Among his personal contributions, Smellie almost certainly composed the entry entitled Abridgement, for within it he laid out his intentions for his entire enterprise. ‘The art of conveying much sentiment in few words is the happiest talent an author can be possessed of,’ he declared, in an entry much longer than those surrounding it (Abrax, an antique stone; Abrobania, a town and district in Transylvania). ‘This talent is particularly necessary in the present state of literature,’ the entry maintained, ‘for many writers have acquired the dexterity of spreading a few critical thoughts over several hundred pages … When an author hits upon a thought that pleases him, he is apt to dwell upon it … Though this may be pleasant to the writer, it tires and vexes the reader.’
Smellie’s conclusion may be judged abusively anti-academic. ‘Abridging is particularly useful in taking the substance of what is delivered by Professors,’ he writes. ‘Every public speaker has circumlocutions, redundancies, lumber, which deserve not to be copied.’ He recommended concision, elision and omission. This ‘would be more for the honour of Professors; as it would prevent at least such immense loads of disjointed and unintelligible rubbish from being handed about by the name of such a man’s lectures.’
Smellie’s suggestion was unmistakable: Encyclopaedia Britannica was an alternative university, the modern way with knowledge. Buy these volumes, he seemed to be saying, and you need buy nothing more; this set will set you up for life. Those whose task it was to sell Britannica and other encyclopaedias to cynical households in the years to come would seldom waver from this pitch.
ACCURATE DEFINITIONS AND EXPLANATIONS
But how, in the late eighteenth century, in the age before door-to-door salespeople, in the age indeed before the train, was such a hefty, new and ambitious publication to be explained and sold? Principally by newspaper advertisement. Announcing the publication of the first volume in December 1768, a notice in the Caledonian Mercury claimed it would contain ‘ACCURATE DEFINITIONS and EXPLANATIONS of all the Terms as they occur in the Order of the Alphabet’.
This did rather make it sound like a dictionary, and with good reason. The encyclopaedia as we understand it today – a work of reference on a great variety of topics, a gathering of information and instructional articles intended as a summation of contemporary human knowledge – began life primarily as a definition of words.
Between the exhaustive entries on Agriculture and Algebra, for example, there were a great many briefer ones, many of them banal. These included (in their entirety):
AID: In a general sense, denotes any kind of assistance given by one person to another.
AIGHENDALE: The name of a liquid measure used in Lancashire, containing seven quarts.
ALARM-BELL: That rung upon any sudden emergency, as a fire, mutiny, or the like.
Other entries read like the erratic index of an atlas:
ABERYSWITH: A market-town in Wales, lying 199 miles W.S.W. of London, in 52.30 N. lat. and 40.15 W. long.
ANGERMANNIA: A maritime province of Sweden, lying on the western shore of the Bothnic gulph.
Many other entries were anecdotal, whimsical, circumlocutory, contradictory and pointedly subjective. Some were blind alleys. Others, rather than self-evident and brief, may now appear to us excessively detailed, given their subject matter.*
ABESTON: a blundering way of writing Abestus. See Abestus. [There is no entry for Abestus.]
ACRIDOPHAGI: Locust-eaters. A famine frequently rages at Mecca when there is a scarcity of corn in Egypt, which obliges the inhabitants to live upon coarser food than ordinary. The Arabians grind the locusts in hand-mills, or stone mortars, and bake them into cakes, and use these cakes in place of bread. Even when there was no scarcity of corn … they boil them, stew them with butter, and make them into a kind of fricassee, which … is not disagreeably tasted.
ANNUITIES: a sum of money, payable yearly, half-yearly, or quarterly, to continue a certain number of years, for ever, or for life.*
ARMADILLO: in zoology, a synonime of the dasypus. See Dasypus.
DASYPUS: A genus of quadrupeds belonging to the order of Bruta. The dasypus has neither fore-teeth nor dog-teeth; it is covered with a hard bony shell, intersected with distinct moveable zones or belts. This shell covers the head, the neck, the back, the flanks, and extends even to the extremity of the tail; the only parts to which it does not extend are the throat, the breast and the belly, which are covered with a whitish skin of a coarse grain, resembling that of a hen after the feathers are pulled off.
