L




LIBERATION?


In the last years of the nineteenth century, full-page advertisements appeared in The Times offering the twenty-four-volume set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for £27, less than half of the original asking price of £65. That was for the full morocco binding. The half morocco binding was only £20 (once £45), while the no morocco cloth-bound version was only £16 (originally £37).

What could you expect for a bargain like that? Prospective buyers were reassured that while the price had fallen dramatically, the value of what they were getting had not fallen at all, ‘not by one word’. They would receive the same extraordinary fare as the people (pity them!) who had paid top whack: 30 million words across 22,000 pages, 338 full-page plates and 671 maps, and a separate 499-page index in a supplementary volume. Swinburne wrote on Keats; Robert Louis Stevenson wrote on the French poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger; mathematicians descended from their lofty perches to explain complex proofs in impenetrable style. For just one guinea down, the purchaser would find the entire set ‘in every respect as desirable’ as the one printed for libraries and other institutions, and on the same high-quality paper.

The world in the balance: Britannica’s classic eleventh edition from 1910/11

There was a catch, of course. The goods were newly printed but old stock. The bargain on offer was the ninth edition, the ‘Scholars edition’ with all those brilliant but often too brilliant entries, parts of it twenty-three years old, repackaged and re-marketed by two businessmen who had no input into its editorial content and no time to read its pages. But for Britannica there was no catch: the cut-price marketing push transformed the fortunes and future of the company, and brought profit to The Times after years of losses. Before the offer, and disregarding thousands of pirated editions, the ninth edition had sold about 5000 sets over ten years; the Times adverts doubled that in a few months. And beyond this, the businessmen, who were American and brought with them American concepts of the hard sell, transformed the entire notions of what an encyclopaedia could be, who would buy it, and how they should pay for it.

From now on, the encyclopaedia would no longer be just for the wealthy or well educated. It was no longer aimed at the contributors’ peers. It was now to be sold to everyone with even a modest education who wanted to better understand the changes around them, and wished to improve the lives of their family. Comprehensive knowledge would become aspirational and affordable by instalments, and the market for encyclopaedias would move from the margins to the mainstream.

The cut-price adverts in The Times varied in length and appearance, becoming almost as much a fixture as its court reports. In return for this, and for its occasional editorial support, the newspaper received one guinea for every set of Britannica sold through its pages. It was a perfect match: each a fusty institution with enough authority to sink a battleship, each a cash-strapped knowledge base struggling to find its feet in a modernising world. One of the advertisements stated ‘The Encyclopaedia Britannica is too well known to need description,’ but then proceeded to describe it for more than 5000 words.

The

Britannica

is essentially the production of men who wrote out of the fulness of knowledge. The wonderful story of the 19th century is told by the men who made its greatness … for the men who fought against ignorance, and brought enlightenment to their generation, themselves tell how the light was spread.

*

The adverts were the chief responsibility of Henry Haxton, a well-connected newspaper man from the Hearst stable and a literary showman of the Barnum school. He was happy to boost circulation with any stunt or scheme, but he was also a man of higher culture, an urban salon dweller, a great friend of James McNeill Whistler.

Haxton had been hired by Horace Hooper, a fellow American who saw Britannica as much as a trading commodity as a learning resource. Hooper was the product of the Chicago school of publishing, which bred a mindset of cheap books, knock-offs, multi-volumes, Bibles and the selling of reference works to everyone who wished to be thought truly American. Encyclopaedias were synonymous with aspiration. If New York and Boston were the well-mannered boutique side of the book trade, Chicago was the cacophonous supermarket. Having successfully sold a great many lesser and pirated sets with less prestigious names, Hooper regarded Britannica as under-exploited, both in the United States and its home market. Resolving to fix this, he and his colleagues successfully negotiated reprint rights with A. & C. Black, the encyclopaedia’s Edinburgh-based owners, and they set about reviving a sleeping giant.

But Hooper and Haxton’s bold manipulation of the ninth edition was just a precursor to their real achievement. Not the tenth, which consisted solely of supplements to the ninth and made no special claims for itself beyond its earnest continuance of a line, but the eleventh edition, arguably the most varied and robust popular encyclopaedia ever made. It was so varied, indeed, and so enduring, that when Wikipedia opened for business ninety years later, it copied almost every word for its website, finding in it a solid base on which to build a digital revolution.*

Haxton’s promotion for the eleventh edition was just as wordy as his previous campaigns. He outlined the depth of coverage (‘history and race development … biography, law and physics …’) and the timeliness of the work (‘the Britannica will enlighten you on … prohibition, suffrage, tariffs, currency, waterways, transportation and government ownership!’). He called the new edition ‘a liberal education’, and remarked on its universal accessibility: ‘In answer to the hundred questions which everyday come to your mind and your wife’s and children’s minds, it will give you more precise information than you can get from any other source.’

