Answer:
The right answer is letter C- there was no authoritative guide to the English language.
Step-by-step explanation:
Two main characteristics of Johnson's work contributed to that fact. Johnson's dictionary was the first one to make an effort to standardize the spelling of the words, illustrating the meanings by literary quotation of authors like Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. In addition, Johnson added notes on a word's usage rather than being simply descriptive, like Cawdrey.
But perhaps the main reason for Johnson's everlasting fame is the fact that, while everybody was busy trying to enlist exclusively the "hard words", Johnson opened his pages to words people actually used. And that created a new trend in lexicography and defined the future of dictionaries.
663 dictionaries had already been published in England before Johnson published his work. “The first English book with dictionary in its title was The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght, which appeared in 1538; it’s actually an English-Latin dictionary”, he writes, adding that “even if we limit our focus to what linguists call the general monolingual English dictionaries—the ones concerned with defining English words not confined to a single field—Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language is not the 664th English dictionary, but still the 21st".
In reality, the first general monolingual English dictionary is Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, almost 150 years before Samuel Johnson made his debut.