We’ve previously seen Canadian Pacific Empress menus from 1957 celebrating British artists such as Shakespeare, John Constable, and Robert Burns. Here are another menu in the same series that was collected by Vancouver Canadian Pacific fan Wallace Chung.

Click image to view and download a PDF of this menu from the University of British Columbia Chung collection.

The 1961 menu presents 18th-century writer and dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson. Although Johnson was well-known in his time as the author of books and articles about politics, travel, and poets such as Shakespeare, he is best known today for his 1755 dictionary, which may be the most influential in English history.

Johnson’s goal was to standardize the spelling of many words, including colour, metre, and programme. Fifty-one years later, Noah Webster published his first American dictionary that simplified these spellings to color, meter, and program. Webster was also interesting in creating an American-English language that was distinct from the English-English language.

Beyond spellings, Johnson’s other goal was to fix the definitions of words so that people could more precisely communicate with one another. He didn’t entirely succeed, but his dictionary and follow-up works such as the Oxford English Dictionary probably slowed the drift of changes in meanings over time.

Unlike the Burns supper featured on a Canadian Pacific Empress menu presented here a few weeks ago, today’s menu doesn’t focus on foods that Johnson might have preferred or even had available. It includes roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and potatoes, all New World foods that might have been available to John in the mid-18th century, but wouldn’t have been regarded as standard English fare.