The English Baron who is obsessed with changing the dictionary in search of books in Europe (01:12)
Located in Herefordshire, England, Croft Castle was first built in the 11th century by the Croft family, who lived there until 1746, when they had to sell the castle to the Knight family due to lack of money. But the descendants of this family have never forgotten the castle. In 1923, the descendants of the Croft family bought the castle back. Today, the castle is owned by the British National Trust and is open to the public, while the castle is home to numerous exhibits related to the family.
Croft Castle
The reason I came to visit this castle has to do with a book. In the study of this castle is a very special dictionary: a dictionary that the 5th Baron Herbert Croft spent a lot of effort to revise. Because of the modification of this dictionary, the baron was called "Mr. Dictionary".
Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary, croft's revised English dictionary
Croft was born in 1751, when the Croft family had lost its castle. Croft graduated from Oxford University and trained at Lincoln Law School. In 1775, he became a lawyer. However, Croft apparently did not like working as a lawyer, and he returned to Oxford university in 1782 to study theology, intending to become a priest. In 1786, Croft graduated and was granted a job as a pastor in Essex. This time, however, Croft was "willful", leaving aside his pastoral work and choosing to remain in Oxford, revising the English Dictionary compiled by the English writer Samuel Johnson.
In the early years, books were seen as something nearly sacred, but by the mid-18th century, things had changed. Advances in printing and binding technology have made books and newspapers increasingly affordable, while more and more people are literate and need to "look up dictionaries" to understand the grammar, meaning, and spelling of words. Against this backdrop, Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary was born on April 15, 1755. With the help of five or six aides, Johnson completed the dictionary in 9 years. To compile this dictionary, he read important English works from 1558 to 1660. He believed that the English of this period was the best and proposed that the grammar from the Elizabethan era to the time of King James be used as the standard of grammar. In January 1755, he was finally "completed". Johnson's efforts paid off, with he receiving an honorarium of 1,500 guineas (equivalent to £2.5 million today). However, this dictionary is not the first to be published in the United Kingdom, or even in the top ten. More than twenty dictionaries were published in England for more than 150 years, the oldest of which was sir Thomas Elliott's Latin-English "word book" published in 1538.
Johnson's English Dictionary is rich in content, containing nearly 40,000 words and detailed example sentences. This dictionary was influential and became an important achievement in the history of English literature in the eighteenth century. For the next century and a half, the dictionary was an important reference book in the English-speaking world until the birth of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928. Even today, this dictionary can still be found on the shelves of many people's homes. However, the dictionary was also controversial, and Johnson often revealed his bias against certain words in the dictionaries he wrote, for example, when he compiled the word "lexicographer", he defined it as "the person who wrote the dictionary, engaged in a harmless labor", and when he compiled the word "pension", he defined it as "a perk paid to people of special status." In England it usually means the payment of remuneration to a person employed by the state to betray his own country."
Croft believed that Johnson's English Dictionary had many flaws, and he seemed to be enchanted, and he made supplementary changes to it. By 1790, he had added 11,000 words and written more than 200 pages of footnotes. Croft was convinced that he was doing this "in the service of the country" and doing "this national work" on his own. Croft had planned to publish the revised dictionary in 1792, but he did not find enough subscribers, meaning that few would pay for the "new dictionary," and he had to abandon the project.
Step into Croft Castle, walk to the left, and through a small room is the study, where Croft's modified dictionary is displayed in a display case in front of the bookshelf. I saw that the dictionary was open, and the empty space of the two pages that were open was full of annotations. I can't help but wonder what was the motivation for Croft to make a desperate bet and spend thousands of days and nights revising this dictionary? Is it interest? Or try your luck? Croft's luck was not bad, and he published best-selling novels even before he switched to theology. In 1780, Croft's novel Love and Madness was published. The novel is based on the murder of The Count of Sandwich's mistress, British actress Martha Ray, by her beloved lover James Hackman. The novel was so popular that it was reprinted 7 times. Croft was also once infamous. He is said to have swindled the letters of poet Thomas Chaterson, who committed suicide at the age of 18, and profited from them.
As a baron, Croft seemed to have the power to be willful. However, his family was long in ruins, and he did not make a rational use of the little money he had left: in 1795, on the second day of his second marriage, he was imprisoned for debt. Knowing that her husband was bankrupt, the newlywed wife left him. Croft was released from prison and went into exile in France and spent the rest of his life in a friend's castle. Croft and his first wife's three daughters were also implicated by the "hot-headed" father. Because there was no dowry, all three daughters were unmarried for the rest of their lives.
In the castle's study were many books, some of them from Croft himself. Hanging at the top of the study fireplace is a bust of Croft. In the portrait, one of Croft's arms is pressed against a dictionary, apparently a symbol of his keen modification of the English Dictionary, next to which is a bust of Johnson. Croft's eyes were solemn, his hands were crossed, and a determined and helpless breath jumped out of the picture. Although Croft did not succeed in the secular sense, he was not afraid of authority and challenged it; although his revised dictionary was not published, this dictionary inspired posterity: knowledge can always be changed and perfected.
Portrait of Croft
A corner of the study
A collection of books by members of the Croft family
(Cui Ying: Journalist, documentary filmmaker, columnist, PhD from the University of Edinburgh, loves walking and literature, likes to collect old illustration books from all over the world, and has published books such as "British Illustrators" and "British Illustration Book Collection". ）