CHRONICLING THE eND OF hISTORY:

The word commerce is one that crops us repeatedly: the dictionary testifies to the march of Georgian commercialism. London's commercial fashions, for instance, are the province of Joseph Addison, Johnson's favourite diarist of urban pretentiousness. Addison is hot on modish contemporary slang (fiddlefaddle, wiseacre, incog as a short form of incognito) and on modish phenomena (the chop-house, the sofa, the practice of eating snails). It is to the quotable essayist that Johnson owes his entries for whitewash, "a kind of make-up used by women who wished to make their skin look fair", and for modesty-piece, a word Addison coined to describe the lace which concealed the more exciting parts of women's breasts.

Johnson records plenty of other fashions and innovations: the toyshop, mezzotints, spa towns, the tobacconist (where once the word had signified a tobacco addict, it now denoted a vendor), the newspaper advertisement, the shoeblack, the mania for tulips, and the cosmetic beauty-spot. In an oblique comment on the contemporary rage for vases - such a boon to that other famous native of Staffordshire, Josiah Wedgwood - he defines vase as "generally a vessel rather for show than use".

He also notes the phenomenon of the umbrella, a "skreen [sic] used in hot countries to keep off the sun, and in others to bear off the rain". Umbrellas were not exactly new (Defoe had equipped Robinson Crusoe with an umbrella made of goatskin in 1719), but they were rarely used as a form of protection against British rain until the late 18th century. The philanthropist Jonas Hanway was supposedly the first Londoner to carry one for such purposes, in the early 1750s, and was mocked for doing so.

As it happened, Hanway was one of the many eminent figures with whom Johnson tangled. Hanway liked to warn of the dangers of drinking tea, claiming it was "pernicious to health, obstructing industry and impoverishing the nation". To Johnson this seemed risibly wrong-headed; he was pleased to pronounce himself a "hardened and shameless tea-drinker".

Yet although it was the fashion for tea-drinking that mainly drove demand for another fruit of the colonies, sugar (which Johnson defines as "the native salt of the sugar-cane, obtained by the expression and evaporation of its juice") it was coffee that proved the more remarkable phenomenon of the age. Johnson gives a clue to this when he defines coffeehouse as "a house of entertainment where coffee is sold, and the guests are supplied with newspapers". It was this relationship between coffee and entertainment that made it such a potent force.

Coffee was first imported to Europe from Yemen in the early part of the 17th century. The first English coffee house opened in 1652; by the middle of the following century there were several thousand in London. Coffee houses were meeting places, where customers - predominantly male - could convene to discuss politics and current affairs. By the time of the dictionary they were not so much gentlemanly snuggeries as commercial exchanges, often doubling up as libraries or theatres. They were centres, too, of political opposition, and, as they were open to all ranks and religions, they allowed a rare freedom of information and expression. Sceptics like Hanway may have been troubled most of all, then, by the capacity of tea and coffee to act as social lubricants.

Changes in 18th-century leisure threatened the traditional structures of class and faith. For instance, the rising popularity of sports like football and cricket cut across social divides, and reflected the increasing commercialisation of leisure. Matches were money-making spectacles, calculated to attract a paying audience, many of whom would also gamble on the outcome. In defining sport as "diversion of the field, as of fowling, hunting, fishing" Johnson chooses to omit the newer, codified sports, but they are noticed elsewhere in the dictionary. From his definition of cricket - "a sport, at which the contenders drive a ball with sticks in opposition to each other" - we can infer that he never saw it played. Yet it was worth including; the crowds at matches were by the 1750s numbering thousands rather than hundreds.

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