Linnaeus enumerates six species of dasypus, principally distinguished by the number of their moveable belts.
1. The novemcinctus, or dasypus, with nine moveable belts.
2. The unicinctus, or dasypus, with eighteen (
sic
) moveable belts.
3. The trichinous, or dasypus, with three moveable belts.
4. The quadricinctus, or dasypus, with four moveable belts. Linnaeus is mistaken with regard to the trivial name and specific character of this animal; it ought to be called the sexcinctus, or dasypus, with six moveable belts; for, according to Briffonius, Bouffon, and most other natural historians, none of the species of this genus have four moveable belts.
5. The septemcinctus, or dasypus, with seven moveable belts.
6. The dasypus with twelve moveable belts. This is the largest species, being about two feet in length, of dasypus.
Questioning precisely how useful this might be to the general reader – or indeed to the dasypus – would be to miss the point: the information was conceived with expertise, and believed accurate, and so it went into the encyclopaedia. The broader question is: what exactly is an encyclopaedia?
The word entered common usage in the seventeenth century, originating from the Greek notion of enkyklios paideia: ‘learning within the circle’ or ‘all-round education’. This circle would in turn make a well-rounded man, someone versed in all the liberal sciences and practical arts. Previously, such an accretion of knowledge would be experiential, or at least personally taught. Only now, with the enlightened Britannica and some of its European predecessors, was the word encyclopaedia employed to define a book or a set of books that made universal learning possible from one extended text. A complete library was hereby filleted and compressed, and the wisdom of experts was attainable to anyone with a solid grounding in comprehension (or what William Smellie called ‘any man of ordinary parts’) and the financial wherewithal to expand it. (It was no small irony that the principal purchasers of this condensed library were libraries: now even those with limited means could attain information in a concise and direct manner.)
Although the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had as many strange inclusions as it did odd omissions, it carried two clear messages for its purchasers: buy these volumes and become one of us; read these volumes and take your place in modern society. The cross-referencing of its entries applied equally to its subscribers: the connections, both textual and personal, united its readers in a shared purpose, a desire to contain what was known and could be agreed upon.
Edinburgh was the perfect place for such a project. Its progressive university attracted students and teachers who were leaders in their fields; the university’s self-esteem fomented only greater expertise. The Scottish Enlightenment was born of a large number of humanist individuals (among them the economist Adam Smith, the architect Robert Adam, lawyer and author James Boswell, surgeon John Hunter, philosopher David Hume, botanist Erasmus Darwin and engineer James Watt) who proposed a rationalist, forward-thinking attitude to matters of the intellect; at the dawn of the steam age the educational dominance of the Church was neither an attractive nor workable proposition for these men, all of whom were overtaken by the demands of practical advancement and the rigours of empirical reasoning.
Intellectually, even viscerally, 1768 was a hugely exciting time to be alive. Every possibility was expanding. The great early breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution had already been made, not least Watt’s early advances with the steam engine and James Hargreaves’s revolution of the cloth trade. In other fields, the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume and John Locke were transforming the way we approached scientific argument and moral judgement. But no one was expanding the realms of the possible that year more than Captain James Cook, who embarked on the first of his voyages across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia a few weeks before the first part of Britannica went to press, and arrived just as the final volume was being completed three years later.
By the time the news of Cook’s discoveries reached Edinburgh, it was clear to Britannica’s founders that their city was home to one other valuable asset: an abundance of avaricious readers, not least at its academic institutions. Britannica was born of market demand, and the market demanded a continually updated version of the world. In 1771, when its publishers claimed every set had been either sold or reserved, and would therefore require a second edition, their creation had become a living, lasting organism.
ALPHABETICAL ORDER
Before a page of Britannica was compiled, William Smellie and his publishers faced a dilemma that wouldn’t trouble us now – the question of how to organise such a vast tower of information in a way that would make its compilation rigorous and its reading seamless.
