustrating the essential barbarity of the old slave system (_American Notes_). Dickens was soon pining for home--no English writer is more essentially and insularly English in inspiration and aspiration than he is. He still brooded over the perverseness of America on the copyright question, and in his next book he took the opportunity of uttering a few of his impressions about the objectionable sides of American democracy, the result being that "all Yankee-doodle-dom blazed up like one universal soda bottle," as Carlyle said. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1843-1844) is important as closing his great character period. His _sève originale_, as the French would say, was by this time to a considerable extent exhausted, and he had to depend more upon artistic elaboration, upon satires, upon _tours de force_ of description, upon romantic and ingenious contrivances. But all these resources combined proved unequal to his powers as an original observer of popular types, until he reinforced himself by autobiographic reminiscence, as in _David Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, the two great books remaining to his later career.

After these two masterpieces and the three wonderful books with which he made his début, we are inclined to rank _Chuzzlewit_. Nothing in Dickens is more admirably seen and presented than Todgers's, a bit of London particular cut out with a knife. Mr Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Betsy Prig and "Mrs Harris" have passed into the national language and life. The coach journey, the windy autumn night, the stealthy trail of Jonas, the undertone of tragedy in the Charity and Mercy and Chuffey episodes suggest a blending of imaginative vision and physical penetration hardly seen elsewhere. Two things are specially notable about this novel--the exceptional care taken over it (as shown by the interlineations in the MS.) and the caprice or nonchalance of the purchasing public, its sales being far lower than those of any of its monthly predecessors.

At the close of 1843, to pay outstanding debts of his now lavish housekeeping, he wrote that pioneer of Christmas numbers, that national benefit as Thackeray called it, _A Christmas Carol_. It failed to realize his pecuniary anticipations, and Dickens resolved upon a drastic policy of retrenchment and reform. He would save expense by living abroad and would punish his publishers by withdrawing his custom from them, at least for a time. Like everything else upon which he ever determined, this resolution was carried out with the greatest possible precision and despatch. In June 1844 he set out for Marseilles with his now rapidly increasing family (the journey cost him £200). In a villa on the outskirts of Genoa he wrote _The Chimes_, which, during a brief excursion to London before Christmas, he read to a select circle of friends (the germ of his subsequent lecture-audiences), including Forster, Carlyle, Stanfield, Dyce, Maclise and Jerrold. He was again in London in 1845, enjoying his favourite diversion of private theatricals; and in January 1846 he experimented briefly as the editor of a London morning paper--the _Daily News_. By early spring he was back at Lausanne, writing his customary vivid letters to his friends, craving as usual for London streets, commencing _Dombey and Son_, and walking his fourteen miles daily. The success of _Dombey and Son_ completely rehabilitated the master's finances, enabled him to return to England, send his son to Eton and to begin to save money. Artistically it is less satisfactory; it contains some of Dickens's prime curios, such as Cuttle, Bunsby, Toots, Blimber, Pipchin, Mrs MacStinger and young Biler; it contains also that masterpiece of sentimentality which trembles upon the borderland of the sublime and the ridiculous, the death of Paul Dombey ("that sweet Paul," as Jeffrey, the "critic laureate," called him), and some grievous and unquestionable blemishes. As a narrative, moreover, it tails off into a highly complicated and exacting plot. It was followed by a long rest at Broadstairs before Dickens returned to the native home of his genius, and early in 1849 "began to prepare for _David Copperfield_."

"Of all my books," Dickens wrote, "I like this the best; like many fond parents I have my favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield." In some respects it stands to Dickens in something of the same relation in which the contemporary _Pendennis_ stands to Thackeray. As in that book, too, the earlier portions are the best. They gained in intensity by the autobiographical form into which they are thrown; as Thackeray observed, there was no writing against such power. The tragedy of Emily and the character of Rosa Dartle are stagey and unreal; Uriah Heep is bad art; Agnes, again, is far less convincing as a consolation than Dickens would have us believe; but these are more than compensated by the wonderful realization of early boyhood in the book, by the picture of Mr Creakle's school, the Peggottys, the inimitable Mr Micawber, Betsy Trotwood and that monument of selfish misery, Mrs Gummidge.

At the end of March 1850 commenced the new twopenny weekly called _Household Words_, which Dickens planned to form a direct means of communication between himself and his readers, and as a means of collecting around him and encouraging the talents of the younger generation. No one was better qualified than he for this work, whether we consider his complete freedom from literary jealousy or his magical gift of inspiring young authors. Following the somewhat dreary and incoherent _Bleak House_ of 1852, _Hard Times_ (1854)--an anti-Manchester School tract, which Ruskin regarded as Dickens's best work--was the first long story written for _Household Words_. About this time Dickens made his final home at Gad's Hill, near Rochester, and put the finishing touch to another long novel published upon the old plan, _Little Dorrit_ (1855-1857). In spite of the exquisite comedy of the master of the Marshalsea and the final tragedy of the central figure, _Little Dorrit_ is sadly deficient in the old vitality, the humour is often a mock reality, and the repetition of comic catch-words and overstrung similes and metaphors is such as to affect the reader with nervous irritation. The plot and characters ruin each other in this amorphous production. The _Tale of Two Cities_, commenced in _All the Year Round_ (the successor of _Household Words_) in 1859, is much better: the main characters are powerful, the story genuinely tragic, and the atmosphere lurid; but enormous labour was everywhere expended upon the construction of stylistic ornament.

The _Tale of Two Cities_ was followed by two finer efforts at atmospheric delineation, the best things he ever did of this kind: _Great Expectations_ (1861), over which there broods the mournful impression of the foggy marshes of the Lower Thames; and _Our Mutual Friend_ (1864-1865), in which the ooze and mud and slime of Rotherhithe, its boatmen and loafers, are made to pervade the whole book with cumulative effect. The general effect produced by the stories is, however, very different. In the first case, the foreground was supplied by autobiographical material of the most vivid interest, and the lucidity of the creative impulse impelled him to write upon this occasion with the old simplicity, though with an added power. Nothing therefore, in the whole range of Dickens surpassed the early chapters of _Great Expectations_ in perfection of technique or in mastery of all the resources of the novelist's art. To have created Abel Magwitch alone is to be a god indeed, says Mr Swinburne, among the creators of deathless men. Pumblechook is actually better and droller and truer to imaginative life than Pecksniff; Joe Gargery is worthy to have been praised and loved at once by Fielding and by Sterne: Mr Jaggers and his clients, Mr Wemmick and his parent and his bride, are such figures as Shakespeare, when dropping out of poetry, might have created, if his lot had been cast in a later century. "Can as much be said," Mr Swinburne boldly asks, "for the creatures of any other man or god?"

In November 1867 Dickens made a second expedition to America, leaving all the writing that he was ever to complete behind him. He was to make a round sum of money, enough to free him from all embarrassments, by a long series of exhausting readings, commencing at the Tremont Temple, Boston, on the 2nd of December. The strain of Dickens's ordinary life was so tense and so continuous that it is, perhaps, rash to assume that he broke down eventually under this particular stress; for other reasons, however, his persistence in these readings, subsequent to his return, was strongly deprecated by his literary friends, led by the arbitrary and relentless Forster. It is a long testimony to Dickens's self-restraint, even in his most capricious and despotic moments, that he never broke the cord of obligation which bound him to his literary mentor, though sparring matches between them were latterly of frequent occurrence. His farewell reading was given on the 15th of March 1870, at St James's Hall. He then vanished from "those garish lights," as he called them, "for evermore." Of the three brief months that remained to him, his last book, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, was the chief occupation. It hardly promised to become a masterpiece (Longfellow's opinion) as did Thackeray's _Denis Duval_, but contained much fine descriptive technique, grouped round a scene of which Dickens had an unrivalled sympathetic knowledge.

