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

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KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge confers majesty. The ownership of a large encyclopaedia may suggest grandeur in the manner of a drawing-room globe or a hand-drawn map of aristocratic lands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, possession of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had become a source of pride and privilege, of honour even. Such possession was often aspirational, an emblem of status, the Patek Philippe of the home library.

The fable is told, and it may even be true, of how Fath-Ali, Shah of Persia 1797–1834, took such pride in his acquisition of the eighteen-volume set of the third edition of Britannica at the beginning of his reign that he decided to change his title. The set had been transported from London by the British ambassador, travelling for many weeks with his arduous load, and its arrival so overwhelmed the Shah that he decreed he would henceforth be known as: ‘Most Exalted and Generous Prince; Brilliant as the Moon, Resplendent as the Sun; the Jewel of the World; the Center of Beauty, of Mussulmen and of the True Faith; Shadow of God; Mirror of Justice; Most Generous King of Kings; Master of the Constellations Whose Throne is the Stirrup Cup of Heaven; and Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’*

As the nineteenth century wore on, such a thing was increasingly seen. A well-bound set was now regularly purchased to furnish a room; the consultation of the volumes would be an occasional and secondary purpose.

But how was this knowledge best transmitted and absorbed? Writing in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1824, the philosopher Alexander Blair argued that the concept of the large-scale encyclopaedia had fundamentally failed, highlighting ‘an essential fallacy’. He claimed that knowledge is advanced by individual minds wholly devoting themselves to their own part of specialised enquiry. This was ‘a process of separation, not of combination’. He argued that previous attempts to display the ‘Circle of the Sciences’ were based on the misconception that this unity could be grasped by individuals. His point was reinforced by the fact that the title ‘Encyclopaedia’ was being increasingly attached to studies of single subjects: The Encyclopaedia of Wit (1804), for one, and An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) and An Encyclopaedia of Music (1825).*

Blair evidently regarded an encyclopaedia as something that failed twice: it was too big to be read in its entirety, but too wide-ranging and inclusive in its content to do any subject justice, even if treated at some length as a treatise. This was not an uncommon opinion. In their first half-century, the popular pioneering encyclopaedias of Chambers, Diderot et D’Alembert, and Bell and Macfarquhar underwent a subtle shift in their proposition, moving from the realm of expanded dictionary into a much larger knowledge base. They were still far from Chambers’s notion of many shelves of a library filleted into one publication, but they were increasingly designated items to be read rather than just referred to (more ‘this is all you need’ rather than ‘this may fulfil a need’). The decades would change this pattern back again, and marketing men found it easier to sell the encyclopaedia as a tool, an assistant, rather than an omniscient tutor. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century the debate about precisely how this knowledge was to be presented – indeed precisely what an encyclopaedia was designed to be – was still fluid.

We have met the most famous debater before, but now his voice was louder. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was last seen berating the publishers of Encyclopaedia Britannica for presenting their instalments in alphabetical order (this ‘huge unconnected miscellany … a worthless monster’). His dissatisfaction endured through the years, so that by 1817 it had expanded to a fully formed manifesto, and the manifesto brought forth a brilliant adventure called Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In tone it wasn’t that dissimilar from Kubla Khan, the epic fever dream he had published the year before, with its stately pleasure domes and caverns measureless to man. In his new vision Xanadu was now London, and the dream was a compendium of knowledge unlike anything that had appeared before.

Coleridge’s grand project emphasised the systematic relationships within knowledge bases, presenting the sciences, the arts and other subjects as a rational and unified progression rather than a scattered constellation. This was the way to learn and document the world’s learning, he argued, and to show how the soul of wisdom may exceed its circumstances.

His thoughts are first glimpsed in a letter he wrote to a friend in 1796. On his return from university studies in Germany he proposed to open a school ‘for 8 young men at 100 Guineas each … and perfect them in 1. The history of savage tribes. 2. Of semi-barbarous nations. 3. Of nations emerging from semi-barbarism. 4. Of civilised states. 5. Of luxurious states. 6. Of revolutionary states. 7. Of colonies.’

When it came to his encyclopaedia, the key word was method. He employed it in the way mathematicians and physicists do, and in the way Francis Bacon did before him: the methodical and systematic advance from one piece of information or thinking to another. ‘All things, in us, and about us, are a chaos, without Method,’ he wrote in his preliminary treatise. ‘There may be transition, but there can never be progress; there may be sensation, but there cannot be thought: for the total absence of Method renders thinking impracticable.’

This wasn’t entirely fanciful. The Metropolitana exists as fifty-nine parts, or thirty volumes, (22,426 pages, 565 plates) issued between 1817 and 1845, the work of four editors and Coleridge as founding supervisor/cheerleader. The ‘divisions’ of its contents page displayed both the variety and approach of its subject matter, but it also suggested quite a different type of publication to the Britannica.