The key theme of this edition was progress – of the world, of Great Britain’s place within it, of the encyclopaedia itself. The editors intended it as an altogether more engaging publication than its predecessors, and almost imperceptibly a more humane one. It was an invitation to a conversation, a liberating force. It had a new publisher, the University of Cambridge, giving Britannica an even more noble cloak of respectability than it had achieved under the aegis of The Times. But under the editorship of Hugh Chisholm, a generous, clubbable man whose journalistic experience extended no further than editing the St James Gazette, it assumed a decidedly more energetic and less reserved academic approach, and certainly a less long-winded one, and adopted a warmer and more personable hue, so that its articles were far closer in tone to a genial discussion in a gentleman’s club than a stern address from a lectern.

The eleventh edition is still widely regarded as a pinnacle, both of the encyclopaedia industry and the publishing industry. One may begin with the layout, a clear double column per page with tight but wholly legible type. Then there was its self-confidence: to claim, as Henry Haxton had done, that it marked ‘the high tide mark of human knowledge’ was not empty rhetoric; it was a belief extensively shared by its editors, and almost certainly by its readers. In his illuminating biography of the eleventh edition, Denis Boyles observed that it ‘has a personality that can’t be easily overlooked; it’s plausible, reasonable, unruffled, often reserved, completely authoritative’. He goes as far as to call it ‘the last great English-language encyclopaedia. As a general reference work it’s unrivalled, as unique now as when it was published.’*

Writing in the New Yorker in 1981, the Dutch author Hans Koning celebrated the Eleventh’s seventieth birthday: its readership was once ‘simply and obviously every English-speaking educated person on earth, who … would expect to find and would find the final authority on everything.’

Koning reasoned that the Encyclopédie of 1751 rang in the age of reason, and the eleventh edition rang it out. He believed it marked the last time that an encyclopaedia could hope to map a circle of all human knowledge ‘with a single centre’, for the world then ‘was a rational and ultimately a harmonious place … In 1910, Anglo-Saxon self-confidence and self-satisfaction were unshakeable.’

With hindsight, and our studied suspicion of things empirical and colonial, Britannica’s pomposity seems absurd. We know that the enlightenment reflected in its pages – and the many subsequent decades of what Koning calls ‘almost official, almost religious optimism’ – was doomed to be snuffed out forever on the battlefields of France and Belgium; the half morocco bindings crumbled like, yes, old books. But just four years before, Koning reasons, on the Oxbridge quads and in all the other learned stations of Britain and America, ‘all of humanity appeared to be on the threshold of being totally understood, described, improved, and then perfected’. The encyclopaedia was the natural repository for all this, the ultimate pure salon for the world. And even after the First World War, with so many uncertainties and dislocations, Britannica provided a leaning post, unstable as it was; in our minds, this was still the world we would defend in the next war, the twenty-nine volumes as good a domestic shelter as anything else.

The eleventh edition has 44 million words. My favourite ones concern the apple, for the simplest of reasons. It tells you something you didn’t know, and it does so with an economy of expression, a lack of pretentiousness and an element of delight. Most importantly, it stands the test of time. Alongside historical description and practical instruction on grafting, propagating, fertilising and harvest, about 2000 words in all, there is a genuine love for the subject. As with many of its most noteworthy articles, this one is signed, or at least initialled: A.B.R. It is the work of Alfred Barton Rendle, FRS, FLS, MA, DSc, Keeper of the Department of Botany at the British Museum.

A slice:

APPLE: (a common Teutonic word … aphul, aphal, apfal, modern German Apfel), the fruit of Pyrus Malus, belonging to the sub-order Pomaceae, of the natural order Rosaceae. It is one of the most widely cultivated and best-known and appreciated of fruits belonging to temperate climates. In its wild state it is known as the crab-apple, and is found generally distributed throughout Europe and western Asia, growing in as high a latitude as Trondhjem in Norway. The crabs of Siberia belong to different species of Pyrus. The fruit is too well known to need any description of its external characteristics.

The apple is successfully cultivated in higher latitudes than any other fruit tree, growing up to 65° N., but notwithstanding this, its blossoms are more susceptible [to] injury from frost than the flowers of the peach or apricot. It comes into flower much later than these trees, and so avoids the night frost which would be fatal to its fruit-bearing. The apples which are grown in northern regions are, however, small, hard, and crabbed, the best fruit being produced in hot summer climates, such as Canada and the United States.

