This was the encyclopaedia I had at school, a fact that now makes me feel slightly queasy, not least because the title of the editor’s preface read, ‘To All Who Love Children All over the World’. Arthur Mee’s manifesto proclaimed that he wanted to cram a child’s mind with everything relevant. His work would be written in words every child could understand, and the longest word in it would be ‘Encyclopaedia’. His grand project had not ‘come to steal away the joy of childhood and put a bitter grinding in its place’. Rather, it was ‘a gift to the nation’, and he hoped that every child who opened it would find something to engage him or her, not least upon gender-specific lines, ‘the mechanical interests of boys, the domestic interest of girls’.
He signed off with a further list of questions. ‘What does the world mean? And why am I here? Where are all the people who have been and gone? Who holds the stars up there?’
Initially, and perhaps unsurprisingly with conundrums like these, Mee had no competitors. La Petite Encyclopédie du jeune âge, published by Larousse, hadn’t been updated since 1853 and wasn’t available in English. The hugely successful World Book from 1917 was a richly illustrated encyclopaedia marketed to both children and adults, but it had little of Mee’s peccadilloes or charm. The first proper rival emerged in the United States in the 1920s with the ten-volume Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, heralded in its marketing as both more up to date than Britannica and more centred around classroom teaching (‘It teaches happily … it informs accurately … Compton’s keeps pace with annual progress.’) Compton’s would emerge as a significant mid-market rival to the highbrow Britannica, but this particular set was a general publication written for adults and much older children.
Britannica had its own plans to launch a junior version in 1914, but the war and its aftermath postponed the launch of Children’s Britannica until 1934. It was ‘a proper encyclopaedia designed for you,’ the editor of the second edition Robin Sales wrote to its young readers in 1969, ‘but with a plan that will help you to use, when you are older, a grown-up encyclopaedia.’ Like the grown-up’s Britannica, the articles were arranged in alphabetical order: in Volume 2, Badger was followed by Badminton, Baghdad and Bagpipe, taking one on a tour of the animal kingdom, the world of sports, an ancient Muslim civilisation and the disputed origins of resonant woodwind in a few colourful pages. Likewise in the last volume: Walnut would be followed by Sir Robert Walpole, who would precede Walrus, who would learn to Waltz. And because the slim nineteen-volume set was just a stepping stone to greater things, there was detailed instruction on how to use the index, knowledge judged indispensable when confronting the full 40 million words later in life (the children’s version contained 4 million). Thus there was no point being disappointed when you flipped the pages of Volume 8 to look up ‘goldfinch’ and found no such entry. The clever boy and girl would rather go to the index, find that the goldfinch was considered part of the large Finch family, and happily turn to page 132 in Volume 7. The quest for knowledge would usually involve a bit of detective work – yet more valuable preparation for adulthood.*
The first volume of Britannica Junior carried a list of the many hundreds of authors ‘who have helped to make this encyclopaedia know a great deal’. Many of them were not experienced at writing for children, so a specialist group of editors in the Britannica office ensured that every article could be easily understood. The entries were also sent to be read by the pupils and teachers at a junior school, and if anything wasn’t clear to them, more clarity was inserted. The authors then got the articles back, to ensure no errors had crept in during the clarification. The whole was then checked anew by an ‘educational adviser’.
Unlike adult encyclopaedias, each volume would end with a suggestion for hobbies and pastimes – how to act Shakespeare, how to draw animals – while the last volume included an alphabetical quiz to send you skittering back to previous volumes:
How did Androcles win the friendship of a lion?
What is meant by irrigation?
Of what metals does soft solder consist?
