The comedian and presenter Sue Perkins hosts an introduction to Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) through the conceit of a tour of his house in London, starting with the statue of Johnson’s cat outside his home and climaxing at the top of the house in the garret in which he compiled the dictionary. On the journey through Johnson’s home, with a brief excursion to the British Library, Perkins is joined by a curator from the house itself; Henry Hitchings, a biographer of Johnson; John Simpson, a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Kate Thomson, an antiquarian bookseller who introduces Perkins to the earliest English dictionaries held in the British Library. The tour is accompanied by conversational snippets from Johnson’s Dictionary, beginning with his definition of ‘preface’. It includes some of his famous entries, such as ‘a harmless drudge’ for ‘lexicographer’, and ends with a moving excerpt from Johnson’s own preface to the Dictionary, complaining of the sometimes painful drudgery of the task and hoping for acclaim.

Money emerges as a significant theme in the programme, beginning with Perkins’ opening discussion of the thickness of Johnson’s front door. Stephanie Pickford, the house’s curator (introduced by Johnson’s definition of the term), explains that the door functioned as Johnson’s first line of defence, both from criminals in the absence of a regular police force and also from debtors, given the parlous state of Johnson’s finances at the time. Indeed, Johnson’s financial situation is given as one of the reasons he accepted the brief to compile a dictionary from London’s booksellers. A discussion of changing ideas of literary patronage at the time – with Johnson himself moving from noble patronage to a more modern publishing system over the course of writing the dictionary – would have been helpful here.

Perkins is an able, amiable, and engaging host for the discussion about Johnson’s achievement, contextualised with a detailed look at earlier dictionaries and what makes Johnson’s unique. Discussing Johnson’s inclusion of quotations exemplifying the use of the words he included in the dictionary, Hitchings suggests that Johnson invented the idea of English literature itself. Although perhaps overstated, this is an intriguing perspective on Johnson’s role in canon-formation, which would have been worth pursuing in more detail.

In fact, most of my criticisms of the programme boil down to wanting more: more context on eighteenth-century literary patronage; more thought on Johnson and canonicity; more of Johnson’s more zany definitions, for example, ‘to worm: To deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue, which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad.’ To be left wanting more, on the other hand, is probably the best compliment I could pay to this half-hour taster of Johnson’s achievements and legacy.

‘Words, Words, Words’ was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2009, and was re-broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra in May 2015. It is currently available on BBC iPlayer.