All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

E

EPHRAIM CHAMBERS (GENTLEMAN)

By all contemporary reckonings, Ephraim Chambers should be much better known than he is. As Bacon inspired, Chambers practised. He made the first modern encyclopaedia as we know it, and his work lit the touchpaper for the Enlightenment.*

The title was a meal in itself:

CYCLOPÆDIA:

OR, AN

UNIVERSAL DICTIONARY

OF

ARTS and SCIENCES;

CONTAINING

The DEFINITIONS of the TERMS;

And ACCOUNTS of

The THINGS signify’d thereby,

In the several ARTS,

Both LIBERAL and MECHANICAL,

And the several SCIENCES,

HUMAN and DIVINE:

The Figures, Kinds, Properties, Productions, Preparations, and Uses,

Of Things NATURAL and ARTIFICIAL;

The Rise, Progress and State of Things

Ecclesiastical, Civil, Military and Commercial:

With the several Systems, Sects, Opinions &c. Among Philosophers, Divines,

Mathematicians, Physicians, Antiquaries, Critics &c.

The Whole intended as a Course of Ancient and Modern LEARNING.

Compiled from the best Authors, Dictionaries, Journals, Memoirs,

Translations, Ephermerides, &c. In several Languages.

In TWO VOLUMES

By E. CHAMBERS Gent.

This groundbreaking work, published in London in 1728, came about because its creator believed that the world contained too many books.

Chambers lived in London during a golden age of publishing. Book stalls clogged the Strand and lined the Thames, the ports were full of travellers’ tales and enticing maps, and printing presses hammered through the night in Clerkenwell and Westminster to meet demand. New copyright laws had recently been passed to restrict piracy, but it was a hopeless task. London was rapidly overtaking Paris as the largest city in Europe, its population growing from 630,000 when Chambers arrived from his birthplace in the Lake District in 1714 to around 730,000 when he was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1740. An appetite for knowledge had resulted in what Chambers saw as too much print and too much choice (he liked to quote Ecclesiastes: ‘Of making books there is no end’). Although he would probably have called it something else, he was experiencing an early form of information overload.

A gathering of arresting things: Cyclopaedia demystifies the human body in 1728

His solution was simple: he proposed a work that resembled a ‘commonplace’ book – a gathering of relevant, significant and arresting things – that would ‘answer all the Purposes of a Library except Parade and Incumbrance’. He produced two massive folio volumes, each almost unliftable, some 2500 pages combined, two guineas the set. The enterprise was financed by subscription but sold well beyond its initial supporters: Chambers’s group of printers – he needed seventeen to manage the whole vast project – rewarded him with £500 for his success, about £60,000 today. The books are about the size of regular-issue Ten Commandments, and their influence on contemporary learning was not much less. Indeed, not long after its publication, Chambers claimed, with no apparent pause for modesty, that his work was simply ‘the best Book in the Universe’.

But like all groundbreaking projects, there were predecessors, inspirations and rivals. Chambers’s volumes represented the last of a trio of quite similar works, but the fact he was published last, and with the greatest fanfare, ensured not only the greatest sales but also the most enduring impact. They followed Antoine Furetière’s three-volume Dictionnaire universel, published at The Hague in 1690, and Lexicon Technicum compiled by the clergyman John Harris and published in several editions between 1704 and 1710.* This also claimed to be a universal guide to the arts and sciences, and appeared, like Chambers’s work, in alphabetical order. Harris’s ‘E’s began with:

EARTH: The surface of the whole Earth, Mr Keil, in his Examination of Dr. Burnet’s Theory, makes to be 170981012 Italian Miles, and the Italian Mile is little less than the English one.

EARTHQUAKES: Mr Boyle thinks that earthquakes are often occasioned by the sudden fall of Ponderous Masses in the Hollow Parts of the Earth, whereby those terrible Shocks and Shakings are produced.