This was a publication aimed at the elementary years, although Britannica was keen to open up a market younger still. To this end, in 1954 it published a pamphlet called ‘Using Britannica Junior with your Preschool Child’. (The cover illustration showed a smiling mother standing behind a smiling father in an armchair, with a boy of about four standing smiling at the side and a smiling girl sitting on her father’s lap. They were all reading the same volume.) The foreword was written by Newton R. Calhoun, who was billed as a psychologist at Winnetka Public Schools in Winnetka, Illinois. ‘Has home seemed too confining for your child to discover new interests in it?’ he asked. ‘It will take a great many different subjects to interest him from hour to hour and day to day.’
The pamphlet explained that Britannica was the ideal way of dealing with a child’s insatiable (‘and, let’s face it, sometimes overwhelming’) curiosity. ‘Often a child asks the same question repeatedly because he remains confused or wants reassurance. It is important not to over-emphasise the giving of factual information if his question really refers to his feelings.’ Britannica chose an example one imagines that its committed editors had been asked by their own children: why do you drink so much coffee? ‘Sometimes actions are better answers than words,’ the adult should realise:
He may want to know why it’s right for you to drink but not for him. If this is his concern you will want to answer in a way that does not alarm him, and yet makes it clear that there is a good reason. Or the same question may mean that he wonders how you can like that stuff: it looks and smells quite unsavoury to him. If so, he will feel more satisfied by tasting coffee than by listening to words. You can give him some coffee diluted with milk and amply sweetened. He will be made to feel more secure because the gap between his and the adult word has been lessened.
He may then ask, ‘Where does it come from and what does it look like before it gets into the can?’, and this is where having Britannica on hand really pays dividends. Coffee uses water, of course, and so a child will probably have other questions, such as where the water comes from, how does it get into the pipes, and where does it go after it goes down the drain. ‘The answers to these questions are given in simple form in the articles rain (Volume 13, Page 30, column a), water supply (15, 58, a) and sewage disposal (13, 292, b) … You can be sure of finding the answers in Britannica Junior.’
The Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia (1948) reverted back to a thematic arrangement. The editors believed that it would be more ‘educationally beneficial’ for its eleven-plus readership if each of the twelve volumes tackled a broader but more cohesive subject matter, with the alphabet only coming into play within each volume, a system that harked at least as far back as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The subjects were humankind, natural history, the universe, communications, great lives, farming and fisheries, industry and commerce, engineering, recreations, law and society, home and health, and the arts.
The preface emphasised its serious intent: the work had been the subject of ‘authorizing’ by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press. The editors hoped their encyclopaedia would be an extended treatise on the value of reading as a whole. ‘To many children (and indeed to many adults) reading is not a natural activity; they do not turn to books for their own sake.’ They might be trained, however, to go to the Oxford Junior for a particular purpose, and thus ‘to form a habit which will be of lifelong value’.
The set was primarily intended for school libraries, and in its preface the editors Laura E. Salt and Geoffrey Boumphrey explained their desire to provide a work of reference suitable for those who found standard encyclopaedias too heavy and overly dense with technical information. They hoped that thousands of illustrations would lighten the load, as would their omission of ‘purely scientific’ topics. Theirs was a humanistic outlook, more concerned with the modern world than the past, more practical than abstract. An encyclopaedia, unlike a dictionary, ‘deals only with words and subjects about which there is something interesting to be said’.
But what, for example, would the first volume of the Oxford Junior (Mankind) say about Americans? After a demographic and social breakdown – ‘people of the States are of very mixed origin – British, French, German, Scandinavian, Russian, Finnish, people from the Balkans, Italians, Dutchmen, Greeks, Poles, Jews, even Chinese and Japanese’ – we learn:
The Americans are a people who are mentally very much alive. They have always stood for the great principles of liberty and democracy, although there are among them great variations of wealth and poverty and frequent bitter struggles between capital and labour. The spirit of free enterprise, still paramount in America, though it certainly stimulates initiative, may be leading to the development of an individualism which threatens the common good, and may lead Americans to put too high a value on financial and material success.