Apples have been cultivated in Great Britain probably since the period of the Roman occupation, but the names of many varieties indicate a French or Dutch origin of much later date. In 1688 Ray enumerated seventy-eight varieties in cultivation in the neighbourhood of London, and now it is calculated that about 2000 kinds can be distinguished. A large trade in the importation of apples is carried on in Britain, imports coming chiefly from French, Belgian and Dutch growers, and from the United States and British North America.

But the greatest delight is a list, a catalogue of apples arranged in order of their ripening. I found it bizarrely inspiring, almost moving, in its variety and obsession. The list made me hungry for the crunch. And it made me sad to think that when I next visited a supermarket, or even the keenest grower in Kent, I would find hardly any of them.


White Juneating: July

Irish Peach: Aug.

Devonshire Quarrenden: Aug.–Sept.

Duchess of Oldenburg: Aug.–Sept.

Peasgood’s Nonesuch: Sept.–Nov.

Sam Young: Oct.–Dec.

King of the Pippins: Oct.–Jan.

Court of Wick: Oct.–Mar.

Sykehouse Russet: Nov.–Feb.

Fearn’s Pippin: Nov.–Mar.

Reinette de Canada: Nov.–Apr.

Ashmead’s Kernel: Nov.–Apr.

White Winter Calville (grown under glass) Dec.–Mar.

Braddick’s Nonpareil: Dec.–Apr.

Court-pendu Plat: Dec.–Apr.

Northern Spy: Dec.–May

Scarlet Nonpareil: Jan.–Mar.

Lamb Abbey Pearmain: Jan.–May


This is just half of the dessert apples. There are nine varieties of pippin. In addition, the large number of ‘kitchen’ (i.e. cooking) apples included the Keswick Codlin, the Lord Suffield, the Yorkshire Greening and the Bess Pool. How utterly enticing is this information? Just the thing, I’d suggest, to lighten the load between Appin, a coast district of Argyllshire, and Appleton, Nathan (1770–1861) American merchant and politician. (These days the entry would be preceded by App Store and followed by Apple Computer.) And it is just the thing to support the view that the eleventh edition may be the most life-affirming Britannica ever made, and the most amenable to a general open-me-anywhere read.

If it wasn’t so unwieldy you might take it everywhere to recite to friends. This is particularly true of the biographical entries, the amuse-bouche of the encyclopaedist’s art. To open just one spread, pages 714–5 in Volume 12, provides seven entries from Gulf Stream to Gum. We learn that Gulfweed is the popular name for the brown seaweed observed by Columbus. We read of Sir William Withey Gull (1816–90), a clinical physician who believed in never giving his patients false hope, and the first to describe (in 1873) the disease now known as myxoedema, defining it as a ‘cretinoid state in adults’. We discover the Larinae, Sterninae and Rhynchops grouping of Gulls, and read how, in 1878 Howard Saunders, of the Zoological Society of London, counted forty-nine species. And we encounter the remarkable John Gully (1783–1863), for five years the unlikely MP for Pontefract, Yorkshire. Why was he unlikely? Because he was first a sportsman, and for many years it seemed possible that he might never leave his varied fields of play alive:

He came into prominence as a boxer, and in 1805 he was matched against Henry Pearce, the ‘Game Chicken’, before the duke of Clarence (afterwards William IV) and numerous other spectators, and after fighting sixty-four rounds, which occupied an hour and seventeen minutes, was beaten. In 1807 he twice fought Bob Gregson, the Lancashire giant, for two hundred guineas a side, winning on both occasions. As the landlord of the Plough Tavern in Carey Street, London, he retired from the ring in 1808, and took to horse-racing. In 1827 he lost £40,000 by backing his horse Mameluke (for which he had paid four thousand guineas) for the St Leger. In partnership with Robert Ridskale, in 1832, he made £85,000 by winning the Derby and St Leger with St Giles and Margrave. In partnership with John Day he won the Two Thousand Guineas with Ugly Buck in 1844, and two years later he took the Derby and the Oaks with Pyrrhus the First and Mendicant, in 1854 the Two Thousand Guineas with Hermit, and in the same year, in partnership with Henry Padwick, the Derby with Andover. Gully was twice married and had twelve children by each wife. He appears to have been no relation of the subsequent Speaker, Lord Selby.

Sixty-four rounds; the Game Chicken; twenty-four children in all; appears to have been no relation. We not only forgive but celebrate the idiosyncrasies; these entries were far from algorithmic in their construction. The eleventh edition contained more biographies than any previous Britannica, many vivid with human foible and eccentricity. Hans Koning was both delighted and alarmed by the number of bizarre Germans included, not least princelings and captains of long-forgotten military campaigns, and the ‘amazing number of times’ little towns popped up with names like Ingolstadt. No subject was too insignificant. Friedrich Rudolf Ludwig, for example, had a book of poems published posthumously in 1700, which were ‘for the most part dry and stilted imitations of French and Latin models’, but not so dry or stilted that they were considered unworthy of mention. And inclusion began young: Christian Heinrich Heinecken was a talented student of history, and spoke Latin and French, and all by the age of three (alas he died at the age of four in 1725).

