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HAMILTON’S CHOICE


If you were a chief librarian at King’s College in New York at the time of the American Revolution, and you had a budget to purchase just one major encyclopaedia, something that would inform and inspire young and scrappy students such as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and Robert R. Livingston, which one should it be? The Britannica was the obvious choice, but there were a few others. Perhaps you would prefer:

A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Comprehending All the Branches of Human Knowledge, published in five volumes (3500 pages) between 1763 and 1764, edited by A Society of Gentlemen and published by W. Owen at Homer’s Head in Fleet Street. This hoped to be ‘more universal and comprehensive’ than any set published previously: ‘the smallest insect and plant find a place’.

Or perhaps: The New Royal Cyclopaedia or Modern Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences edited by George Selby Howard, published in London in three folio volumes in 1788. This claimed to be modelled on ‘an entire and new improved plan’, containing ‘all the latest discoveries and improvements’ particularly ‘amphibiology, brontology, fluxions, longimetry, mensuration, phytology, stereometry and tactics’. In fact it was largely and shamelessly a copy of an updated Chambers’s Cyclopaedia.

Or maybe you’ll be tempted by an Italian set. The profusely illustrated Nuovo Dizionario (1746–51) compiled by Gianfrancesco Pivati, perhaps, reflecting the changing fortunes of Venetian trade, or the French spin-off from the Encyclopédie, Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey’s Encyclopédie Réduite from 1767.

But just a few years later, with King’s College in New York recently renamed Columbia College, your choice would be much easier. It would be Dobson’s.

This enterprise, published from 1789 – all eighteen volumes and three supplements of it – may look a little familiar. It may look very like the third edition of the Britannica, and 95 per cent of it was precisely that. The other 5 per cent contained additions, corrections and amendments written to please an American readership, a fairly discerning lot: among the first subscribers (in addition to the librarians at King’s College and Yale) were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. George Washington was so keen on it that he bought two.

Suitably, Thomas Dobson began his bookselling career in Edinburgh. In 1784, in his early thirties, he moved with his wife and three daughters to Philadelphia and swiftly established himself as an importer of foreign titles ‘in good editions in the most elegant bindings’, including Shakespeare, Swift, Pope and Sterne, and he built up specialist lists in medicine and children’s books. Philadelphia was the most populous and cultivated city in America, and according to Dobson’s biographer Robert D. Arner, it was the only place where a project as ambitious and risky as his encyclopaedia could have any hope of success. It was home to the wealthiest merchants and lawmakers, as well as leading novelists and actors, and it was soon to be home to the federal government. Dobson saw his opportunity: not merely an imported Britannica, but a Britannica typeset, printed and improved in the very streets where it would be bought.*

Dobson’s adverts in the local newspapers in 1789 promised a publication like none ever created on American soil. It would be printed in weekly instalments of forty quarto pages over several years, the whole containing more than 400 copper plates. The work could also be purchased for $5 per volume. But the portents were not good. A year before, Dobson had announced the publication of a deluxe eight-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (in large-scale octavo, ‘handsomely bound, gilt and lettered … with an elegant head of the author, and all the maps’). The cost was $2 per volume, but his request for payment in advance did not attract enough customers to proceed.*

For his Britannica, Dobson once again insisted on an advance subscription model, but this time his effort would be assisted by a more persuasive prospectus and paid agents in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Baltimore. He dismissed the alternative option of selling door-to-door, a method employed successfully just five years before by the book agent Parson Weems. Dobson regarded this method as short-sighted, as it ‘sinks the book in the public estimation and never fails to take the trade out of the bookseller’s hands, who of course is no longer interested in it.’

His prospectus in the newspapers was modelled closely on those of Bell and Macfarquhar in Edinburgh, and no wonder. Although he would never admit it, his undertaking was essentially piracy: American copyright law protected domestic publications, but those from overseas enjoyed no such privileges (and, it may be supposed, particularly not if they originated with America’s former colonists. The only criterion was that any reprinted or translated publication was seen to improve the lot of American readers, and Dobson found no difficulty in such a claim. The first thing he did was remove the dedication to King George III. The illustrations – all those hundreds of copper engravings by Andrew Bell – were also copied, and sometimes slightly modified; frequently American engravers would scratch their names where Bell’s had been, and Dobson misinformed American booksellers with his broadsides: ‘Every part of the Work will be executed by American artists.’ Dobson hoped that his Encyclopaedia (he dropped the Britannica just before publication) would soon be regarded as the most timely and reliable publication of a forward-looking nation. As Robert D. Arner defined it, ‘Dobson’s Encyclopaedia brought Old World order and authority as well as the examples of the past to bear on unruly New World experience, offering a rebuke of democratic excesses that imperilled culture and learning.’ Further, it emphasised the primacy of the historical perspective, and although it had broken from England politically, the appeal of his Encyclopaedia ‘lay mainly in its promise of reuniting the American intellectual community with vital and sustaining European traditions and learning’.

In Great Britain, the third edition of Britannica had received largely favourable reviews. After James Tytler’s ascendancy in his balloon, its fervent new editor, the Episcopalian minister George Gleig, further added to Britannica’s reputation, achieving sales of 13,000 copies and net profits for its publishers of £42,000. Although many smaller enterprises would suffer financial jeopardy trying to emulate this success, there was now no doubt that encyclopaedias could be lucrative affairs. One obvious indication: the arrival in the Edinburgh office of several writs for copyright infringement, the biggest from James Clark, who claimed that sixty-one pages in the third edition were copied verbatim, alongside his engravings, from one of his books on shoeing horses and preventing equine disease. The court found in his favour, but failed to order financial compensation.

