Richardson, CHARLES

Richardson, CHARLES, lexicographer, was born in July 1775, studied law, kept school at Clapham, received in 1852 a pension of £75, and died October 6, 1865. His first work, Illustrations of English Philology (1815), led to his undertaking an English dictionary for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, the first part of which appeared in January 1818. The project fell through, but Richardson's New Dictionary of the English Language at length appeared complete in two quarto volumes in 1837. The work was warmly received—Trench styled it 'the best dictionary in the language'—and at that time it deserved the praise. A later work was entitled On the Study of Language: an Exposition of Tooke's Divisions of Purley (1854).