In many ways it harked back to the ancient world. The ‘Pure Science’ division included Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Morals and Theology. ‘Mixed and Applied Science’ covered Mechanics, Pneumatics, Optics, Astronomy, Heat, Light and Sound; among the ‘Fine Arts’ one would read about Painting, Heraldry, Music and Engraving. The ‘Useful Arts and Natural History’ featured Agriculture, Carpentry, Fortification, Anatomy and Zoology. These were lengthy, subdivided studies packed with academic fervour and exhausting thoroughness. They were not for random consultation on an inclement Sunday. If you bought the Metropolitana, you ended up with a big library of small books on major topics.

The entry on Numismatics, for example, stretched to thirty-one tight double-columned pages, about 30,000 words. Both sides of every coin of every reign were scrutinised, and every symbol of war or God or chariot race had a story and a purpose. A reader would discover symbols on Grecian coins derived ‘from the productions of the climate’, including wines, melon and parsley; the diminution in the size of Roman coins (signalling a deflation of the currency); a pyramid indicating the relative value of coins in 300 BC and 200 BC (where one Sestertius equalled 2 Quinarius, and 20 Quinarius equalled 2 Tremissis); the use of abbreviations denoting high office (Trib Pot for Tribunitiâ Potestate, Pont Max for Pontifex Maximus); the differing value of brass, copper and silver coins in the age of Augustus – until every coin was appraised. It ended with a look at various coin cabinets and caskets, one for every level of collecting, and advice on how best to arrange a collection within them (here the alphabet was rejected as well, in favour of ‘a system more accordant with truth’, specifically the truth of chronology and a tour of dusty locations where coins once circulated and buried hordes might yet be found: Gaul, Thrace, Macedon, Thessaly, Illyria, Epirus, Euboea, Zacynthus, Commagene, Phoenicia, Parthia and Zeugitania.

And this was letting the reader off lightly. Entries like these (and I’ve picked one of the most involving) appeared hewn from the side of rock cliffs, and they were not uninteresting once you hacked your way in (through the story of coins, some of the hubristic glory that was ancient Rome also emerged). But these huge essays run next to each other with hardly a breath between them, the surrounding pages distinctly lacking the occasional geographical or literary diversion one might encounter in other encyclopaedias, the sort of thing that makes them as engaging as they were instructive.

In Britannica’s seventh edition, for example, published at the same time as the Metropolitana between 1830 and 1842, one overruns a search for James Mill’s thoughts on the Freedom of the Press and finds brief insights into the Necropolis, Nepal and the Netherlands. In Volume 5 of the Metropolitana, by contrast, there are 165 uninterrupted pages on Meteorology and fifty-one on Engraving (followed by twenty more on Notes on Engraving). The authors were the sort of leading figures to command respect, but none of them considered concision a virtue. Fellows of the Royal Society, a conclave of bishops and reverends, the astronomer William Herschel, the mathematician and computing pioneer Charles Babbage, professors from St John’s, Cambridge and Oriel, Oxford – the great, the brilliant, the pedantic and the windy.

Admittedly, something unexpected happened in the Metropolitana’s fourth division. The last volumes suddenly turned alphabetical and catch-all, and more of a glossary. They contained a Complete Vocabulary of Geography, a Philosophical Lexicon, and a History of the English Language, seemingly an attempt to cover everything not considered in the essays that had gone before, perhaps a sop to everyone who had expected the sort of traditional encyclopaedic dictionary they had grown used to.

Although possessed of extraordinary philosophical scope, Coleridge’s vision was swimming so fiercely against the tide that today its memory, not to say its physical presence, has been largely washed away. It was widely read within the universities, but failed to leave a lasting impression on either the popular psyche or the popular market. Its critical reception was mixed. In 1862, the editor of the monthly magazine British Controversialist found it a ‘magnificent projection’ that ‘dazzled … by its excursive brilliancy’; the treatises on Logic and Rhetoric ‘added greatly to the estimation in which the “Encyclopaedia” began to be held’. But a year later The Quarterly Review sniped that ‘the proposals of the poet Coleridge … had at least enough of a poetical character to be eminently unpractical’. In subsequent years, the journal noted, a large proportion of the contents was ‘dug out of the ruins and re-issued in separate volumes by fresh publishers who acquired the property of the work, and thus distinctly recognised it as a mere quarry of valuable materials’.*

Predictably, Britannica did not take kindly to the attacks on its principles and practice. The eighth edition (1853–60) contained a biography of Coleridge by the author and literary critic Thomas De Quincey, and the vitriol flowed unceasing. He was ‘capable of immense service to poetry’, his verse imbued with ‘simplicity and lucidness’. But his prose style, evidenced in both his literary criticism and (it was implied) his groundwork on Metropolitana, was ‘disfigured by turgidity, and the affected use of words’. His humour was ‘ponderous and unwieldy’. Coleridge, De Quincey concluded, ‘lived on the future; and Coleridge’s future was a bad bank on which to draw; its bills were perpetually dishonoured.’