The method chosen, alphabetical order, was far from universally accepted; this easy collation of characters might indeed be anti-intelligent. To take the ‘A’s, on the first page of the first edition: could a reader gain a rounded knowledge of the world from a discordant appreciation that Aabam is ‘a term, among alchemists, for lead’, or that Aarseo is ‘a town in Africa, situated near the mouth of the river Mina’, or that Abactores is ‘a term for such as carry off or drive away a whole herd of cattle by stealth’ and that Abactus is ‘an obsolete term, among physicians, for a miscarriage procured by art’?*
Wouldn’t this be just a speculative, subjective and irregular collection of what today we may dismissively call factoids? Would such a random process not be considered absurd in any other constructive situation in life, such as the placement of skilled workers on a production line ordered to work next to the person closest alphabetically in surname, irrespective of their role? Or would this method inadvertently reflect the true nature of Britannica and most encyclopaedias before and since – that is, a scattershot accretion of geographic, philosophic and scientific miscellany, a grand admission that the organic amassment of human knowledge is an unattainable and maybe even fruitless endeavour?
The alphabet is a concept, an abstraction. Its letters began as representative symbols, in much the same way as a coin became representative of money: the worth is not in the item itself but in the promise of indicative value, in this case the wealth of communication. Language symbols appear in the West first as Egyptian hieroglyphics, and around 1800–1700 BCE appear as a twenty-two-letter abjad, a system consisting entirely of consonants. This North Semitic script was similar to Old Hebrew, and we know its order was firmly established by the time nine acrostic Old Testament psalms were composed between the sixth and second centuries BCE.
The primitive alphabet was swiftly adopted by Middle-Eastern craftsmen and merchants, who found the symbols far easier to remember and record than the thousands of previous cuneiform or hieroglyphic symbols (it was perhaps the earliest example of a communication technology promoted by commerce). And from Egypt and Israel this alphabet passed to Greece around 1000–900 BCE. The Latin rendering removed the ‘zeta’ and added ‘G’, before incorporating both ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. The Roman alphabet used in the West derived largely from Etruscan characters, and extended to twenty-six letters in medieval times when ‘I’ was differentiated into ‘I’ and ‘J’, and ‘V’ was spilt into ‘U’, ‘V’ and ‘W’.*
The appeal of alphabetical order was recognised by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, and there is some suggestion that the Library of Alexandria employed it in its classification of scrolls (by author). But it was only in the fifteenth century, with the advent of the printing press and the subsequent use of paper as a popular system of storage and trading records, that the alphabet came to be used regularly as a method of ordering and reference. The development of movable type necessitated a distinct and fixed physical placement of letters that had never been required before. The liability and speed of making text depended on knowing a set order, much as we know the QWERTY layout of the keyboard; if this was to change every time we sat down, we would probably not sit down. In the age of Gutenberg, strict placement was doubly necessary, as the carved metal letters were visible only at the tip of their metal strip; the best way to mind or find your Ps and Qs was by careful advance assignment.
The alphabet’s printed roots lie in glosses or glossaries: the definition, usually at the end of a text or book, of words considered unfamiliar to the general reader (or as the first edition of Britannica has it: ‘Glossary, a sort of dictionary, explaining the obscure and antiquated terms’). Often, as in the case of the Roman physician Galen from the second century CE, glossaries would appear in medical textbooks, and it seemed natural that these terms would appear in alphabetical order. But it wasn’t until the demand for bilingual dictionaries in the sixteenth century that the logical tradition for an instructional reference book running from A to Z was established.
But all this seemed to run counter to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s stated aim of creating a circle of human knowledge (after all, an alphabet was linear not circular, a progressive string of characters). To Britannica’s founders and editors, there was no doubt that the alphabet eased accessibility. It created order where none existed, particularly in a work of almost a thousand pages. And it helped with retrieval, enabling a fact, definition or explanation to be more easily found. What it didn’t do was assist in the interpretation of a more detailed concept, or in the presentation of one of Britannica’s proud treatises on the practical arts or sciences.
To see how William Smellie and his publishers wrestled with this dilemma, one need only consult the title page.