Of course there were weaknesses. There was a blindness towards issues we may now consider important (Freud and psychoanalysis), and a squeamishness around sex (which ensured there was no entry on Sex). Conversely, there was plenty of sober coverage of topics we would now regard as dubious (poltergeists and other paranormal activity, phrenology). We may attempt to pardon both omissions and errors with the catch-all explanation we use so often these days: those were different times, with different values and codes; ignorant historical errors of judgement will always be easy prey for those who come later.

In his introduction, the editor Hugh Chisholm carefully embraced the concept of controversy, something encyclopaedists had previously been reluctant to do (despite their revolutionary leanings, Diderot and D’Alembert were careful not to specifically endorse contentious entries for fear of imprisonment; inclusion was endorsement enough). Chisholm welcomed debate, for ‘impartiality does not consist in concealing criticism, or in withholding the knowledge of divergent opinion, but in an attitude of scientific respect’.*

But then we must face the entry entitled Negro. This is more than problematic; a prejudice so extreme that it can neither be explained nor forgiven, and yet remains visible, cold and hard, on library shelves (in my own beloved London Library indeed, not 10 yards from where I’m writing this, on an upper shelf, a shadow waiting to fall). It would be difficult to imagine assumptions more offensive. The entry will most likely leave you breathless, for it is history as written, and in 1911 it was believed to be both true and wise. It was written by Thomas Athol Joyce, the chief ethnographer at the British Museum.

NEGRO: (from Lat. niger, black), in anthropology, the designation of the distinctly dark-skinned, as opposed to the fair, yellow, and brown variations of mankind … The colour of the skin, which is also distinguished by a velvety surface and a characteristic odour, is due not to the presence of any special pigment, but to the greater abundance of the colouring matter in the Malpighian mucous membrane between the inner or true skin and the epidermis or scarf skin. This colouring matter is not distributed equally over the body, and does not reach its fullest development until some weeks after birth; so that new-born babies are a reddish chocolate or copper colour. But excess of pigmentation is not confined to the skin; spots of pigment are often found in some of the internal organs, such as the liver, spleen, &c. Other characteristics appear to be a hypertrophy of the organs of excretion, a more developed venous system, and a less voluminous brain, as compared with the white races.

It was of its time, of course, and it serves to remind us what a time it was. It will come as little relief, or even surprise, that Britannica expressed similarly assured prejudices against Chinese, Afghans, Arabs and Native Americans. (Other judgements appear so naive as to be almost comical: Antisemitism, for example, was a ‘passing phase in the history of culture’.) Some of these slurs appeared as a theoretical and political act, and chimed with the encyclopaedia’s entry for Civilization, which calls for the ‘betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity’.*

For many years after its launch, Britannica’s eleventh edition continued to be promoted as something between a knowledge circus and the latest time-saving gadget. Whereas once the Britannica was sold primarily on content – the calibre of its professors, the unique material between its covers – it was increasingly being marketed on price and value. ‘At the present price,’ an advertisement in the American Magazine proclaimed, it was ‘the cheapest book ever published’. How so? Because it eliminated the need for a reference library of 400 to 500 books and would be ‘about one-seventh’ of the cost. The set also eliminated sixteen ‘arduous’ years of ordinary book buying. The entire set would be yours for $5 down, followed by $5 per volume for 37 or 47 months, depending on your choice of dark-green sheepskin or dark-red full morocco (there was also a 31-month miserly cloth binding ‘regarded as entirely satisfactory by those who had to choose the cheapest form’, and a version in ‘full limp velvet suede’, price on application).

The Advertising entry in the eleventh edition, written by its advertising manager Henry R. Haxton, expressed a common concern: ‘In the French, and some English Newspapers, where an advertisement is often given the form of an item of news, the reader is distressed by the constant fear of being hoodwinked.’

But in 1913, two years after it launched, Haxton wrote another advertisement celebrating his and his encyclopaedia’s success. Published in The Times, it certainly matched the product it was selling – a thicket of text explaining why this edition was superior to all its predecessors, and no feature was omitted. It was ‘the most successful book of our time’. In the last two years, Haxton claimed, it had sold 40,000 sets, or 1,160,000 volumes, making it imperative ‘not to sell’ the encyclopaedia but merely to fulfil existing orders. But now, with only 10 per cent remaining, the set was available once more! The reader had a choice of paper – either ‘heavy book paper’, which brought each volume in at 2¾ inches, or English-made opaque Indian paper, which made the volumes only one inch thick: this innovation was ‘an inspiration of genius’.