Coleridge’s initial ambition, expressed in 1803, for a series of volumes designed to ‘set up the reader, give him at once connected trains of thought and facts, and a delightful miscellany for lounge reading’ had long been abandoned. By the time its second edition was concluded in 1858, thirty-four years after its founder’s death, the prospect of such popular appeal had been thoroughly replaced by text both earnest and exhausting, and the modern reader was looking for something else from their encyclopaedias.

The publishers of Britannica were having their own problems keeping pace with a changing world. Nothing had transformed modern lives so much as electric light, elongating both working and leisure hours, improving safety, transport and entertainment; for our particular purposes, the encyclopaedia could be printed more swiftly, sold more efficiently, and be read for longer. But an attempt to actually explain the scientific principles of light could still easily run aground on the triple hazards of old-fashioned alphabetical order, traditional publishing methods, and the missed deadline.

In the 1870s, Britannica was still published piecemeal. The first volume of the ninth edition appeared in 1875, and the last, the twenty-fourth, only in 1888. The contributor specialising in acrobats had to write his entry more than a decade before the one specialising in yaks. And if you were writing about Light, it was no use submitting your entry after Volume 14 (Kaolin–LON), which had gone to press in 1882.

Both earnest and exhausting: a new volume of Metropolitana hits the streets

Unless your name was John William Strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh. Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919) was just too clever for deadlines. A student of Eton and Harrow, a professor and chancellor at Cambridge, a president of the Royal Society, and a recipient of many scientific medals, Rayleigh was expert in mathematics, hydrodynamics, viscosity, explosives, acoustics, photography and electromagnetism. He discovered and isolated the rare gas argon, for which he would receive the 1904 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Britannica invited him to contribute the entry on the physical properties of Light for its ninth edition. He was given a deadline, but more pressing demands caused him to miss it, and the volume was deprived of his insights (another man hurriedly and inadequately filled his shoes). But there was still hope that the Lord’s expertise could be employed, and an enterprising editor ensured that Volume 17, MOT–ORM (1884), made space for an article from Rayleigh entitled Optics. But a similar calamity occurred: the Lord failed to get his act together. And then, as the twenty-third volume (T–UPS) approached, a few blank pages were set aside for Undulating Light, and the editor held his breath. But, oh dear again – no dice from his Lordship. With almost all hope lost, Rayleigh submitted his celebrated entry, Wave Theory of Light, for Volume 24 (1888), and the world learnt that among the many suppositions regarding the propagation of light as a vibration, ‘the most famous is that which assimilates light to the transverse vibrations of an elastic solid. Transverse they must be in order to give room for the phenomena of polarisation.’ How illuminating that was, or how murky, only an individual reader could decide.*

This was another problem for Britannica: the transformation of knowledge into comprehension. Contributions from experts often failed to prove useful to a lay reader approaching the subject for the first time, and while few entries came as close to the thicket of specialist detail that marked the Metropolitana, many faced their own problems of readability. Britannica’s ninth edition was a towering masterwork of the British ivy-walled university, but its mastery did not initially extend to dirtying itself with the practicalities of sales or the popular market. Men like Lord Rayleigh, even if they met their deadlines, were writing for their peers, and this was not an attribute likely to expand the readership. But then something happened to transform Britannica’s fortunes: the arrival of two brilliant and shameless Americans intent on dragging the worthiest of institutions into the modern age.

* Mussulman is an ancient Persian term for Muslim. The story was proudly recalled by Herman Kogan in The Great EB (University of Chicago Press, 1958).

* As quoted in Richard Yeo, Lost Encyclopaedias: Before and After the Enlightenment (Book History, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, vol. 10).

* Though no more readable now than then (and probably less so), the Metropolitana does have its champions today, not least those who credit the role it played in establishing a framework of applied science, a term that Coleridge was the first to use and popularise after acquiring it in Germany. The historian of science Robert Bud has noted that one of the encyclopaedia’s later editors, H.J. Rose, was also principal of the new King’s College, London, where the many rational treatises on applied science found a practical application in numerous areas of engineering, including the railways and mining, as well as several areas of the arts and manufacture. It is likely that the Metropolitana was also employed as a useful educational tool within the nascent polytechnic movement; see Robert Bud, ‘“Applied Science”: A Phrase in Search of a Meaning’, Isis, University of Chicago Press, September 2012.

* The Lord had the last laugh. When word got out that Britannica was planning a tenth edition for 1902 (the ninth edition reprinted with supplements), Rayleigh was asked to write about Argon. No one in the world knew as much about this noble gas as he did, except perhaps his fellow professor and co-discoverer, Sir William Ramsay. So it would have been a travesty had anyone else composed the Britannica entry about such an inert subject. Rayleigh conjured around 3000 words, frequently referring to his original research published in academic journals. He explained how he had isolated argon from other gases in the air, and how he and Ramsay had presented their discovery to an astonished Royal Society in 1895. Equally astonishing was the fact that he managed to get his unique account to the editor of Britannica early enough to appear in Volume A–AUS.