Abel Boyer

Abel Boyer (1667? – 16 November 1729) was a French-English lexicographer, journalist and miscellaneous writer.

Abel Boyer was probably born on 24 June 1667 at Castres, in Upper Languedoc, southern France. His father, Pierre Boyer, one of the two consuls or chief magistrates of Castres, had been suspended and fined for his Protestantism. Boyer's education at the academy of Puylaurens was interrupted by the religious disturbances, and leaving France with his maternal uncle Pierre Campdomerc, a noted Huguenot preacher, he finished his studies at Franeker in Friesland, after a brief episode, it is said, of military service in Holland. Proceeding to England in 1689 he fell into great poverty, and is represented as transcribing and preparing for the press Dr. Thomas Smith's edition of William Camden's Latin correspondence (London, 1691). A good classical scholar, Boyer became in 1692 tutor to Allen Bathurst, afterwards first Earl Bathurst, whose father Sir Benjamin was treasurer of the household of the princess, afterwards Queen Anne. Probably through this connection he was appointed French teacher to her son Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, for whose use he prepared and to whom he dedicated The Complete French Master, published in 1694. Disappointed of advancement on account of his zeal for Whig principles, he abandoned tuition for authorship.

In December 1699, Boyer produced on the London stage, with indifferent success, a modified translation in blank verse of Jean Racine's Iphigénie, which was published in 1700 as Achilles or Iphigenia in Aulis, a tragedy written by Mr. Boyer. A second edition of it appeared in 1714 as The Victim, or Achilles and Iphigenia in Aulis, in an "advertisement" prefixed to which Boyer stated that in its first form it had "passed the correction and approbation" of John Dryden. In 1702, there appeared at The Hague the work which has made Boyer's a familiar name, his Dictionnaire Royal Français et Anglais, divisé en deux parties, ostensibly composed for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, then dead. It was much superior to every previous work of the kind, and has been the basis of very many subsequent French-English dictionaries; the last English unabridged edition is that of 1816; the edition published at Paris in 1860 is stated to be the 41st. For the English-French section Boyer claimed the merit of containing a more complete English dictionary than any previous one, the English words and idioms in it being defined and explained as well as accompanied by their French equivalents. In the French preface to the whole work, Boyer said that 1,000 English words not in any other English dictionary had been added to his by Richard Savage, whom he spoke of as his friend, and who assisted him in several of his French manuals and miscellaneous compilations and translations published subsequently. The macrostructure and microstructure of the entries in Boyer's Royal Dictionary was copied by Ó Beaglaoich in his English-Irish Dictionary of 1732. Among the English versions of French works executed in whole or in part by Boyer was a popular translation of Fénelon's Télémaque, of which a twelfth edition appeared in 1728.

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