ECCENTRICITY: in the Ptolomaic Astronomy, is that Part of the Linea Apsidum lying between the Center of the Earth and of the Eccentric; ie that Circle which the Sun is supposed to move in about our Earth, and which hath not the Earth exactly for its Center. And the Ancients found this must be supposed, because the Sun sometimes appears large, and then it is nearest to us, and sometimes smaller, and then further off.*

Ephraim Chambers acknowledged Lexicon Technicum in his preface, while also raising its shortcomings: he called it (and its predecessors) part of ‘an inferior class of books’, while his own was ‘superior to what had been known in any former work’. (This was a common enough trait among early encyclopaedists: calling rivals out in the manner of professional wrestlers.) In his preface he admitted he was more compiler than author, but he claimed much originality in his selection, writing that he was ‘far from having contented myself to take what was ready collected’, but had ‘augmented it with a large accession from other quarters’. In this he compared himself to a bee, gathering the pollen as he hopped from flower to flower, producing nectar ‘for the publick Service’. (And in this he echoed Isidore of Seville’s estimation that he was planting textual ‘flowers’.)

He extended this theme to the heart of the project itself, including an entry on Plagiary, arguing that compilers such as he could not be accused of ‘author theft’ because ‘what they take from others they do it avowedly, and in the open Sun. In effect, their Quality gives them a title to every thing that may be for their purpose, wherever they find it.’

Examining the monumental volumes almost 300 years after publication, I was struck by one feature in particular: they are remarkable material objects. The stamping of the ink on coarse pages creates an impression on the fingertips. Turning the giant leaves, the reader may feel, as I did, a considerable sense of power and good fortune. Here is the world, all its natural science, theology, cartography, philosophy. And here is a distinct advance from some of its more fanciful predecessors, the ones with the hokum about witches’ brews and faith in magic. Here, indeed, is an attempt at purposely filtered fact that would stand the test of time three centuries later.

Volume 1 opens with two extraordinary frontispieces. The first is a large opening fold-out copper engraving, a wide vista in the style of Hieronymus Cock. About eighty people in long robes are engaged in various forms of scholarship in an open-air classical forum, with pillars and statuary framing mechanical instruments and measuring devices. The message is clear: these people (about a quarter of whom are women) are mastering a great many of the activities you are about to read about, be they practical (astrological calculation, weighing); artistic (heraldic design, architectural planning); or theoretical (a lot of people debating, many with their arms open). Others are examining two large globes, perhaps wondering where to travel next.*

The second frontispiece is a complex chart of Knowledge, laid out, as with Bacon’s work, like a family tree. This is Chambers’s statement of intent, a diagram serving as both contents page and higher theory. It identifies forty-seven subject or theoretical groupings from the arts and sciences, and attempts to wrestle the limitations of an alphabetical listing back on to thematic ground.

At the top of the tree sits the phrase: ‘KNOWLEDGE is either …’, which then splits into two choices: ‘Natural and Scientifical’ or ‘Artificial and Technical’.

These split again, into ‘Sensible, Rational, Internal or External’, and there are more subdivisions towards the foot of the tree, the more precise subject categories we may recognise as specialisms (and perhaps careers) today: Meteorology, Hydrology, Mineralogy, Zoology, Phytology, Geometry, Ethics, Music, Pneumatics, Mechanics, Astronomy, Agriculture, Rhetoric and many others. And then there are detailed notes, wherein each of these subjects is further explained. Meteorology, for example, regroups the encyclopaedia’s various entries on the history of air and atmosphere, including Ether, Vapour, Cloud, Rain, Shower, Drop, Hail, Dew and Damp. Alluringly, Geometry encompasses separate entries entitled Perpendicular, Parallel, Triangle, Square, Polygon, Cycloid, Quadratix, Prism, Planisphere, Analemma and Parabola.

Who was this overwhelming book intended for? In Chambers’s words, for anyone wishing to reclaim the mind ‘from its native wildness’. It was for those wishing to shrink rather than expand their library, an early desire for downsizing. Chambers wasn’t alone with his wish. In 1680, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz detected a ‘horrible mass of books which keeps on growing … disorder will become nearly insurmountable’. There is a connected dilemma: not only so many books, but nowhere to put them all, and an inequality of access that ensured only the well educated could afford to consult them. Leibniz, incidentally, had read so many of these books that he was referred to by King George I as ‘a living dictionary’, a phrase we might more commonly translate as ‘a walking encyclopaedia’. By the time Ephraim Chambers picked up his quill in the early eighteenth century, this phrase was already a mild insult, a term for an insufferable know-it-all. In classical Greece, and even in the Middle Ages, it was possible to imagine that the feat of committing a whole book’s worth of factual content to memory was both desirable and possible. With the emergence of the Cyclopaedia it was clear that this was no longer the case.