Inevitably, Britannica would make ‘the ideal Christmas present’, and it was now so cheap that a clever reader would consider buying numerous sets as both an investment in knowledge and an investment in itself. ‘I bought two copies for the benefit of my two sets of grandchildren,’ Dr C.W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard, happily informed the campaign. ‘I find them altogether admirable, and my grandchildren, who are at the most inquisitive ages, are of the same opinion.’*

But not everyone thought highly of it. A review by Joseph Jacobs in the New York Times criticised the extent to which it relied on articles reprinted from earlier editions: he estimated that ‘not more than a fifth’ of the content was absolutely new. Hugh Chisholm replied that the obverse was the case – not more than about one-fifth was retained from previous editions (he claimed that a quick survey of one volume found only 16 per cent had appeared in the tenth edition). ‘I know it to be a fact that no previous edition has been so original in its matter, as compared with its predecessor, as that which I have had the honor of directing to its conclusion.’

The most forceful and prolonged battering came from the critic and poet Willard Huntington Wright, who also wrote detective novels under the name S.S. Van Dine. Wright/Van Dine’s entry in Britannica.com lists many of his titles, including his philosophy primer What Nietzsche Taught (1915) and The Kennel Murder Case (1933) – but there is one significant omission: Misinforming a Nation (1917). This was a 220-page assessment of how America had fallen fatally under the spell of the ‘assumed cultural superiority’ of England, noting how everything English was consistently overvalued and overpraised on American shores. Wright’s assault was fuelled by what he saw as English contempt for Catholicism, coupled with an intellectual prejudice he perceived against all aspects of American beliefs and aesthetics. The majority of his ammunition was employed specifically against Britannica’s eleventh edition, ‘this distorted, insular, incomplete, and suggestively British reference work’. Its framework was narrow and parochial, and he could find ‘no more vicious and dangerous intellectual influence’ on young American minds; if accepted as in any way authoritative it would ‘retard our intellectual development fully twenty years’. Wright barely drew breath. He also found that, far from being ‘universal’, the encyclopaedia was rather the home of ‘second- and third-rate Englishmen … given space and praise much greater than that accorded truly great men of other nations … The vocabulary of hyperbole has been practically exhausted in setting forth the dubious merits of this reference work … the ethics and decencies of ordinary honest commerce have been thrown to the wind.’*

His complaints appear not to have affected sales. The eleventh edition was an extraordinary global success. It sold about 1 million sets, more than every previous edition combined. It won a famous army of fans, not least Ernest Shackleton, who took the entire edition on his two-year voyage aboard Endurance, and would report how it saved him and his crew, socially and psychologically, as they battled the Antarctic ice. They believed they were carrying the sum of human civilisation along with them, a talisman in which they would themselves soon feature as heroes.

The eleventh edition was to be the last of its kind, the last to be so sure of itself, the last before the war. Many of its contributors died between 1914 and 1918, and with them died the superiority, the callousness and the downright brilliant know-it-all assertiveness of Britannica’s imperial tone. As Hans Koning concludes, one is ‘almost tempted to envy the writers … their doubtlessness’ in this unthreatened world. The key word here is ‘almost’. One re-examines the entry that observed how the Negro had ‘dark tightly curled hair … of the “wooly” or the “frizzly” type’, or the lines that claim Haitians are ‘ignorant and lazy’, ‘the Chinese character is inferior to the European’, and the Afghan is ‘cruel and crafty’ – and one begins to understand how the next generation of Britannica readers (those children who were once told they would be intellectually undernourished if they didn’t consume its pages) might form their worldview.



LITTLE WOMEN


In 1926, Janet Courtney published a memoir called Recollected in Tranquillity, a title suggesting her career had hitherto been hectic. She had worked as a secretary at the Royal Commission on Labour, and as a clerk at the Bank of England, but her most interesting years occurred at the High Holborn offices of Britannica. She was a lynchpin of administration, a role that entailed discretion, sublimation and being underappreciated on a daily basis.

But in December 1910, at the launch of the eleventh edition, when she was still known as Janet Hogarth, she had a rare evening in the limelight, albeit in a tokenistic way, when she was called upon to give a speech at a banquet celebrating the role of women at the encyclopaedia. The banquet was at the Savoy, the last in a sequence of four; the first three had been men only.