In March and April 1870 Dickens, as was his wont, was mixing in the best society; he dined with the prince at Lord Houghton's and was twice at court, once at a long deferred private interview with the queen, who had given him a presentation copy of her _Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands_ with the inscription "From one of the humblest of authors to one of the greatest"; and who now begged him on his persistent refusal of any other title to accept the nominal distinction of a privy councillor. He took for four months the Milner Gibsons' house at 5 Hyde Park Place, opposite the Marble Arch, where he gave a brilliant reception on the 7th of April. His last public appearance was made at the Royal Academy banquet early in May. He returned to his regular methodical routine of work at Gad's Hill on the 30th of May, and one of the last instalments he wrote of _Edwin Drood_ contained an ominous speculation as to the next two people to die at Cloisterham: "Curious to make a guess at the two, or say at one of the two." Two letters bearing the well-known superscription "Gad's Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent" are dated the 8th of June, and, on the same Thursday, after a long spell of writing in the Châlet where he habitually wrote, he collapsed suddenly at dinner. Startled by the sudden change in the colour and expression of his face, his sister-in-law (Miss Hogarth) asked him if he was ill; he said "Yes, very ill," but added that he would finish dinner and go on afterwards to London. "Come and lie down," she entreated; "Yes, on the ground," he said, very distinctly; these were the last words he spoke, and he slid from her arms and fell upon the floor. He died at 6-10 P.M. on Friday, the 9th of June, and was buried privately in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, in the early morning of the 14th of June. One of the most appealing memorials was the drawing by his "new illustrator" Luke Fildes in the _Graphic_ of "The Empty Chair; Gad's Hill: ninth of June, 1870." "Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of Charles Dickens" (_The Times_). In his will he enjoined his friends to erect no monument in his honour, and directed his name and dates only to be inscribed on his tomb, adding this proud provision, "I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country on my published works."

Dickens had no artistic ideals worth speaking about. The sympathy of his readers was the one thing he cared about and, like Cobbett, he went straight for it through the avenue of the emotions. In personality, intensity and range of creative genius he can hardly be said to have any modern rival. His creations live, move and have their being about us constantly, like those of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Molière and Sir Walter Scott. As to the books themselves, the backgrounds on which these mighty figures are projected, they are manifestly too vast, too chaotic and too unequal ever to become classics. Like most of the novels constructed upon the unreformed model of Smollett and Fielding, those of Dickens are enormous stock-pots into which the author casts every kind of autobiographical experience, emotion, pleasantry, anecdote, adage or apophthegm. The fusion is necessarily very incomplete and the hotch-potch is bound to fall to pieces with time. Dickens's plots, it must be admitted, are strangely unintelligible, the repetitions and stylistic decorations of his work exceed all bounds, the form is unmanageable and insignificant. The diffuseness of the English novel, in short, and its extravagant didacticism cannot fail to be most prejudicial to its perpetuation. In these circumstances there is very little fiction that will stand concentration and condensation so well as that of Dickens.

For these reasons among others our interest in Dickens's novels as integers has diminished and is diminishing. But, on the other hand, our interest and pride in him as a man and as a representative author of his age and nation has been steadily augmented and is still mounting. Much of the old criticism of his work, that it was not up to a sufficiently high level of art, scholarship or gentility, that as an author he is given to caricature, redundancy and a shameless subservience to popular caprice, must now be discarded as irrelevant.

As regards formal excellence it is plain that Dickens labours under the double disadvantage of writing in the least disciplined of all literary genres in the most lawless literary milieu of the modern world, that of Victorian England. In spite of these defects, which are those of masters such as Rabelais, Hugo and Tolstoy, the work of Dickens is more and more instinctively felt to be true, original and ennobling. It is already beginning to undergo a process of automatic sifting, segregation and crystallization, at the conclusion of which it will probably occupy a larger segment in the literary consciousness of the English-spoken race than ever before.

Portraits of Dickens, from the gay and alert "Boz" of Samuel Lawrence, and the self-conscious, rather foppish portrait by Maclise which served as frontispiece to _Nicholas Nickleby_, to the sketch of him as Bobadil by C. R. Leslie, the Drummond and Ary Scheffer portraits of middle age and the haggard and drawn representations of him from photographs after his shattering experiences as a public entertainer from 1856 (the year of his separation from his wife) onwards, are reproduced in Kitton, in Forster and Gissing and in the other biographies. Sketches are also given in most of the books of his successive dwelling places at Ordnance Terrace and 18 St Mary's Place, Chatham; Bayham Street, Camden Town; 15 Furnival's Inn; 48 Doughty Street; 1 Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park; Tavistock House, Tavistock Square; and Gad's Hill Place. The manuscripts of all the novels, with the exception of the _Tale of Two Cities_ and _Edwin Drood_, were given to Forster, and are now preserved in the Dyce and Forster Museum at South Kensington. The work of Dickens was a prize for which publishers naturally contended both before and after his death. The first collective edition of his works was begun in April 1847, and their number is now very great. The most complete is still that of Messrs Chapman & Hall, the original publishers of _Pickwick_; others of special interest are the Harrap edition, originally edited by F. G. Kitton; Macmillan's edition with original illustrations and introduction by Charles Dickens the younger; and the edition in the World's Classics with introductions by G.K. Chesterton. Of the translations the best known is that done into French by Lorain, Pichot and others, with B.H. Gausseron's excellent _Pages Choisies_ (1903).

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--During his lifetime Dickens's biographer was clearly indicated in his guide, philosopher and friend, John Forster, who had known the novelist intimately since the days of his first triumph with _Pickwick_, who had constituted himself a veritable encyclopaedia of information about Dickens, and had clung to his subject (in spite of many rebuffs which his peremptory temper found it hard to digest) as tightly as ever Boswell had enveloped Johnson. Two volumes of Forster's _Life of Charles Dickens_ appeared in 1872 and a third in 1874. He relied much on Dickens's letters to himself and produced what must always remain the authoritative work. The first two volumes are put together with much art, the portrait as a whole has been regarded as truthful, and the immediate success was extraordinary. In the opinion of Carlyle, Forster's book was not unworthy to be named after that of Boswell. A useful abridgment was carried out in 1903 by the novelist George Gissing. Gissing also wrote _Charles Dickens: A Critical Study_ (1898), which ranks with G.K. Chesterton's _Charles Dickens_(1906) as a commentary inspired by deep insight and adorned by great literary talent upon the genius of the master-novelist. The names of other lives, sketches, articles and estimates of Dickens and his works would occupy a large volume in the mere enumeration. See R.H. Shepherd, _The Bibliography of Dickens_ (1880); _James Cooke's Bibliography of the Writings of Charles Dickens_ (1879); _Dickensiana_, by F. G. Kitton (1886); and _Bibliography_ by J.P. Anderson, appended to Sir F.T. Marzials's _Life of Charles Dickens_ (1887). Among the earlier sketches may be specially cited the lives by J. C. Hotten and G. A. Sala (1870), the Anecdote-Biography edited by the American R. H. Stoddard (1874), Dr A. W. Ward in the English Men of Letters Series (1878), that by Sir Leslie Stephen in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and that by Professor Minto in the eighth edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. The _Letters_ were first issued in two volumes edited by his daughter and sister-in-law in 1880. For Dickens's connexion with Kent the following books are specially valuable:--Robert Langton's _Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens_ (1883); Langton's _Dickens and Rochester_ (1880); Thomas Frost's _In Kent with Charles Dickens_ (1880); F. G. Kitton's _The Dickens Country_ (1905); H. S. Ward's _The Real Dickens Land_ (1904); R. Allbut's _Rambles in Dickens Land_ (1899 and 1903). For Dickens's reading tours see G. Dolby's _Charles Dickens as I knew him_ (1884); J. T. Fields's _In and Out of Doors with Charles Dickens_ (1876); Charles Kent's _Dickens as a Reader_ (1872). And for other aspects of his life see M. Dickens's _My Father as I recall him_ (1897); P. H. Fitzgerald's _Life of C. Dickens as revealed in his Writings_ (1905), and _Bozland_ (1895); F. G. Kitton's _Charles Dickens, his Life, Writings and Personality_, a useful compendium (1902); T. E. Pemberton's _Charles Dickens and the Stage_, and _Dickens's London_ (1876); F. Miltoun's _Dickens's London_ (1904); Kitton's _Dickens and his Illustrators_; W. Teignmouth Shore's _Charles Dickens and his Friends_ (1904 and 1909); B. W. Matz, _Story of Dickens's Life and Work_ (1904), and review of solutions to _Edwin Drood_ in _The Bookman_ for March 1908; the recollections of Edmund Yates, Trollope, James Payn, Lehmann, R. H. Horne, Lockwood and many others. _The Dickensian_, a magazine devoted to Dickensian subjects, was started in 1905; it is the organ of the Dickens Fellowship, and in a sense of the Boz Club. _A Dickens Dictionary_ (by G. A. Pierce) appeared in 1872 and 1878; another (by A. J. Philip) in 1909; and a _Dickens Concordance_ by Mary Williams in 1907. (T. SE.)

