The Cat Who Helped to Write the Dictionary
The true story of Hodge, the 18th century’s most famous and beloved cat
No puzzle from me this week, but here’s an elegant one from PostMark on MyCrossword. My crash course on how to do cryptic puzzles begins here.
An earlier version of this piece appeared in Tenderly Magazine.
We’re mostly focused on words and wordery here, which means that we have not had as much freedom as we might like to celebrate the cats who sometimes sit upon those words and smile blithely up at you while you’re trying to write. I aim to rectify that regrettable error today, and in the process reflect upon the exceptional niceness of a historical cat named Hodge Johnson, who almost certainly sat on the first modern dictionary.
And that will not have been the only thing Hodge sat on. It is very likely that this great cat, this towering feline, at one time or another sat upon The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abisinnia, a satirical novella concerning the possibility of human happiness; Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, a collection of sizzling hot takes regarding a particularly sad story about a Scottish king; and The Vanity of Human Wishes, a poetic disquisition on the futility of man’s quest for greatness in the style of Juvenal’s tenth satire. This prolific sitter is also suspected by many historians to have sat upon the author of all of these works, Samuel Johnson himself, the actual dude who wrote the whole actual dictionary all by himself. (Well, sort of. This is absolutely a subject for another day, but there were a number of English dictionaries before Johnson’s, though none were so comprehensive or influential. Whether these early dictionarists would have done more memorable work with a feline assistant is not recorded by history.)
But we are not here to talk about the achievements of Doctor Samuel Johnson. Doctor Samuel Johnson is a footnote in this story. He is a hand for petting. He is a vehicle for oysters (according to James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the good Doctor would put away his writing and go into town for oysters whenever Hodge was feeling peckish). He is a lap.
He is also the source of most of what we know about Hodge, so we will need to refer to his notes, whatever we may think of him. It might be useful for us to think of Johnson as Hodge’s Boswell, just as Boswell was Johnson’s Boswell (and Johnson therefore was Boswell’s Hodge, while Hodge was of course Johnson’s Hodge, as Boswell didn’t like cats), if that’s not too confusing.
Indeed, Johnson, who literally wrote the dictionary definition for “cat” (A domestick animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species), has given us the best evidence we have for the theory that Hodge was a very nice cat indeed by confirming to his biographer that Hodge was “very fine.” As Boswell has it:
“I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”
While these sentiments may seem faint praise to some and not by themselves sufficient to establish the historical niceness of this great cat, it is important to remember that Samuel Johnson was also a man who was not afraid to eviscerate anything he found objectionable. He described the academic Thomas Sheridan (father of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan) as “dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature.” He took every available opportunity to malign Scottish people (he defined “Oats” in his dictionary as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”). And he humiliated nature’s noblest reptiles by defining “Lizard” as “an animal resembling a serpent, with legs added to it.” But for Hodge, Johnson reserved a softer side. A protectiveness, which Boswell observes in an anecdote:
“This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. “Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.” And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, “But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.”
Toward the end of Hodge’s life, Johnson was teased by his friend Hester Thrale for obtaining the 18th century equivalent of catnip “to amuse Hodge in his last hours,” and when this (now, surely we can agree) exceptionally nice cat darkened the world by finally leaving it, he was elegized by the poet Percival Stockdale. “An Elegy on The Death of Dr Johnson’s Favourite Cat” (1778) is a rebuke to each of us, fallen as we are, who must inevitably strive and fail to achieve even an iota of the niceness of this cat:
“The general conduct if we trace
Of our articulating race,
Hodge’s example we shall find
A keen reproof of human kind.
He lived in town, yet ne’er got drunk,
Nor spent one farthing on a punk;
He never filched a single groat,
Nor bilked a taylor of a coat;
His garb when first he drew his breath
His dress through life, his shroud in death.”
Hodge has been gone for 244 years, but the groat-filching, tailor-bilking, punk-paying rest of us can edify ourselves by contemplating this legitimately lovely lexicographer’s lapcat, this perfect purring prince, at the site of the statue that is built to him in the courtyard of Dr. Johnson’s house in Gough Square in London. But even in the state of grace, Hodge passes no judgment, nor does he deign to look down at us from his perch:
“I made Hodge about shoulder height for the average adult,” wrote the sculptor Jon Bickley, “which is just about right for putting an arm around.”
In the words of Percival Stockdale:
“Dost thou, with generous pride aspire
Thy nature’s glory to acquire?
Then in thy life exert the man,
With moral deed adorn the span;
Let virtue in thy bosom lodge;
Or wish thou hadst been born a Hodge.”