Hogarth adored her job and most of her colleagues. ‘There never was an office so gay, so self-confident, so crowded, so uncomfortable, yet so irresistible in its attraction.’ She was proud of her own entries in the new edition, most of them small and all of them unsigned, and prouder still of her achievements as chief indexer, a highly complicated assignment covering and cross-referencing 30,000 pages in less than a year, a half-million separate entries, a volume in itself.

She was introduced at the dinner by the editor Hugh Chisholm, who praised the number of women who had ‘lent their assistance’ to bring the eleventh edition to publication. The number of contributors was still small compared to men, ‘but in the sections relating to social and purely feminine affairs their contributions were of the first importance.’*

Rising to her feet after the meal, holding a cigarette, Hogarth observed how the lighting in the ballroom had been softened ‘to make us look our best’. She said that the cleverest answer to the question ‘What are women put into this world for?’ was ‘To keep the men’s head straight.’ And she agreed that although the number of women was still small, at the launch of the ninth edition thirty-five years before ‘if anyone had suggested to the then editors and proprietors that women’s share in the work should be not only acknowledged but proclaimed upon the housetops, the suggestion would have been regarded as absolutely revolutionary, if not positively indecent.’ But now, as the Daily Telegraph reported a few days after Hogarth’s speech, Britannica had ‘given them the chance to demonstrate in this way their rightful place in the learned world’.*

Up to a point. It was true that Britannica had always been a male preserve. Indeed, this had barely changed for more than a century since the first edition of 1768 (the one that had succinctly informed readers who chanced upon the entry Woman that they were the female equivalent of Man and should ‘See Homo’). But even now the improvement was marginal. In the tenth edition, compiled by almost 1800 contributors, only 37 had been women. In the eleventh, the figure was actually smaller at 35 women, although the total was also smaller at about 1500. A woman’s ‘rightful place in the learned world’ amounted to less than 2.5 per cent. As the historian Gillian Thomas points out in her biographical study of those 35 women, A Position to Command Respect, far from being ‘proclaimed upon the housetops,’ as Hogarth claimed, ‘the vast amount of women’s work on the eleventh Britannica was invisible and unacknowledged’.*

Gillian Thomas attempts to rectify this by recognising the many women who acted as ‘literary devils’ on Britannica – a term encompassing ghostwriting, researching long articles that would be credited to men, and writing small articles that usually went uncredited. These included Agnes Muriel Clay, a tutor in classics at Oxford; Agnes Mary Clerke, a classical scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of four books on astronomy; Pearl Craigie, classical scholar at University College, London, a popular novelist and playwright; Agnes Mary Duclaux, poet and literary critic, whose contributions to the Times Literary Supplement introduced English readers to Proust; Alice B. Gomme, a founder of the Folklore Society; Margaret, Lady Huggins, a leader in spectrography and honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society; Flora, Lady Lugard, ‘Colonial Editor’ of The Times; and Alice Meynell, poet and essayist.

The women shared differing and unpredictable political views. One, Lady Emilia Dilke, was a committed trades unionist, while Agnes Clay was involved in the Association for the Education of Women. Others, including Pearl Craigie, Mary Ward and Janet Hogarth, were supportive of the Anti-Suffrage Movement, arguing that women should stay above the fray of demeaning politics, fearing that a woman’s influence in the home and education of children would be adversely affected.

But not all their contributions were anonymous. The more unusual their specialisms, the more they received personal acknowledgement. Alice Gomme wrote on Children’s Games; Mary Ward wrote on Spain; Jessie Weston on Arthurian Legends; Flora Shaw tackled the British Empire; Victoria, Lady Welby explained Significs, a precursor to the study of semiotics. It was primarily in areas of the traditional university syllabus that their work was ignored, not least in the fields of classics, mathematics and science.

The content of the eleventh Britannica was, predictably, also very male-dominated. There was no entry for Marie Curie, for example, despite the extensive coverage given to radioactivity elsewhere; her work, and her Nobel Prize for Physics, was covered only briefly in the entry about her husband Pierre Curie. Elsewhere, historical events seemed to have been placed in what Thomas calls ‘a hall of distorting mirrors’. The story of Mme. Roland, a popular hero of the French Revolution, appears only within a biographical entry for her husband Jean Marie Roland. While she occupies almost three-quarters of the text, ‘the heading and the story’s frame implies that the reader’s attention ought to be devoted to her husband, even though the article itself can find little to say about him’.