DICKINSON, ANNA ELIZABETH (1842- ), American author and lecturer, was born, of Quaker parentage, at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 28th of October 1842. She was educated at the Friends' Free School in Philadelphia, and was for a time a teacher. In 1861 she obtained a clerkship in the United States mint, but was removed for criticizing General McClellan at a public meeting. She had gradually become widely known as an eloquent and persuasive public speaker, one of the first of her sex to mount the platform to discuss the burning questions of the hour. Before the Civil War she lectured on anti-slavery topics, during the war she toured the country on behalf of the Sanitary Commission, and also lectured on reconstruction, temperance and woman's rights. She wrote several plays, including _The Crown of Thorns_ (1876); _Mary Tudor_ (1878), in which she appeared in the title rôle; _Aurelian_ (1878); and _An American Girl_ (1880), successfully acted by Fanny Davenport. She also published a novel, _Which Answer?_ (1868); _A Paying Investment, a Plea for Education_ (1876); and _A Ragged Register of People, Places and Opinions_ (1879).

DICKINSON, JOHN (1732-1808), American statesman and pamphleteer, was born in Talbot county, Maryland, on the 8th of November 1732. He removed with his father to Kent county, Delaware, in 1740, studied under private tutors, read law, and in 1753 entered the Middle Temple, London. Returning to America in 1757, he began the practice of law in Philadelphia, was speaker of the Delaware assembly in 1760, and was a member of the Pennsylvania assembly in 1762-1765 and again in 1770-1776.[1] He represented Pennsylvania in the Stamp Act Congress (1765) and in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776, when he was defeated owing to his opposition to the Declaration of Independence. He then retired to Delaware, served for a time as private and later as brigader-general in the state militia, and was again a member of the Continental Congress (from Delaware) in 1779-1780. He was president of the executive council, or chief executive officer, of Delaware in 1781-1782, and of Pennsylvania in 1782-1785, and was a delegate from Delaware to the Annapolis convention of 1786 and the Federal Constitutional convention of 1787. Dickinson has aptly been called the "Penman of the Revolution." No other writer of the day presented arguments so numerous, so timely and so popular. He drafted the "Declaration of Rights" of the Stamp Act Congress, the "Petition to the King" and the "Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec" of the Congress of 1774, and the second "Petition to the King"[2] and the "Articles of Confederation" of the second Congress. Most influential of all, however, were _The Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania_, written in 1767-1768 in condemnation of the Townshend Acts of 1767, in which he rejected speculative natural rights theories and appealed to the common sense of the people through simple legal arguments. By opposing the Declaration of Independence, he lost his popularity and was never able entirely to regain it. As the representative of a small state, he championed the principle of state equality in the constitutional convention, but was one of the first to advocate the compromise, which was finally adopted, providing for equal representation, in one house and proportional representation in the other. He was probably influenced by Delaware prejudice against Pennsylvania when he drafted the clause which forbids the creation of a new state by the junction of two or more states or parts of states without the consent of the states concerned as well as of congress. After the adjournment of the convention he defended its work in a series of letters signed "Fabius," which will bear comparison with the best of the Federalist productions. It was largely through his influence that Delaware and Pennsylvania were the first two states to ratify the Constitution. Dickinson's interests were not exclusively political. He helped to found Dickinson College (named in his honour) at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1783, was the first president of its board of trustees, and was for many years its chief benefactor. He died on the 14th of February 1808 and was buried in the Friends' burial ground in Wilmington, Del.

See C. J. Stillé, _Life and Times of John Dickinson_, and P. L. Ford (editor), _The Writings of John Dickinson_, in vols. xiii. and xiv. respectively of the _Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania_ (Philadelphia, 1891 and 1895).

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Being under the same proprietor and the same governor, Pennsylvania and Delaware were so closely connected before the Revolution that there was an interchange of public men.

[2] The "Declaration of the United Colonies of North America ... setting forth the Causes and the Necessity of their Taking up Arms" (often erroneously attributed to Thomas Jefferson).

DICKSON, SIR ALEXANDER (1777-1840), British artillerist, entered the Royal Military Academy in 1793, passing out as second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in the following year. As a subaltern he saw service in Minorca in 1798 and at Malta in 1800. As a captain he took part in the unfortunate Montevideo Expedition of 1806-07, and in 1809 he accompanied Howorth to the Peninsular War as brigade-major of the artillery. He soon obtained a command in the Portuguese artillery, and as a lieutenant-colonel of the Portuguese service took part in the various battles of 1810-11. At the two sieges of Budazoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, the Salamanca forts and Burgos, he was entrusted by Wellington (who had the highest opinion of him) with most of the detailed artillery work, and at Salamanca battle he commanded the reserve artillery. In the end he became commander of the whole of the artillery of the allied army, and though still only a substantive captain in the British service he had under his orders some 8000 men. At Vitoria, the Pyrenees battles and Toulouse he directed the movements of the artillery engaged, and at the end of the war received handsome presents from the officers who had served under him, many of whom were his seniors in the army list. He was at the disastrous affair of New Orleans, but returned to Europe in time for the Waterloo campaign. He was present at Quatre Bras and Waterloo on the artillery staff of Wellington's army, and subsequently commanded the British battering train at the sieges of the French fortresses left behind the advancing allies. For the rest of his life he was on home service, principally as a staff officer of artillery. He died, a major-general and G.C.B., in 1840. A memorial was erected at Woolwich in 1847. Dickson was one of the earliest fellows of the Royal Geographical Society.

His diaries kept in the Peninsula were the main source of information used in Duncan's _History of the Royal Artillery_.

DICKSON, SIR JAMES ROBERT (1832-1901), Australian statesman, was born in Plymouth on the 30th of November 1832. He was brought up in Glasgow, receiving his education at the high school, and became a clerk in the City of Glasgow Bank. In 1854 he emigrated to Victoria, but after some years spent in that colony and in New South Wales, he settled in 1862 in Queensland, where he was connected with many important business enterprises, among them the Royal Bank of Queensland. He entered the Queensland House of Assembly in 1872, and became minister of works (1876), treasurer (1876-1879, and 1883-1887), acting premier (1884), but resigned in 1887 on the question of taxing land. In 1889 he retired from business, and spent three years in Europe before resuming political life. He fought for the introduction of Polynesian labour on the Queensland sugar plantations at the general election of 1892, and was elected to the House of Assembly in that year and again at the elections of 1893 and 1896. He became secretary for railways in 1897, minister for home affairs in 1898, represented Queensland in the federal council of Australia in 1896 and at the postal conference at Hobart in 1898, and in 1898 became premier. His energies were now devoted to the formation of an Australian commonwealth. He secured the reference of the question to a plebiscite, the result of which justified his anticipations. He resigned the premiership in November 1899, but in the ministry of Robert Philp, formed in the next month, he was reappointed to the offices of chief secretary and vice-president of the executive council which he had combined with the office of premier. He represented Queensland in 1900 at the conference held in London to consider the question of Australian unity, and on his return was appointed minister of defence in the first government of the Australian Commonwealth. He did not long survive the accomplishment of his political aims, dying at Sydney on the 10th of January 1901, in the midst of the festivities attending the inauguration of the new state.