Encyclopaedia Britannica;
or, A
DICTIONARY
OF
ARTS and SCIENCE
COMPILED UPON A NEW PLAN
IN WHICH
The different SCIENCES and ARTS are digested into
distinct Treatises or Systems
AND
The various TECHNICAL TERMS, &c. are explained as they occur
in the order of the Alphabet
It was a compromise, an attempt to produce something both generally useful and academically detailed, in which thousands of brief definitions arranged alphabetically combined with extended expert sections on such things as Horsemanship (eight pages), Hydrostatics (nineteen pages) and Law (seventy-five pages). These longer entries – each of which could have been published as an instructive pamphlet on their own – were split into sections or chapters, these subdivisions only occasionally adopting alphabetical order.
While William Smellie’s listing of his major sources and contributors also appeared in alphabetical order (from ‘Albini tabulae anatomicae’ to ‘Young on Composition’), the editor made it clear in his preface that the system could not be extended to the more complex entries. There was a ‘folly of attempting to communicate science under the various technical terms arranged in an alphabetical order’. He found this concept ‘repugnant to the very idea of science, which is a connected series of conclusions deduced from self-evident or previously discovered principles’. The key to a reader understanding these principles depended on them being ‘laid before him in one uninterrupted chain’.
His dual approach suggested perhaps that the publishers saw two distinct sets of prospective readers. It was entirely feasible that the ‘Society of Gentlemen in Scotland’ who had both written and subscribed to the first edition, and were most likely to have rallied for the in-depth articles, were regarded as a quite separate reader to the intelligent lay figure who may have been encouraged (by newspaper advertisement or fanciful bookshop whim) to purchase the set to improve their prospects.
But it may also be that Britannica’s publishers had seized upon a brilliant system of marketing. Few people would buy just one part of an encyclopaedia arranged alphabetically; once persuaded to buy the letter ‘A’ and ‘B’ for a shilling each, a reader would either have to be disappointed with the text on offer, or be straitened financially, not to proceed to the end of the set.
There is a compelling word for this concept: abecedarianism. While in its most neutral form it means something arranged in alphabetical order, or the process of learning an alphabet, or indeed buying something in alphabetical order, it has also taken on a slightly condescending tone, not least in tech circles, where it may be applied to something rather simplistic, perhaps a piece of programming progressing in an uninterrupted or obvious fashion. As such it may also suggest a lack of imagination, a strict pedagoguery. And then there is another apt definition: an Abecedarianist is one who rejects all formal learning. Applied most commonly (and with some disputation) to the sixteenth-century German sect of Anabaptists, it suggests a person wholly reliant on spiritual, instinctual and religious guidance on how to live one’s life. An encyclopaedia, therefore, of any description and in any order, would not have been part of an Abecedarianist’s armoury.
ANCIENT MARINER
Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a dim view of Smellie and his schemes. Today, his reputation as a fantastical poet tends to overshadow his work as a vociferous literary critic, but in late-eighteenth-century London his influence was considerable. And his criticism of Encyclopaedia Britannica was the literary equivalent of gunboat diplomacy.
For a start, he regarded the concept of alphabetical order as absurdly random and completely nonsensical. In its place he offered a superior intellectual approach to the organisation of knowledge (and thus, almost by definition, a less marketable one). He advocated a ‘rational arrangement’ and a strict ‘scientific method’, a circular philosophical relationship between all subjects in an encyclopaedia, organised into ‘one harmonious body of knowledge’, an organic connection of past and present. The historian Richard Yeo has suggested that Coleridge wished for all branches of sciences and fine arts to be arranged in terms of class, order, genus or species, each of which derived its ‘scientific worth, from being an ascending step towards the universal’.* By contrast, any encyclopaedia organised around the alphabet was ‘mechanically arranged’, a caged animal compared to Coleridge’s promotion of the safari park.
Despite its alphabetical strictures, Coleridge argued that Britannica was characterised by ‘more or less complete disorganization’ of its subject matter. In 1803, Coleridge wrote to the poet Robert Southey of the ‘strange abuse’ that ‘has been made of the word encyclopaedia!’ He found the ‘huge unconnected miscellany’ of the Britannica too frequently determined ‘by the caprice or convenience of the compiler’; knowledge was splintered and fractured, he complained, and thus rendered almost useless.