An entry titled British Peoples is illustrated by three photographs: haymaking in Suffolk, an aerial view of the pottery district of Staffordshire belching smoke from 100 chimneys, and Trafalgar Square, captioned ‘The Heart of the Empire’. The English are characterised as having a fondness for understatement (‘the expression “not bad” is a typical example’), something that Americans find ‘most conspicuous, and put it down to false modesty’. Elsewhere, Englishmen are noted for their ‘coldness’, although they are ‘companionable’ once one gets to know them.
England is also known abroad for what often appears as a willingness to combine expressions of high moral idealism with a very realistic ability to hold on to territory and business. The famous ‘White Man’s Burden’ as a slogan of empire has, for instance, always appeared to Britain’s competitors as a piece of hypocrisy.
We should remind ourselves of the date of this writing: 1948, the year Empire Windrush unloaded its Jamaican passengers by the Thames, the year the British mandate ended in Palestine, the year George VI lost his title ‘Emperor of India’. The young boys and girls reading those books will be in their eighties now, having run the country and influenced the course of the world for some fifty years.*
The critical response to the Oxford Junior was mixed. Because each of the volumes carried a different subject, they were reviewed primarily by specialist magazines. So the Modern Law Review of 1953 picked up Volume 10, Law and Order, and a certain J.A.G. Griffith found it diverse and excellently printed. He was less happy with the large number of errors: despite the statement to the contrary, Griffith observed, there was nothing to prevent a member of the National Coal Board standing for parliament; local authorities began to build housing estates long before the 1920s; and the explanation of the funding of the National Health Service was wrong. Apart from these mistakes and many others, the writer concluded, the volume was a ‘considerable achievement’.
In 1950 History magazine found much to admire in the first three volumes, covering Mankind, Natural History and the Universe, but there was one black hole: a stark lack of History. ‘The history teacher has a fundamental grievance,’ wrote the history professor R.F. Treharne. ‘Thanks to the highly arbitrary plan of the work, his subject seems to have been largely forgotten.’
In its tortuously metaphorical analysis, the Burlington Magazine found the encyclopaedia almost edible. Writing for the young is difficult, declared the author Wilfrid Blunt, brother of the art expert and spy Anthony Blunt. ‘The “older young” may be persuaded to accept simple nourishment, but they will revolt against pap; the stomachs of the “younger young”, on the other hand, cannot yet assimilate adult food.’ Irrespective of age and digestive systems, Blunt found that almost all readers would find the set admirable: ‘The pabulum there provided is easily digestible, yet not pre-digested; it is attractively served; it is eminently nourishing.’ Only occasionally was the editors’ taste questionable, he felt. There should have been no entry on the Limerick, for one. And he disapproved of sullying the publication with even a passing mention of the blues, judging it ‘irritating’ and ‘an ephemeral kind of music that is better forgotten’. The prejudices of the reviewer sit uneasily upon the prejudices of the product. But as to accuracy – we’ll see that this was anyone’s guess.*
* One American advertisement for what was also called Britannica Junior showed a mom and pop admiring their child from a distance: ‘Look! He’s actually studying on his own – and loving it!’
* Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopedia no doubt had a similar impact in the decades before. An entry on the British Empire in South Africa praised ‘the part that has been played by our country in opening up the great African continent … it is not generally realized that the British Empire controls in Africa [in 1910] a larger area of the Earth’s surface than it controls either in Canada or Australia.’ But we were slow to get going with our exploitation. ‘The reason for this was that only a small proportion of the continent had a climate in which white men could live healthily and work productively on white men’s industries.’ Trade could still be conducted to some extent, because the continent had a large population, ‘mostly uncivilized, but capable of bringing to the coast things which civilized people desired, particularly gold dust and ivory.’
* The blues received only a few lines of coverage within a one-page entry on Jazz. And its very last words are questionable. It states that many blues songs are ‘deeply expressive of sadness, fear, even satire upon the lot of the black man at the expense of the white, but never of vindictiveness or hatred.’