DICOTYLEDONS, in botany, the larger of the two great classes of angiosperms, embracing most of the common flower-bearing plants. The name expresses the most universal character of the class, the importance of which was first noticed by John Ray, namely, the presence of a pair of seed-leaves or cotyledons, in the plantlet or embryo contained in the seed. The embryo is generally surrounded by a larger or smaller amount of foodstuff (endosperm) which serves to nourish it in its development to form a seedling when the seed germinates; frequently, however, as in pea or bean and their allies, the whole of the nourishment for future use is stored up in the cotyledons themselves, which then become thick and fleshy. In germination of the seed the root of the embryo (radicle) grows out to get a holdfast for the plant; this is generally followed by the growth of the short stem immediately above the root, the so-called "hypocotyl," which carries up the cotyledons above the ground, where they spread to the light and become the first green leaves of the plant. Protected between the cotyledons and terminating the axis of the plant is the first stem-bud (the plumule of the embryo), by the further growth and development of which the aerial portion of the plant, consisting of stem, leaves and branches, is formed, while the development of the radicle forms the root-system. The size and manner of growth of the adult plant show a great variety, from the small herb lasting for one season only, to the forest tree living for centuries. The arrangement of the conducting tissue in the stem is characteristic; a transverse section of the very young stem shows a number of distinct conducting strands--vascular bundles--arranged in a ring round the pith; these soon become united to form a closed ring of bast and wood, separated by a layer of formative tissue (cambium). In perennials the stem shows a regular increase in thickness each year by the addition of a new ring of wood outside the old one--for details of structure see PLANTS: Anatomy. A similar growth occurs in the root. This increase in the diameter of stem and root is correlated with the increase in leaf-area each season, due to the continued production of new leaf-bearing branches. A characteristic of the class is afforded by the complicated network formed by the leaf-veins,--well seen in a skeleton leaf, from which the soft parts have been removed by maceration. The parts of the flower are most frequently arranged in fives, or multiples of fives; for instance, a common arrangement is as follows,--five sepals, succeeded by five petals, ten stamens in two sets of five, and five or fewer carpels; an arrangement in fours is less frequent, while the arrangement in threes, so common in monocotyledons, is rare in dicotyledons. In some orders the parts are numerous, chiefly in the case of the stamens and the carpels, as in the buttercup and other members of the order Ranunculaceae. There is a very wide range in the general structure and arrangement of the parts of the flower, associated with the means for ensuring the transference of pollen; in the simplest cases the flower consists only of a few stamens or carpels, with no enveloping sepals or petals, as in the willow, while in the more elaborate type each series is represented, the whole forming a complicated structure closely correlated with the size, form and habits of the pollinating agent (see FLOWER). The characters of the fruit and seed and the means for ensuring the dispersal of the seeds are also very varied (see FRUIT).

DICTATOR (from the Lat. _dictare_, frequentative of _dicere_, to speak). In modern usage this term is loosely used for a personal ruler enjoying extraordinary and extra-constitutional power. The etymological sense of one who "dictates"--i.e. one whose word (_dictum_) is law (from which that of one who "dictates," i.e. speaks for some writer to record, is to be distinguished)--has been assisted by the historical use of the term, in ancient times, for an extraordinary magistrate in the Roman commonwealth. It is unknown precisely how the Roman word came into use, though an explanation of the earlier official title, magister populi, throws some light on the subject. That designation may mean "head of the (infantry) host" as opposed to his subordinate, the magister equitum, who was "head of the cavalry." If this explanation be accepted, emphasis was thus laid in early times on the military aspect of the dictatorship, and in fact the office seems to have been instituted for the purpose of meeting a military crisis such as might have proved too serious for the annual consuls with their divided command. Later constitutional theory held that the repression of civil discord was also one of the motives for the institution of a dictatorship. Such is the view expressed by Cicero in the _De legibus_ (iii. 3, 9) and by the emperor Claudius in his extant _Oratio_ (i. 28). This function of the office, although it may not have been contemplated at first, is attested by the internal history of Rome. In the crisis of the agitation that gathered round the Licinian laws (367 B.C.) a dictator was appointed, and in 314 B.C. we have the notice of a dictator created for purposes of criminal jurisdiction (_quaestionibus exercendis_). The dictator appointed to meet the dangers of war, sedition or crime was technically described as "the administrative dictator" (_rei gerundae causa_). Minor, or merely formal, needs of the state might lead to the creation of other types of this office. Thus we find dictators destined to hold the elections, to make out the list of the senate, to celebrate games, to establish festivals, and to drive the nail into the temple of Jupiter--an act of natural magic which was believed to avert pestilence. These dictators appointed for minor purposes were expected to retire from office as soon as their function was completed. The "administrative dictator" held office for at least six months.

The powers of a dictator were a temporary revival of those of the kings; but there were some limitations to his authority. He was never concerned with civil jurisdiction, and was dependent on the senate for supplies of money. His military authority was confined to Italy; and his power of life and death over the citizens was at an early period limited by law. It was probably the _lex Valeria_ of 300 B.C. that made him subject to the right of criminal appeal (_provocatio_) within the limits of the city. But during his tenure of power all the magistrates of the people were regarded as his subordinates; and it was even held that the right of assistance (_auxilium_), furnished by the tribunes of the plebs to members of the citizen body, should not be effectively exercised when the state was under this type of martial law. The dictator was nominated by one of the consuls. But here as elsewhere the senate asserted its authority over the magistrates, and the view was finally held that the senate should not only suggest the need of nomination but also the name of the nominee. After the nomination, the imperium of the dictator was confirmed by a _lex curiata_ (see COMITIA). To emphasize the superiority of this imperium over that of the consuls, the dictator might be preceded by twenty-four lictors, not by the usual twelve; and, at least in the earlier period of the office, these lictors bore the axes, the symbols of life and death, within the city walls.

Tradition represents the dictatorship as having a life of three centuries in the history of the Roman state. The first dictator is said to have been created in 501 B.C.; the last of the "administrative" dictators belongs to the year 216 B.C. It was an office that was incompatible both with the growing spirit of constitutionalism and with the greater security of the city; and the epoch of the Second Punic War was marked by experiments with the office, such as the election of Q. Fabius Maximus by the people, and the co-dictatorship of M. Minucius with Fabius, which heralded its disuse (see PUNIC WARS). The emergency office of the early and middle Republic has few points of contact, except those of the extraordinary position and almost unfettered authority of its holder, with the dictatorship as revised by Sulla and by Caesar. Sulla's dictatorship was the form taken by a provisional government. He was created "for the establishment of the Republic." It is less certain whether the dictatorships held by Caesar were of a consciously provisional character. Since the office represented the only supreme _Imperium_ in Rome, it was the natural resort of the founder of a monarchy (see SULLA and CAESAR). Ostensibly to prevent its further use for such a purpose, M. Antonius in 44 B.C. carried a law abolishing the dictatorship as a part of the constitution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Mommsen, _Römisches Staatsrecht_, ii. 141 foll. (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1887); Herzog, _Geschichte und System der römischen Staatsverfassung_, i. 718 foll. (Leipzig, 1884); Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie_, v. 370 foll. (new edition, Stuttgart. 1893, &c.); Lange, _Römische Alterthümer_, i. 542 foll. (Berlin, 1856, &c.); Daremberg-Saglio, _Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines_, ii. 161 foll. (1875, &c.); Haverfield, "The Abolition of the Dictatorship," in _Classical Review_, iii. 77. (A. H. J. G.)

DICTIONARY.

Definition and history.

In its proper and most usual meaning a dictionary is a book containing a collection of the words of a language, dialect or subject, arranged alphabetically or in some other definite order, and with explanations in the same or some other language. When the words are few in number, being only a small part of those belonging to the subject, or when they are given without explanation, or some only are explained, or the explanations are partial, the work is called a _vocabulary_; and when there is merely a list of explanations of the technical words and expressions in some particular subject, a _glossary_. An alphabetical arrangement of the words of some book or author with references to the places where they occur is called an index (q.v.). When under each word the phrases containing it are added to the references, the work is called a _concordance_. Sometimes, however, these names are given to true dictionaries; thus the great Italian dictionary of the _Accademia della Crusca_, in six volumes folio, is called _Vocabolario_, and Ernesti's dictionary to Cicero is called _Index_. When the words are arranged according to a definite system of classification under heads and subdivisions, according to their nature or their meaning, the book is usually called a classed vocabulary; but when sufficient explanations are given it is often accepted as a dictionary, like the _Onomasticon_ of Julius Pollux, or the native dictionaries of Sanskrit, Manchu and many other languages.

