Q
QUESTIONING
For the child in the real world, the year 1910 began with a lot of questions. Do animals know when they are treated kindly? Is the country healthier than the town? Why does it rain so much in Scotland?
Because we once lived in simpler times, these things once had simple answers. They appeared in The Children’s Encyclopaedia, which was known as The Book of Knowledge in the United States, a hugely successful and unpredictable enterprise that made at least a modest contribution to shaping young opinion between the wars, and thus adult opinion after it. (One could build a fair case suggesting that a junior encyclopaedia would always be more influential than an adult one, given the impressionable age of its readers.) The answers are: we don’t know, but it certainly does the human good; yes if you like pure air and sunshine, but no if you’re more interested in better water and drainage systems; and Scotland is farther north than England, and so its colder climate condenses more water in the atmosphere (it also has a very broken west coast, and the water of the sea comes far up into the land).
Initially available as a fortnightly part-work between 1908 and 1910, and sold primarily on platform kiosks at train stations, the instalments would build into that well-worn encyclopaedic phrase ‘a treasury of knowledge’, but it wasn’t like most encyclopaedias that had gone before. For a start, it wasn’t alphabetical. It was a huge engaging hotchpotch of everything, and because it had no recognisable shape it was both surprising and barmy. It wasn’t even thematic, it was just all over the place; it read as though its editor Arthur Mee had thrown his index cards out of the window into a high wind.
The contents page of Volume 1 lists nineteen ‘groups’ of entries, although these too repel easy categorisation. For instance, Group 2, ‘Men and Women’, features articles on The First Flying Men, The Kings of Music, The Famous Men of Venice and The French Revolutionists. Or take Group 16, ‘Ideas’, which features Movement, Justice, Courage and Truth, all the Marvel heroes in one. The Children’s Encyclopedia was a huge success: its publisher, the Educational Book Company, claimed sales of 800,000 in its first decade, a great many of these to schools and libraries.
The entry on Truth reveals another aspect of the project, a hard-line faith in God. It cites Montaigne’s suggestion that we are born to enquire after truth, and ‘we should keep it constantly before our minds.’ But it is not enough. ‘He did not say that truth was hidden in a well. He said it was in the heights of the Divine. Truth is God, and in seeking truth we are seeking our creator.’
This was heady stuff for a child who has just learnt, in the same volume, about how to make their own sweets and a bag from a pair of gloves. And so the quest for truth became a game, ‘the greatest game of hide and seek that was ever invented. God had hidden his truth, and we shall never find it on this earth; but He has made the search for it so exciting and splendid.’ And on the following page – page 501 out of the 764 pages in Volume 1 – you can build a toy to measure the wind (‘… put the washer on top of the wooden post …’).
The encyclopaedia, composed at the height of empire, was also committed to a proudly British way of life (all except the title, which changed from Encyclopaedia to Encyclopedia as it broke into the American market sometime in the 1920s). A section on the slave trade provides a distinct flavour of this – supercilious, even-handed, very sure of itself. The entry was called ‘The Good Explorers and the Bad Explorers of the Long Ago’.
The early explorers were of two kinds: simple priests who went with incredible daring into realms of benighted savagery to baptise men, women, and children whose very language they did not know; and Spanish and Portuguese slave-dealers who, by the middle of the seventeenth century, were carrying 10,000 poor wretches a year from Africa to Brazil alone, where, toiling like beasts of burden, the unhappy creatures, if exceedingly strong and equally fortunate, might live out seven years, but not more than seven.
England, to her shame be it told, had her share in those slaves. In the century preceding the American Declaration of Independence, we carried three million African slaves to the New World; and threw another 250,000 into the Atlantic as they died in our ships. All the Negroes in the New World, and they number many millions now, are descended from the slaves stolen with cruelty and violence from the Dark Continent.