The complaint was a simple one, and William Smellie had heard it before. The reader might be obliged to search back and forth through several entries in several volumes to acquire a thorough understanding, say, of industrial growth or meteorology; the experience was comparable to printing chapters of a novel in an order that made comprehension purposely difficult. Also, there was a tendency for entries appearing in Britannica late in the alphabet to be condensed in order to meet printing deadlines and financial constraints (in the first edition, the letters A and B occupied 697 pages, with the remainder squeezed into 2000). What was Coleridge’s solution to these dilemmas? It was called Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, a publication as big, burdensome and doomed as the albatross. We shall mark its rise and fall a little later in this chronological alphabet.
ANOMALIES AND APOLOGIES
By today’s standards Encyclopaedia Britannica was not wholly enlightened. The fact that it was compiled by men for men may be borne out by consulting the entry Woman, which read, in its entirety: ‘The female of man. See Homo.’*
Women do fare slightly better when it comes to religious affairs. Here, the entry for God runs in its entirety: ‘One of the many names of the Supreme Being,’ while Goddess receives the greater coverage, in length at least:
A heathen deity of the female sex. The ancients had almost as many goddesses as gods; such were Juno, the goddess of air; Diana, the goddess of woods etc. And under this character were represented the virtues, graces, and principal advantages of life; Truth, Justice, Piety, Liberty, Fortune, Victory etc. It was the peculiar privilege of the goddesses to be represented naked on medals.
There were similar anomalies elsewhere, and many idiosyncratic editorial choices. The entry on Mahometans, the outdated term for those who followed Muhammad and would be now regarded as Muslim, runs to seventeen pages, covering all forms of cultural history and religious observance. The entry on Jews and Judaism, by contrast, extends to one paragraph (‘Those who profess obedience to the laws and religion of Moses … they lay great stress upon frequent washings … every Jew is obliged to marry, and a man who lives to 20 unmarried is accounted as actually living in sin.’)
Elsewhere, bloodletting from the penis is a bit of a cure-all, squinting is a contagious disease (and may be caused by nurses placing a child’s cradle in a wrong position with regard to the light). And you didn’t necessarily want to buy the first edition if you were hard of hearing. ‘Some say, the eggs of ants bruised and put into the ear, with the juice of an onion, cure the most inveterate deafness.’
In his preface, William Smellie excused himself early. For all the fanfare, and for all the work employed in its creation, he explained that in his opinion Encyclopaedia Britannica was still a little rushed. The editors, he said, ‘were not aware of the length of time necessary for the execution, but engaged to begin the publication too early’. Even though the publication was delayed by a year, ‘still time was wanted’.
And then there was a plea for forgiveness. A work of this kind, Smellie argued, was bound by its very size to contain errors, ‘whether falling under the denomination of mental, typographical or accidental’. He reasoned that those familiar with a work of such an extensive nature ‘will make proper allowances’.
Any reader – indeed any writer – would surely have sympathised. Of course there would be mistakes in a work of this complexity. And most of them were straightforward: St Andrew’s Day – for the thirteenth, read the thirtieth; Interlocutor – for extacted read extracted; Law – read 1672, not 1972. And then there were entries that would only prove suspect with time.
ASBESTOS: A sort of fossil stone, which may be split into threads and filaments, from one inch to ten inches in length, very fine, brittle, yet somewhat tractable, silky, and of a greyish colour, not unlike talc of Venice. It is almost insipid to the taste, indissoluble in water, and endued with the wonderful property of remaining unconsumed in the fire, which only whitens it … Pliny says he has seen napkins of it, which, being taken foul from the table, were thrown into the fire, and better scoured than if they had been washed in water. This stone is found in many places of Asia and Europe; particularly in the island of Anglesey in Wales, and in Aberdeenshire in Scotland.
By the time the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica sold the last of its 3000 sets in the 1770s, the notion of this grandly ambitious multi-volume publication attempting to encompass the sum of human knowledge had became a sport, a pastime and an enduring sensation. Britannica was one of the eighteenth century’s most enduring brands. Although at first there was no indication that the first edition wouldn’t also be the only edition, it was decreed that like the dasypus it should in future come in different sizes, with updates and printings and additions.