Dictionaries were originally books of reference explaining the words of a language or of some part of it. As the names of things, as well as those of persons and places, are words, and often require explanation even more than other classes of words, they were necessarily included in dictionaries, and often to a very great extent. In time, books were devoted to them alone, and were limited to special subjects, and these have so multiplied, that dictionaries of things now rival in number and variety those of words or of languages, while they often far surpass them in bulk. There are dictionaries of biography and history, real and fictitious, general and special, relating to men of all countries, characters and professions; the English _Dictionary of National Biography_ (see BIOGRAPHY) is a great instance of one form of these; dictionaries of bibliography, relating to all books, or to those of some particular kind or country; dictionaries of geography (sometimes called _gazetteers_) of the whole world, of particular countries, or of small districts, of towns and of villages, of castles, monasteries and other buildings. There are dictionaries of philosophy; of the Bible; of mathematics; of natural history, zoology, botany; of birds, trees, plants and flowers; of chemistry, geology and mineralogy; of architecture, painting and music; of medicine, surgery, anatomy, pathology and physiology; of diplomacy; of law, canon, civil, statutory and criminal; of political and social sciences; of agriculture, rural economy and gardening; of commerce, navigation, horsemanship and the military arts; of mechanics, machines and the manual arts. There are dictionaries of antiquities, of chronology, of dates, of genealogy, of heraldry, of diplomatics, of abbreviations, of useful receipts, of monograms, of adulterations and of very many other subjects. These works are separately referred to in the bibliographies attached to the articles on the separate subjects. And lastly, there are dictionaries of the arts and sciences, and their comprehensive offspring, encyclopaedias (q.v.), which include in themselves every branch of knowledge. Neither under the heading of _dictionary_ nor under that of _encyclopaedia_ do we propose to include a mention of every work of its class, but many of these will be referred to in the separate articles on the subjects to which they pertain. And in this article we confine ourselves to an account of those dictionaries which are primarily word-books. This is practically the most convenient distinction from the subject-book or encyclopaedia; though the two characters are often combined in one work. Thus the _Century Dictionary_ has encyclopaedic features, while the present edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, restoring its earlier tradition but carrying out the idea more systematically, also embodies dictionary features.

_Dictionarium_ is a word of low or modern Latinity;[1] _dictio_, from which it was formed, was used in medieval Latin to mean a word. _Lexicon_ is a corresponding word of Greek origin, meaning a book of or for words--a dictionary. A _glossary_ is properly a collection of unusual or foreign words requiring explanation. It is the name frequently given to English dictionaries of dialects, which the Germans usually call _idioticon_, and the Italians _vocabolario_. _Wörterbuch_, a book of words, was first used among the Germans, according to Grimm, by Kramer (1719), imitated from the Dutch _woordenboek_. From the Germans the Swedes and Danes adopted _ordbok_, _ordbog_. The Icelandic _ordabôk_, like the German, contains the genitive plural. The Slavonic nations use _slovar_, _slovnik_, and the southern Slavs _ryetshnik_, from _slovo_, _ryetsh_, a word, formed, like dictionary and lexicon, without composition. Many other names have been given to dictionaries, as _thesaurus_, _Sprachschatz_, _cornucopia_, _gazophylacium_, _comprehensorium_, _catholicon_, to indicate their completeness; _manipulus predicantium_, _promptorium puerorum_, _liber memorialis_, _hortus vocabulorum_, _ionia_ (a violet bed), _alveary_ (a beehive), _kamoos_ (the sea), _haft kulzum_ (the seven seas), _tsze tien_ (a standard of character), _onomasticon_, _nomenclator_, _bibliotheca_, _elucidario_, _Mundart-sammlung_, _clavis_, _scala_, _pharetra_,[2] _La Crusca_ from the great Italian dictionary, and _Calepino_ (in Spanish and Italian) from the Latin dictionary of Calepinus.

The tendency of great dictionaries is to unite in themselves all the peculiar features of special dictionaries. A large dictionary is most useful when a word is to be thoroughly studied, or when there is difficulty in making out the meaning of a word or phrase. Special dictionaries are more useful for special purposes; for instance, synonyms are best studied in a dictionary of synonyms. And small dictionaries are more convenient for frequent use, as in translating from an unfamiliar language, for words may be found more quickly, and they present the words and their meanings in a concentrated and compact form, instead of being scattered over a large space, and separated by other matter. Dictionaries of several languages, called _polyglots_, are of different kinds. Some are polyglot in the vocabulary, but not in the explanation, like Johnson's dictionary of Persian and Arabic explained in English; some in the interpretation, but not in the vocabulary or explanation, like _Calepini octoglotton_, a Latin dictionary of Latin, with the meanings in seven languages. Many great dictionaries are now polyglot in this sense. Some are polyglot in the vocabulary and interpretation, but are explained in one language, like Jal's _Glossaire nautique_, a glossary of sea terms in many languages, giving the equivalents of each word in the other languages, but the explanation in French. Pauthier's _Annamese Dictionary_ is polyglot in a peculiar way. It gives the Chinese characters with their pronunciation in Chinese and Annamese. Special dictionaries are of many kinds. There are technical dictionaries of etymology, foreign words, dialects, secret languages, slang, neology, barbarous words, faults of expression, choice words, prosody, pronunciation, spelling, orators, poets, law, music, proper names, particular authors, nouns, verbs, participles, particles, double forms, difficulties and many others. Fick's dictionary (Göttingen, 1868, 8vo; 1874-1876, 8vo, 4 vols.) is a remarkable attempt to ascertain the common language of the Indo-European nations before each of their great separations. In the second edition of his _Etymologische Forschungen_ (Lemgo and Detmoldt, 1859-1873, 8vo, 7217 pages) Pott gives a comparative lexicon of Indo-European roots, 2226 in number, occupying 5140 pages.

Methods.

At no time was progress in the making of general dictionaries so rapid as during the second half of the 19th century. It is to be seen in three things: in the perfecting of the theory of what a general dictionary should be; in the elaboration of methods of collecting and editing lexicographic materials; and in the magnitude and improved quality of the work which has been accomplished or planned. Each of these can best be illustrated from English lexicography, in which the process of development has in all directions been carried farthest. The advance that has been made in theory began with a radical change of opinion with regard to the chief end of the general dictionary of a language. The older view of the matter was that the lexicographer should furnish a standard of usage--should register only those words which are, or at some period of the language have been, "good" from a literary point of view, with their "proper" senses and uses, or should at least furnish the means of determining what these are. In other words, his chief duty was conceived to be to sift and refine, to decide authoritatively questions with regard to good usage, and thus to fix the language as completely as might be possible within the limits determined by the literary taste of his time. Thus the Accademia della Crusca, founded near the close of the 16th century, was established for the purpose of purifying in this way the Italian tongue, and in 1612 the _Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca_, long the standard of that language, was published. The Académie Française, the first edition of whose dictionary appeared in 1694, had a similar origin. In England the idea of constructing a dictionary upon this principle arose during the second quarter of the 18th century. It was imagined by men of letters--among them Alexander Pope--that the English language had then attained such perfection that further improvement was hardly possible, and it was feared that if it were not fixed by lexicographic authority deterioration would soon begin. Since there was no English "Academy," it was necessary that the task should fall to some one whose judgment would command respect, and the man who undertook it was Samuel Johnson. His dictionary, the first edition of which, in two folio volumes, appeared in 1755, was in many respects admirable, but it was inadequate even as a standard of the then existing literary usage. Johnson himself did not long entertain the belief that the natural development of a language can be arrested in that or in any other way. His work was, however, generally accepted as a final authority, and the ideas upon which it was founded dominated English lexicography for more than a century. The first effective protest in England against the supremacy of this literary view was made by Dean (later Archbishop) Trench, in a paper on "Some Deficiencies in Existing English Dictionaries" read before the Philological Society in 1857. "A dictionary," he said, "according to that idea of it which seems to me alone capable of being logically maintained, is an _inventory of the language_; much more, but this primarily.... It is no task of the maker of it to select the _good_ words of the language.... The business which he has undertaken is to collect and arrange _all_ words, whether good or bad, whether they commend themselves to his judgment or otherwise.... _He is an historian of_ [the language], _not a critic._" That is, for the literary view of the chief end of the general dictionary should be substituted the philological or scientific. In Germany this substitution had already been effected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their dictionary of the German language, the first volume of which appeared in 1854. In brief, then, the modern view is that the general dictionary of a language should be a record of all the words--current or obsolete--of that language, with all their meanings and uses, but should not attempt to be, except secondarily or indirectly, a guide to "good" usage. A "standard" dictionary has, in fact, been recognized to be an impossibility, if not an absurdity.