Chambers dedicated his book to the newly crowned King George II. The nature of his fawning tribute may partly account for his work’s impact. He ‘lay at Your Majesty’s feet … an attempt towards a survey of the republic of learning.’ He believed that Great Britain now enjoyed a reputation for scientific and artistic expression that was once the province of Rome in her Augustan age; Rome would soon envy our own. To underline this British mastery, Chambers stressed the difference between ‘Your Majesty’s subjects and the savages of Canada, or the Cape of Good Hope.’ He claimed his readers had recently been ennobled by a monarch ‘inspired with a generous passion to devote his cares to the welfare of mankind’; and the author was one of the countless many ‘conspiring with unexampled ardor and unanimity to all his glorious views’.

Among his ‘E’s, Chambers includes:

EARNEST: Money advanced to complete or assure a verbal bargain, and bind the parties to a performance thereof. By the civil law, he who recedes from his bargain loses his earnest.

EARTH: (extract) The orbits of all the planets include the sun as the common centre of them all: the earth … is not in the centre of any of them.

The earth’s orbit being proved to be between those of Venus and Mars, it follows that the earth must turn around the sun. For, as it lies within the orbits of the superior planets, their motion would indeed appear unequal and irregular; but they would never be stationary or retrograde without this supposition.

EMPALEMENT: A cruel kind of punishment wherein a sharp pale or stake is thrust up the fundament and through the body. It was frequently practised in the time of Nero; and it continues to be popular in Turkey.

And …

ENCYCLOPAEDIA: The circle or chain of arts and sciences. The word is compounded of the in, circle and learning: the root being child, infant. It is sometimes also written cyclopaedia. Vitruvius in the preface to his 6th book calls it encyclios disciplina. See Cyclopaedia.

Padding back some 100 pages one finds:*

CYCLOPAEDIA: The word cyclopaedia is not of classical authority, though frequent enough among modern writers to have got into several of our dictionaries. Some make it a crime in us to have called the present work by this name; not considering that names and titles of books, engines, instruments etc are in great measure arbitrary, and that authors make no scruple of coining new words on such occasions.

The word ‘encyclopaedia’ wasn’t used in the title of a book until the Croatian polymath Paul Skalich published Encyclopaedia, seu Orbis disciplinarum tam sacrarum quam prophanarum Epistemon (Encyclopaedia, or Knowledge of the World of Disciplines) in Basel in 1559. It was a minor work.*

By 1750, when the word was used in a prospectus for a French publication, it was still such a novelty that its meaning had to be explained, and not entirely satisfactorily: ‘The word “Encyclopedia” signifies the interrelationship of the sciences’. Then as now, the word could be spelt either way.

* The Chambers we may now associate with almanacs and other reference books was not him: that was Robert Chambers, operating about a century later.

* John Harris hoped his Lexicon would provide more than mere reference; he longed to have composed ‘a Book useful to be read carefully over’. But in its first year of publication, Jonathan Swift was able to satirise (in A Tale of a Tub) what he saw as the plethora of ‘index learning’, a trend towards abridgement and summation, which Swift considered a poor substitute for actually reading an entire work. (Without using the phrase, he accused them of dumbing down.)

* Is it necessary to observe that our understanding has advanced, and that the earth is not hollow, and nor does it enjoy the sun revolving around it? See below for the rather more accurate interpretation in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia.

* The engraving is by ‘G. Child of Covent Garden’. Chambers had learnt his geographical knowledge of the world from the great map and globe maker John Senex, with whom he apprenticed not long after arriving in London in his mid-thirties.

* The only way to be sure is to count them, as the pages are not numbered.

* The word ‘encyclopaedist’ is believed to have been first used by John Evelyn in 1651 in reference to Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Encyclopaedia Septem Tomis Distincta, a seven-volume set once again claimed by the compiler to be ‘the totality of knowledge’.