Its key new ingredient – the greatly expanded recruitment of experts in their fields, something that would soon be taken for granted among all great encyclopaedias – was widely appreciated. The Eclectic Review, for instance, found ‘considerable excellence’, while the British Critic acclaimed a ‘great work’. But the increased print run may have affected quality: judgement of the copper plates ranged from ‘as good as can be expected’ to ‘execrable’. And there was one memorable hatchet job: the Agricultural Magazine damned the entire work as ‘a trash viler than the vilest Scottish haggish’.

In Philadelphia, Dobson’s original print run was 1000 sets, but the early level of interest from subscribers doubled this. When purchasers got their first volumes in the early 1790s, they found the extraordinary range of entries that had impressed British readers – including new treatises on Logarithms and Critical Philosophy (Kant) and the fifty-page article on the French Revolution, expressly written for the third edition – and additions designed to please American readers with their supportive post-revolutionary spirit. But the changes were small, and there were many notable omissions. While the article entitled President added the new executive, and Chronology added the date 1787 to include the formation in Philadelphia of the new Constitution, there was no mention of the Declaration of Independence and no biographies of Americans were added (not even the most obvious candidate Benjamin Franklin).

Dobson’s principal American contributor was the geographer Jedidiah Morse. He wrote about American Indians, the history of several states, and specific revolutionary battles. Inevitably, his interpretation of the war was rather different from the British one. The original view from Edinburgh was that ‘the beginning of every political establishment is contemptible’, and went on to cast ‘the turbulence of some North Americans, and the blunders of some British statesmen’ as the villains. Morse had a more positive outlook: in the past, in the Old World, new political institutions were marked by ‘the barbarous manners of savage tribes’. But ‘very different were the circumstances which gave birth to this new republic.’ The causes of the revolutionary conflict were very different too. Gone was the British blaming of French emissaries for the uprising and the destruction of the ‘warmth of attachment to the mother-country’. More significant, Morse added, was an American ‘abhorrence of oppression … love of liberty, and … quick sense of injury’. Further, he claimed, the English found the cause of the conflict ‘in any source rather than their own misconduct’.

While early instalments of his work were well received by readers, Dobson was struggling financially. Each of his letters to his subscribers contained increasingly urgent appeals for payment. The Gazette of the United States carried a notice in which he took the liberty of ‘representing to such subscribers as are in arrears, the indispensable necessity of punctuality … Though the importance of a few dollars may be but a trifle to the individuals, yet the accumulation of these trifles UNPAID leaves the publisher under very serious embarrassments.’

And then disaster struck. In September 1793, with precisely half of his eighteen volumes published, a fire swept through his building destroying not only the volume in progress but the means of printing subsequent ones. His entire type foundry melted, with total losses exceeding $5000. Dobson praised the kindness of strangers for his swift recovery, not least the printer who donated an entire library of new metal type.*

The set was complete in 1798, and one of the earliest reviews appeared the following year. ‘The magnitude of the work far exceeds any thing ever before issued from the press in the United States,’ announced Charles Brockden Brown in his Monthly Magazine and American Review. Brown acknowledged both the great labour and hazard involved in such a production, and excused the errors and omissions as an inevitable consequence of having so many hands tackling such a large spread of topics. He particularly admired the cross-referencing, the ‘relation which the various objects of knowledge bear to one another’, the distinguishing feature of an encyclopaedia over a dictionary.

And then, as Professor Arner observes, Brown turned lyrical, finding inspiration in Paradise Lost to praise not only Dobson’s project, but encyclopaedias as a concept. Nothing better exemplified the new American nation in aspiration and purpose:

The Encyclopaedist conducts his reader to a lofty eminence, from which he is enabled to descry the boundless prospect that stretches before him; he points out to his view the accumulated labours, experience, and wisdom of ages; he assists him to survey the history of the human mind in its progress from rudeness to refinement, and to teach him to anticipate the glorious destiny which awaits the full development and exertion of intellectual energy in a more enlightened age.




* For a compelling forensic account see Robert D. Arner, Dobson’s Encyclopaedia (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1991).

* A note on a printer’s page sizes is overdue. Before the twentieth century, encyclopaedias were usually printed in one of two sizes. The earliest, heaviest and most prestigious was folio, somewhere in the range of 12 × 19 inches. Quarto, which measured around 9.5 × 12 inches, became the more popular and manageable form. The terms refer to how many times a large original sheet of paper was folded: historically, a quarto volume was printed on sheets folded in half twice, with the first fold at right angles to the second, to produce four leaves (or eight pages). By the same process, an octavo book, a format still in use today for many modern hardbacks, has been folded in half again, producing eight leaves.

We are familiar with Shakespeare’s First Folios, printed in 1623, although earlier and less reliable texts of his plays were widely distributed in quarto. Gutenberg’s first printed books were also in quarto size. The earliest Britannica was in folio, while the ones most of us own or have consulted in libraries are slightly smaller than the traditional quartos, at 8.5 × 11 inches. Modern book sizes are complex things, with different terms applying in different countries. The UK’s demy, royal, A, B and C formats will be less identifiable in the United States, while the US crown octavo and duodecimo will confuse Japanese printers versed in shinsho or bunkobon paperbacks. And of course manuscript and printing paper sizes – A3, A4 and foolscap etc. – are different again. If you want to be really bamboozled, may I recommend: wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size.

* The fire was a personal tragedy for Dobson, but the yellow fever that swept Philadelphia and the eastern seaboard in these years was a broader one, which also had a large impact on his production schedule and sales.

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