This theoretical requirement must, of course, be modified considerably in practice. The date at which a modern language is to be regarded by the lexicographer as "beginning" must, as a rule, be somewhat arbitrarily chosen; while considerable portions of its earlier vocabulary cannot be recovered because of the incompleteness of the literary record. Moreover, not even the most complete dictionary can include all the words which the records--earlier and later--actually contain. Many words, that is to say, which are found in the literature of a language cannot be regarded as, for lexicographic purposes, belonging to that language; while many more may or may not be held to belong to it, according to the judgment--almost the whim--of the individual lexicographer. This is especially true of the English tongue. "That vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the vocabulary of English-speaking men presents, to the mind that endeavours to grasp it as a definite whole, the aspect of one of those nebulous masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a clear and unmistakable nucleus shades off on all sides, through zones of decreasing brightness, to a dim marginal film that seems to end nowhere, but to lose itself imperceptibly in the surrounding darkness" (Dr J. A. H. Murray, _Oxford Dict._ General Explanations, p. xvii). This "marginal film" of words with more or less doubtful claims to recognition includes thousands of the terms of the natural sciences (the New-Latin classificatory names of zoology and botany, names of chemical compounds and of minerals, and the like); half-naturalized foreign words; dialectal words; slang terms; trade names (many of which have passed or are passing into common use); proper names and many more. Many of these even the most complete dictionary should exclude; others it should include; but where the line shall be drawn will always remain a vexed question.

Another important principle upon which Trench insisted, and which also expresses a requirement of modern scientific philology, is that the dictionary shall be not merely a record, but also an _historical_ record of words and their uses. From the literary point of view the most important thing is present usage. To that alone the idea of a "standard" has any application. Dictionaries of the older type, therefore, usually make the common, or "proper" or "root" meaning of a word the starting point of its definition, and arrange its other senses in a logical or accidental order commonly ignoring the historical order in which the various meanings arose. Still less do they attempt to give data from which the vocabulary of the language at any previous period may be determined. The philologist, however, for whom the growth, or progressive alteration, of a language is a fact of central importance, regards no record of a language as complete which does not exhibit this growth in its successive stages. He desires to know when and where each word, and each form and sense of it, are first found in the language; if the word or sense is obsolete, when it died; and any other fact that throws light upon its history. He requires, accordingly, of the lexicographer that, having ascertained these data, he shall make them the foundation of his exposition--in particular, of the division and arrangement of his definitions, that sense being placed first which appeared first in order of time. In other words, each article in the dictionary should furnish an orderly biography of the word of which it treats, each word and sense being so dated that the exact time of its appearance and the duration of its use may as nearly as possible be determined. This, in principle, is the method of the new lexicography. In practice it is subject to limitations similar to those of the vocabulary mentioned above. Incompleteness of the early record is here an even greater obstacle; and there are many words whose history is, for one reason or another, so unimportant that to treat it elaborately would be a waste of labour and space.

The adoption of the historical principle involves a further noteworthy modification of older methods, namely, an important extension of the use of quotations. To Dr Johnson belongs the credit of showing how useful, when properly chosen, they may be, not only in corroborating the lexicographer's statements, but also in revealing special shades of meaning or variations of use which his definitions cannot well express. No part of Johnson's work is more valuable than this. This idea was more fully developed and applied by Dr Charles Richardson, whose _New Dictionary of the English Language ... Illustrated by Quotations from the Best Authors_ (1835-1836) still remains a most valuable collection of literary illustrations. Lexicographers, however, have, with few exceptions, until a recent date, employed quotations chiefly for the ends just mentioned--as instances of use or as illustrations of correct usage--with scarcely any recognition of their value as historical evidence; and they have taken them almost exclusively from the works of the "best" authors. But since all the data upon which conclusions with regard to the history of a word can be based must be collected from the literature of the language, it is evident that, in so far as the lexicographer is required to furnish evidence for an historical inference, a quotation is the best form in which he can give it. In fact, extracts, properly selected and grouped, are generally sufficient to show the entire meaning and biography of a word without the aid of elaborate definitions. The latter simply save the reader the trouble of drawing the proper conclusions for himself. A further rule of the new lexicography, accordingly, is that quotations should be used, primarily, as historical evidence, and that the history of words and meanings should be exhibited by means of them. The earliest instance of use that can be found, and (if the word or sense is obsolete) the latest, are as a rule to be given; while in the case of an important word or sense, instances taken from successive periods of its currency also should be cited. Moreover, a quotation which contains an important bit of historical evidence must be used, whether its source is "good," from the literary point of view, or not--whether it is a classic of the language or from a daily newspaper; though where choice is possible, preference should, of course, be given to quotations extracted from the works of the best writers. This rule does not do away with the illustrative use of quotations, which is still recognized as highly important, but it subordinates it to their historical use. It is necessary to add that it implies that the extracts must be given exactly, and in the original spelling and capitalization, accurately dated, and furnished with a precise reference to author, book, volume, page and edition; for insistence upon these requirements--which are obviously important, whatever the use of the quotation may be--is one of the most noteworthy of modern innovations. Johnson usually gave simply the author's name, and often quoted from memory and inaccurately; and many of his successors to this day have followed--altogether or to some extent--his example.

The chief difficulty in the way of this use of quotations--after the difficulty of collection--is that of finding space for them in a dictionary of reasonable size. Preference must be given to those which are essential, the number of those which are cited merely on methodical grounds being made as small as possible. It is hardly necessary to add that the negative evidence furnished by quotations is generally of little value; one can seldom, that is, be certain that the lexicographer has actually found the earliest or the latest use, or that the word or sense has not been current during some intermediate period from which he has no quotations.

Lastly, a much more important place in the scheme of the ideal dictionary is now assigned to the _etymology_ of words. This may be attributed, in part, to the recent rapid development of etymology as a science, and to the greater abundance of trustworthy data; but it is chiefly due to the fact that from the historical point of view the connexion between that section of the biography of a word which lies within the language--subsequent, that is, to the time when the language may, for lexicographical purposes, be assumed to have begun, or to the time when the word was adopted or invented--and its antecedent history has become more vital and interesting. Etymology, in other words, is essentially the history of the _form_ of a word up to the time when it became a part of the language, and is, in a measure, an extension of the history of the development of the word in the language. Moreover, it is the only means by which the exact relations of allied words can be ascertained, and the separation of words of the same form but of diverse origin (homonyms) can be effected, and is thus, for the dictionary, the foundation of all _family history_ and correct _genealogy_. In fact, the attention that has been paid to these two points in the best recent lexicography is one of its distinguishing and most important characteristics. Related to the etymology of words are the changes in their form which may have occurred while they have been in use as parts of the language--modifications of their pronunciation, corruptions by popular etymology or false associations, and the like. The facts with regard to these things which the wide research necessitated by the historical method furnishes abundantly to the modern lexicographer are often among the most novel and interesting of his acquisitions.