The strangest entry was the one entitled Women. This is signed simply ‘X’, the only lengthy article in the whole edition with this credit, and it is thought to have been written by the editor Chisholm himself. It runs to seven pages (compared to ten on the subsequent Woodcarving), and betrays signs of wrangling. Much of the article is devoted to the legal standing of women in a historical and matrimonial context, and the issue of education, where it manages to be both chivalrous and patronising, describing the ‘temperate, calm, earnest demeanour of women’ as a credit to school and university teaching, something that has ‘awakened admiration and respect from all’. Women are said to have ‘invaded’ other professions, including journalism, law-copying, plan-tracing and factory inspection, where nonetheless they are found to be ‘hard-working, persevering and capable’ and quite able to ‘hold their ground’; a woman may also succeed as a queen and regent. The other main topic concerns women’s suffrage, something Britannica appears to be largely against. The word ‘suffrage’ and the subject of ‘the vote’ seem initially so unpalatable that their appearance is replaced by ‘the movement for the abolition of the sex distinction in respect of the right conferred upon certain citizens to share in the election of parliamentary representatives.’*

There was another reason why the entry entitled Women was subject to wrangling: an error in carpentry. The bookcases for the eleventh edition had been ordered and built a year before the completion of the set, and when it was clear the edition would run to one more volume than originally planned, Hugh Chisholm faced a dilemma. According to Gillian Thomas, he issued instructions to keep entries beginning W–Z down to a minimum. But Janet Hogarth, the contributor and chief indexer, recalled how Chisholm once tried to justify cutting the entry on Women in its entirety.

I vividly remember a winter afternoon when he called me ‘into counsel’ as he called it, in the editorial sanctum, which … meant that whilst I sat meekly by the fire, he walked up and down, expounding to me that the then position of women as an integral part of the human race made it unnecessary to write about them as though they were a race apart! I cordially but respectfully agreed, and we decided that only a few columns, chronicling the suffrage movement and certain educational advances need be inserted.

More than any other publication, the storage of encyclopaedias has always been an issue. But storage can also be an affectation, and from the time in 1860 when the eighth edition offered a £3 revolving mahogany bookcase to house its twenty-one volumes, spinning furniture became as much a status symbol as the books it was holding.

By the time of the eleventh edition, it had become an important selling point for the set, with three different designs. The first was a mahogany single-tier open case topped by a narrow ‘consulting table’, while the other two came in ‘Jacobean Oak’ with glass fronts, one of sturdy and compact design with the volumes placed vertically in three rows, the other of a more precarious build resembling a grandfather clock, with all the books stacked horizontally flat on top of each other. They were all ‘free’, the way a mobile phone may now come free with a thirty-six-month contract, and only available ‘while stocks last’ which almost certainly meant ‘while demand lasts’.

By 1930, the bookcases had become a dominant feature in the advertisements. ‘Presented Free with each set is a beautiful bookcase-table, made of solid brown mahogany,’ proclaimed one, with everything in the accompanying photograph just as solid: a dad smoking his pipe in a chair by the edge of the bookcase, his wife on the edge of the chair consulting the Britannica, the long bookcase centre stage with a lamp and vase on it, and behind the bookcase two very engaged children, a boy and a girl, each busting their buttons to get their hands on their mother’s volume.

A few years later, a family in Port Washington, New York, posed on two sofas with the Americana in a bookcase between them. ‘The Americana made a real improvement in the homework of our fifteen-year-old daughter Kathleen in just a few months,’ reported Mrs Raymond Saunders. ‘When people ask us if we use The Americana much, we just point to the bookcase, for at least one volume is always out of place and being used by one of the children.’ And Mrs Howard W. Colburn of Goodwater, Alaska, concurred. ‘My oldest boy even learned how to work his algebra problems from the article on algebra.’




* Yet, despite reflecting all the greatness and progress of the world, the edition somehow managed to neglect half its people; the value of women to Britannica, both as subjects and contributors, would only slowly emerge and be recognised in the new century. There was one notable exception to this in the ninth edition (1888): the entry ‘Women, Law Relating to’. It began: ‘The law as it relates to women has been gradual in its operation, but its tendency has been almost uniformly in one direction. Disabilities of women, married or unmarried, have been one after another removed, until at the present day, in most countries, the legal position of women differs little from that of men as far as regards private rights. Politically and professionally the sexes are still not upon an equality, but even in this aspect women have considerably greater rights than they once possessed, and the old theory of their intellectual and moral inferiority is virtually exploded. Those who defend their exclusion must now do so on other grounds.’

* It helped that it was out of copyright.

* Everything Explained That is Explainable: On the Creation of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910–1911 by Denis Boyles (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016).

* In his memoir Another Part of the Wood (1975), Kenneth Clark wrote of how, in the eleventh edition, ‘One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by the facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopaedia in the tradition of Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only when it is slightly coloured by prejudice.’ His use of the word ‘slightly’ may now be considered understatement.

