Johnson and the Definition of Silence

This chapter offers a close reading of Johnson’s Dictionary definitions of ‘silence’ and ‘silent’. For Johnson, silence is a literary rather than a scientific concept. It is also associated with a humanist, Renaissance culture (represented by Shakespeare), rather than a proto-Romantic, environmental culture that the Dictionary largely excludes. For Johnson, the sub-definitions of silence are contested ground and directly related to his disapproving apprehension of late eighteenth-century poetics. To approach the Dictionary in this way is to suggest, more broadly, a way of reading its entries not just as definitions, but as complex historical and critical articulations.