It should be added that even approximate conformity to the theoretical requirements of modern lexicography as above outlined is possible only under conditions similar to those under which the Oxford _New English Dictionary_ was undertaken (see below). The labour demanded is too vast, and the necessary bulk of the dictionary too great. When, however, a language is recorded in one such dictionary, those of smaller size and more modest pretensions can rest upon it as an authority and conform to it as a model so far as their special limitations permit.

The ideal thus developed is primarily that of the general dictionary of the purely philological type, but it applies also to the encyclopaedic dictionary. In so far as the latter is strictly lexicographic--deals with words as words, and not with the things they denote--it should be made after the model of the former, and is defective to the extent in which it deviates from it. The addition of encyclopaedic matter to the philological in no way affects the general principles involved. It may, however, for practical reasons, modify their application in various ways. For example, the number of obsolete and dialectal words included may be much diminished and the number of scientific terms (for instance, new Latin botanical and zoological names) be increased; and the relative amount of space devoted to etymologies and quotations may be lessened. In general, since books of this kind are designed to serve more or less as works of general reference, the making of them must be governed by considerations of practical utility which the compilers of a purely philological dictionary are not obliged to regard. The encyclopaedic type itself, although it has often been criticized as hybrid--as a mixture of two things which should be kept distinct--is entirely defensible. Between the dictionary and the encyclopaedia the dividing line cannot sharply be drawn. There are words the meaning of which cannot be explained fully without some description of things, and, on the other hand, the description of things and processes often involves the definition of names. To the combination of the two objection cannot justly be made, so long as it is effected in a way--with a selection of material--that leaves the dictionary essentially a dictionary and not an encyclopaedia. Moreover, the large vocabulary of the general dictionary makes it possible to present certain kinds of encyclopaedic matter with a degree of fulness and a convenience of arrangement which are possible in no single work of any other class. In fact, it may be said that if the encyclopaedic dictionary did not exist it would have to be invented; that its justification is its indispensableness. Not the least of its advantages is that it makes legitimate the use of diagrams and pictorial illustrations, which, if properly selected and executed, are often valuable aids to definition.

On its practical side the advance in lexicography has consisted in the elaboration of methods long in use rather than in the invention of new ones. The only way to collect the data upon which the vocabulary, the definitions and the history are to be based is, of course, to search for them in the written monuments of the language, as all lexicographers who have not merely borrowed from their predecessors have done. But the wider scope and special aims of the new lexicography demand that the investigation shall be vastly more comprehensive, systematic and precise. It is necessary, in brief, that, as far as may be possible, the literature (of all kinds) of every period of the language shall be examined systematically, in order that all the words, and senses and forms of words, which have existed during any period may be found, and that enough excerpts (carefully verified, credited and dated) to cover all the essential facts shall be made. The books, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, and so on which must thus be searched will be numbered by thousands, and the quotations selected may (as in the case of the Oxford _New English Dictionary_) be counted by millions. This task is beyond the powers of any one man, even though he be a Johnson, or a Littré or a Grimm, and it is now assigned to a corps of readers whose number is limited only by the ability of the editor to obtain such assistance. The modern method of editing the material thus accumulated--the actual work of compilation--also is characterized by the application of the principle of the division of labour. Johnson boasted that his dictionary was written with but little assistance from the learned, and the same was in large measure true of that of Littré. Such attempts on the part of one man to write practically the whole of a general dictionary are no longer possible, not merely because of the vast labour and philological research necessitated by modern aims, but more especially because the immense development of the vocabulary of the special sciences renders indispensable the assistance, in the work of definition, of persons who are expert in those sciences. The tendency, accordingly, has been to enlarge greatly the editorial staff of the dictionary, scores of sub-editors and contributors being now employed where a dozen or fewer were formerly deemed sufficient. In other words, the making of a "complete" dictionary has become a co-operative enterprise, to the success of which workers in all the fields of literature and science contribute.

The most complete exemplification of these principles and methods is the _Oxford New English Dictionary, on historical principles, founded mainly on materials collected by the Philological Society_. This monumental work originated in the suggestion of Trench that an attempt should be made, under the direction of the Philological Society, to complete the vocabulary of existing dictionaries and to supply the historical information which they lacked. The suggestion was adopted, considerable material was collected, and Mr Herbert Coleridge was appointed general editor. He died in 1861, and was succeeded by Dr F. J. Furnivall. Little, however, was done, beyond the collection of quotations--about 2,000,000 of which were gathered--until in 1878 the expense of printing and publishing the proposed dictionary was assumed by the Delegates of the University Press, and the editorship was entrusted to Dr (afterwards Sir) J. A. H. Murray. As the historical point of beginning, the middle of the 12th century was selected, all words that were obsolete at that date being excluded, though the history of words that were current both before and after that date is given in its entirety; and it was decided that the search for quotations--which, according to the original design, was to cover the entire literature down to the beginning of the 16th century and as much of the subsequent literature (especially the works of the more important writers and works on special subjects) as might be possible--should be made more thorough. More than 800 readers, in all parts of the world, offered their aid; and when the preface to the first volume appeared in 1888, the editor was able to announce that the readers had increased to 1300, and that 3,500,000 of quotations, taken from the writings of more than 5000 authors, had already been amassed. The whole work was planned to be completed in ten large volumes, each issued first in smaller parts. The first part was issued in 1884, and by the beginning of 1910 the first part of the letter S had been reached.

The historical method of exposition, particularly by quotations, is applied in the _New English Dictionary_, if not in all cases with entire success, yet, on the whole, with a regularity and a precision which leave little to be desired. A minor fault is that excerpts from second or third rate authors have occasionally been used where better ones from writers of the first class either must have been at hand or could have been found. As was said above, the literary quality of the question is highly important even in historical lexicography, and should not be neglected unnecessarily. Other special features of the book are the completeness with which variations of pronunciation and orthography (with dates) are given; the fulness and scientific excellence of the etymologies, which abound in new information and corrections of old errors; the phonetic precision with which the present (British) pronunciation is indicated; and the elaborate subdivision of meanings. The definitions as a whole are marked by a high degree of accuracy, though in a certain number of cases (not explicable by the date of the volumes) the lists of meanings are not so good as one would expect, as compared (say) with the _Century Dictionary_. Work of such magnitude and quality is possible, practically, only when the editor of the dictionary can command not merely the aid of a very large number of scholars and men of science, but their gratuitous aid. In this the _New English Dictionary_ has been singularly fortunate. The conditions under which it originated, and its aim, have interested scholars everywhere, and led them to contribute to the perfecting of it their knowledge and time. The long list of names of such helpers in Sir J. A. H. Murray's preface is in curious contrast with their absence from Dr Johnson's and the few which are given in that of Littré. The editor's principal assistants were Dr Henry Bradley and Dr W. A. Craigie. Of the dictionary as a whole it may be said that it is one of the greatest achievements, whether in literature or science, of modern English scholarship and research.

The _New English Dictionary_ furnishes for the first time data from which the extent of the English word-store at any given period, and the direction and rapidity of its growth, can fairly be estimated. For this purpose the materials furnished by the older dictionaries are quite insufficient, on account of their incompleteness and unhistorical character. For example 100 pages of the _New English Dictionary_ (from the letter H) contain 1002 words, of which, as the dated quotations show, 585 were current in 1750 (though some, of course, were very rare, some dialectal, and so on), 191 were obsolete at that date, and 226 have since come into use. But of the more than 700 words--current or obsolete--which Johnson might thus have recorded, he actually did record only about 300. Later dictionaries give more of them, but they in no way show their status at the date in question. It is worth noting that the figures given seem to indicate that not very many more words have been added to the vocabulary of the language during the past 150 years than had been lost by 1750. The pages selected, however, contain comparatively few recent scientific terms. A broader comparison would probably show that the gain has been more than twice as great as the loss.