* Denis Boyles points out that the notoriety – i.e. blatant racism – of the Negro article has ensured that it is one of the eleventh edition’s most widely read. There is no record of any conflict or objection from the encyclopaedia’s editors or fellow contributors at the time of sale, and any objection from readers may have been treated just like an objection to any other entry, and dismissed with the assuredness that populates the rest of the publication. (You may choose not to read on, but for factual context I’ve included some further representative extracts below.)

‘Mentally the negro is inferior to the white. The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: “The negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence.”

‘It would be generally but not universally held, also, that the negroes in the United States progressed under slavery, that they were far better qualified for incorporation as a vital and contributing element of the country’s civilization at the time of their emancipation than they were on arrival or than an equal number of their African kindred would have been. But probably the rate of progress has been more rapid under freedom than it was under slavery.

‘The negroes in the United States have played and are playing an important and necessary part in the industrial and economic life of the southern states, in which in 1908 they formed about one-third of the population. But that life was changing with marvellous rapidity, becoming less simple, less agricultural and patriarchal, more manufacturing and commercial, more strenuous and complex. It was too early to say whether the negroes would be given an equal or a fair opportunity to show that they could be as serviceable or more serviceable in such a civilization as they had been in that which was passing away, and whether the race would show itself able to accept and improve such chances as were afforded, and to remain in the future under these changing circumstances, as they had been in the past, a vital and essential part of the life of the nation.’

It is a particular misfortune of Britannica’s wide-ranging influence and authority that it may have both delayed and withheld the possibility of progress advanced in the paragraph above.

In 1970, a social studies teacher in New York called Irving Sloan published a survey of the treatment of black Americans in nine popular encyclopaedias. He found considerable improvement in recent decades, including far more comprehensive and less prejudiced articles on the general history of the ‘Afro-American’. But he also noted a paucity of individual entries on the achievements of black men, and very few for black women. See: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED090113.pdf

* Dr Eliot knew a good length of books when he saw one. He was the editor of the fifty-book set of Harvard Classics, known as ‘the five-foot shelf of books’.

* Wright, Willard Huntington, Misinforming a Nation, New York, B.W. Huebsch, 1917. Wright was most likely reviewing one of the many American editions of the eleventh Britannica adapted for sale through many regional newspapers and department store catalogues. These would have included additional material pertaining to the United States, written by American specialists. It was telling that when Britannica was considered by one of its staff many decades later it was judged too American and certainly prejudiced against Britain. In 1988 the genealogist Charles Mosley, who worked for Britannica for several years, first as a subeditor and then as its London editor, wrote in the Guardian how the pro-American bias ‘amounts to more than impertinence’. ‘The full horror of what an American editorial monopoly entails is seldom appreciated. The American editors who write short in-house articles are ignorant and parochial … The Encyclopaedia Britannica is a publication so contemptuous of Britain, the land of its birth, that it cannot be bothered to ascertain correct usage when speaking of The Thames.’ Mosley questioned its priorities when it came to biographical selections: he balked at the inclusion of globetrotting television journalist Alan Whicker, and mourned the lack of the Conservative cabinet ministers Lords Carrington or Whitelaw.

* It was not immediately clear what these ‘purely feminine affairs’ consisted of, but an American advertisement for the eleventh edition sold by Sears, Roebuck & Co provides a clue. Beneath the subheading ‘The Britannica in Women’s Affairs’ we read that the encyclopaedia ‘gives to the woman fundamental information on politics, on economics, child welfare, domestic science, on foods and their relative values, on hygiene, sanitation, home decorations, furniture, rugs and furnishings.’

* Hogarth changed her name to Courtney upon marriage in 1911, after which she found her work increasingly stressful. She served as assistant editor on Britannica’s twelfth edition after the war, but regretted not being able to devote more hours to the work. ‘Men really need not be so frightened,’ she wrote in 1926. ‘They will never find the labour market flooded with married women. It is not an easy matter to combine professional work with matrimony. No doubt there is greater security, but there is also the added strain of another person to consider.’

* A Position to Command Respect by Gillian Thomas (Scarecrow Press Inc, Metuchen, New Jersey and London, 1992). In her introduction, Thomas recalls her father frequently referring to the eleventh edition to settle arguments, the green volumes behind a glass-fronted bookcase. Though her father, like the volumes, was regarded as rather old-fashioned, Britannica ‘still seemed an oddly comforting piece of cultural furniture’; he had bought the set on an instalment plan ‘as a young man intent on self-improvement’.

* In the 1950s, Herman Kogan wrote that Britannica’s Walter Yust, the editor of the fourteenth edition, was apparently surprised when informed by the historian Mary Ritter Beard how few were the biographies of women compared to men. Of roughly 13,000, fewer than 800 described the lives of women. Yust asked Beard for a list of omissions, and she obliged. Subsequent progress was slow.

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