But the second edition would require a new editor. William Smellie declined to continue in the role, for he had other plans, with alcohol once more a prominent part of them. Twenty years from his initial engagement, and after years as an influential founding member of various philosophical and natural history societies, including the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Smellie found himself the celebrity owner of a drinking club on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile called the Crochallan Fencibles. His biographer Robert Kerr found him increasingly dishevelled during this period, and in financial disarray, while one fellow club member, the poet Robert Burns, revelled in Smellie’s inebriated joshery, and found him a ‘veteran in genius, wit and b[aw]dry’. Smellie, according to a source quoted by Kerr, used to ‘thrash the poet most abominably’.
Nonetheless, Burns honoured him with a verse:
His uncomb’d, hoary locks, wild-staring,
thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear
unmatch’d;
Yet, tho his caustic wit was biting rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.
Colin Macfarquhar died in 1793, William Smellie in 1795, and Andrew Bell in 1809. Their extraordinary publication lived on, surviving controversy, calumny, mutiny, bankruptcy, parody, ignominy and perfidy until it announced in 2012 that it would print no more.
* Caaba ‘properly signifies a square building; but is particularly applied by the Mahometans to the temple of Mecca … It is toward this temple they always turn their faces when they pray, in whatever part of the world they happen to be.’ Lythrum was a purple flowering plant, ‘a genus of the dodecandria monogynia class’. Macao was ‘an island on China, in the province of Canton, fifty miles south of Canton’. Zyglophyllum was another flowering plant, of which ‘There are eight species, none of them natives of Britain.’
* For reasons of space and comprehension I have not included samples of the lengthier and more detailed treatises, relying for flavour instead on these shorter definitions. But there was a conscious difference between the definitions in Britannica and those in the basic dictionaries that preceded it. The aim in the encyclopaedia was connectivity: definitions were often cross-referenced, and when two or more were considered together, greater knowledge would be attained. For a closer examination, visit:
https://digital.nls.uk/encyclopaedia-britannica/archive
* This entry lasted five pages, and often read like something from the Marx Brothers: ‘The probability that a person of a given age shall live a certain number of years is measured by the proportion which the number of persons living at the proposed age has to the difference between the said number and the number of persons living at the given age.’
* A ‘miscarriage procured by art’ is achieved by interventionist means; a deliberate abortion.
* This is necessarily a highly truncated account: I have made no mention, for example, of the parallel Arabic script that emerged in Petra, nor the role played by Phoenician traders in the second millennium BCE. For a full and illuminating history of this development see A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders (Picador, 2020). Flanders observes that the word ‘alphabet’ was not itself employed until surprisingly late. The Romans preferred either letter (leterae) or element (elementae), and it wasn’t until Hippolytus of Rome wrote ‘ex Graecorum alphabeto’ to mean ‘from the Greek alphabet’ (and derived from the first two letters in that language, alpha, beta), around 200 CE, that the word probably entered regular usage.
* Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture by Richard Yeo (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
* Thirty years later, with the publication of Britannica’s fourth edition (1801–09), the consideration of women in relation to men had entered a new phase. ‘The man, more robust, is fitted for severe labour, and for field exercise; the woman, more delicate, is fitted for sedentary occupations, and particularly for nursing children. The man, bold and vigorous, is qualified for being a protector; the woman, delicate, and timid, requires protection … The man, as a protector, is destined by nature to govern; the woman, conscious of inferiority, is disposed to obey.’ One may, at this point, believe this to be parody, but it is not. And it goes on: ‘Men have penetration and solid judgement to fit them for governing, women have sufficient understanding to make a good figure under a good government; a greater portion would excite dangerous rivalry between the sexes, which nature has avoided by giving them different talents. Women have more imagination and sensibility than men, which make all their enjoyments more exquisite; at the same time they are better qualified to communicate enjoyment … With respect to the ultimate end of love, it is the privilege of the male, as superior and protector, to make a choice; the female preferred has no privilege but barely to consent or to refuse.’