In the _Deutsches Wörterbuch_ of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm the scientific spirit, as was said above, first found expression in general lexicography. The desirability of a complete inventory and investigation of German words was recognized by Leibnitz and by various 18th-century scholars, but the plan and methods of the Grimms were the direct product of the then new scientific philology. Their design, in brief, was to give an exhaustive account of the words of the literary language (New High German) from about the end of the 15th century, including their earlier etymological and later history, with references to important dialectal words and forms; and to illustrate their use and history abundantly by quotations. The first volume appeared in 1854. Jacob Grimm (died 1863) edited the first, second (with his brother, who died in 1859), third and a part of the fourth volumes; the others have been edited by various distinguished scholars. The scope and methods of this dictionary have been broadened somewhat as the work has advanced. In general it may be said that it differs from the _New English Dictionary_ chiefly in its omission of pronunciations and other pedagogic matter; its irregular treatment of dates; its much less systematic and less lucid statement of etymologies; its less systematic and less fruitful use of quotations; and its less convenient and less intelligible arrangement of material and typography.

These general principles lie also at the foundation of the scholarly _Dictionnaire de la langue française_ of E. Littré, though they are there carried out less systematically and less completely. In the arrangement of the definitions the first place is given to the most primitive meaning of the word instead of to the most common one, as in the dictionary of the Academy; but the other meanings follow in an order that is often logical rather than historical. Quotations also are frequently used merely as literary illustrations, or are entirely omitted; in the special paragraphs on the history of words before the 16th century, however, they are put to a strictly historical use. This dictionary--perhaps the greatest ever compiled by one man--was published 1863-1872. (Supplement, 1878.)

The _Thesaurus Linguae Latinae_, prepared under the auspices of the German Academies of Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig, Munich and Vienna, is a notable application of the principles and practical co-operative method of modern lexicography to the classical tongues. The plan of the work is to collect quotations which shall register, with its full context, every word (except the most familiar particles) in the text of each Latin author down to the middle of the 2nd century A.D., and to extract all important passages from all writers of the following centuries down to the 7th; and upon these materials to found a complete historical dictionary of the Latin language. The work of collecting quotations was begun in 1894, and the first part of the first volume has been published.

In the making of all these great dictionaries (except, of course, the last) the needs of the general public as well as those of scholars have been kept in view. But the type to which the general dictionary designed for popular use has tended more and more to conform is the _encyclopaedic_. This combination of lexicon and encyclopaedia is exhibited in an extreme--and theoretically objectionable--form in the _Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX^e siècle_ of Pierre Larousse. Besides common words and their definitions, it contains a great many proper names, with a correspondingly large number of biographical, geographical, historical and other articles, the connexion of which with the strictly lexicographical part is purely mechanical. Its utility, which--notwithstanding its many defects--is very great, makes it, however, a model in many respects. Fifteen volumes were published (1866-1876), and supplements were brought out later (1878-1890). The _Nouveau Larousse illustré_ started publication in 1901, and was completed in 1904 (7 vols.). This is not an abridgment or a fresh edition of the _Grand Dictionnaire_ of Pierre Larousse, but a new and distinct publication.

The most notable work of this class, in English, is the _Century Dictionary_, an American product, edited by Professor W. D. Whitney, and published 1889-1891 in six volumes, containing 7046 pages (large quarto). It conforms to the philological mode in giving with great fulness the older as well as the present vocabulary of the language, and in the completeness of its etymologies; but it does not attempt to give the full history of every word within the language. Among its other more noteworthy characteristics are the inclusion of a great number of modern scientific and technical words, and the abundance of its quotations. The quotations are for the most part provided with references, but they are not dated. Even when compared with the much larger _New English Dictionary_, the _Century's_ great merit is the excellent enumeration of meanings, and the accuracy of its explanations; in this respect it is often better and fuller than the _New English_. In the application of the encyclopaedic method this dictionary is conservative, excluding, with a few exceptions, proper names, and restricting, for the most part, the encyclopaedic matter to descriptive and other details which may legitimately be added to the definitions. Its pictorial illustrations are very numerous and well executed. In the manner of its compilation it is a good example of modern cooperative dictionary-making, being the joint product of a large number of specialists. Next to the _New English Dictionary_ it is the most complete and scholarly of English lexicons.

_Bibliography._--The following list of dictionaries (from the 9th edition of this work, with occasional corrections) is given for its historical interest, but in recent years dictionary-making has been so abundant that no attempt is made to be completely inclusive of later works; the various articles on languages may be consulted for these. The list is arranged geographically by families of languages, or by regions. In each group the order, when not alphabetical, is usually from north to south, extinct languages generally coming first, and dialects being placed under their language. Dictionaries forming parts of other works, such as travels, histories, transactions, periodicals, reading-books, &c., are generally excluded. The system here adopted was chosen as on the whole the one best calculated to keep together dictionaries naturally associated. The languages to be considered are too many for an alphabetical arrangement, which ignores all relations both natural and geographical, and too few to require a strict classification by affinities, by which the European languages, which for many reasons should be kept together, would be dispersed. Under either system, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, whose dictionaries are so closely connected, would be widely separated. A wholly geographical arrangement would be inconvenient, especially in Europe. Any system, however, which attempts to arrange in a consecutive series the great network of languages by which the whole world is enclosed, must be open to some objections; and the arrangement adopted in this list has produced some anomalies and dispersions which might cause inconvenience if not pointed out. The old Italic languages are placed under Latin, all dialects of France under French (but Provençal as a distinct language), and Wallachian among Romanic languages. Low German and its dialects are not separated from High German. Basque is placed after Celtic; Albanian, Gipsy and Turkish at the end of Europe, the last being thus separated from its dialects and congeners in Northern and Central Asia, among which are placed the Kazan dialect of Tatar, Samoyed and Ostiak. Accadian is placed after Assyrian among the Semitic languages, and Maltese as a dialect of Arabic; while the Ethiopic is among African languages as it seemed undesirable to separate it from the other Abyssinian languages, or these from their neighbours to the north and south. Circassian and Ossetic are joined to the first group of Aryan languages lying to the north-west of Persia, and containing Armenian, Georgian and Kurd. The following is the order of the groups, some of the more important languages, that is, of those best provided with dictionaries, standing alone:--

EUROPE: Greek, Latin, French, Romance, Teutonic (Scandinavian and German), Celtic, Basque, Baltic, Slavonic, Ugrian, Gipsy, Albanian.

ASIA: Semitic, Armenian, Persian, Sanskrit, Indian, Indo-Chinese, Malay Archipelago, Philippines, Chinese, Japanese, Northern and Central Asia.

AFRICA: Egypt and Abyssinia, Eastern Africa, Southern, Western, Central, Berber.

AUSTRALIA AND POLYNESIA.

AMERICA: North, Central (with Mexico), South.

EUROPE

Greek.---Athenaeus quotes 35 writers of works, known or supposed to be dictionaries, for, as they are all lost, it is often difficult to decide on their nature. Of these, Anticlides, who lived after the reign of Alexander the Great, wrote [Greek: Exêgêtikos], which seems to have been a sort of dictionary, perhaps explaining the words and phrases occurring in ancient stories. Zenodotus, the first superintendent of the great library of Alexandria, who lived in the reigns of Ptolemy I. and Ptolemy II., wrote [Greek: Glôssai], and also [Greek: Lexeis ethnikai], a dictionary of barbarous or foreign phrases. Aristophanes of Byzantium, son of Apelles the painter, who lived in the reigns of Ptolemy II. and Ptolemy III., and had the supreme management of the Alexandrian library, wrote a number of works, as [Greek: Attikai Lexeis, Lakônikai Glôssai] which, from the titles, should be dictionaries, but a fragment of his [Greek: Lexeis] printed by Boissonade, in his edition of Herodian (London, 1869, 8vo, pp. 181-189), is not alphabetical. Artemidorus, a pupil of Aristophanes, wrote a dictionary of technical terms used in cookery. Nicander Colophonius, hereditary priest of Apollo Clarius, born at Claros, near Colophon in Ionia, in reputation for 50 years, from 181 to 135, wrote [Greek: Glôssai] in at least three books. Parthenius, a pupil of the Alexandrian grammarian Dionysius (who lived in the 1st century before Christ), wrote on choice words used by historians. Didymus, called [Greek: chalkenteros], who, according to Athenaeus, wrote 3500 books, and, according to Seneca, 4000, wrote lexicons of the tragic poets (of which