You Could Look It Up (34 page)

The
Encyclopædia Britannica
was not the first Britannic encyclopedia, but the story in Great Britain is different from the story on the Continent. Although colossal works of profound erudition were all the rage in seventeenth-century Europe, the English got in on the act late, in 1704, when the clergyman John Harris published his
Lexicon Technicum; or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Explaining Not Only the Terms of Art, but the Arts Themselves
. The alphabetical arrangement and the large scale (8,200 entries) were new in Britain, and the emphasis on science and technology was new anywhere. “Technical Harris,” as he was called, may have begun the practice of tapping experts to contribute to encyclopedias, since one entry was written by Isaac Newton—though it is also possible that he simply
plagiarized Newton without permission.
19
He and Ephraim Chambers satisfied British readers for much of the eighteenth century, but when the
Encyclopédie
appeared, the British knew at once that they were outclassed. They decided they needed a comparable work with systematic coverage of all areas of knowledge.

Like
L’Encyclopédie
, the project began as the brainchild of publishers, this time Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, based in Edinburgh. The location is important: coming out of Scotland, this was a
British
project, not an English one. The political entity called Great Britain was only a few decades old, and the
Britannica
embraced the Union and celebrated a British identity founded on liberty. Macfarquhar and Bell hired another Scot, William Smellie, to do the real work. The son of an architect, Smellie was born in 1740 in the suburbs of Edinburgh. He received a classical education at his grammar school, but had to leave school at the age of twelve. He was then put to work as the apprentice to a stay maker, constructing women’s undergarments from whalebone. He found the work distasteful and was glad when he got a job as a proofreader. It was a good position for an autodidact, who had taught himself sciences and languages and even became a founding member of the Newtonian Society, an Edinburgh club that promoted literary and especially scientific learning. At the time he was “as devoted to whiskey as to scholarship,”
20
but he seems to have kept his drinking under control while he worked on the book.

On June 8, 1768, the publishers issued a prospectus seeking subscribers for a work of one hundred weekly installments, to begin in November of that year. Each twenty-four-page number would cost sixpence; the well-off could spend an extra twopence for high-grade paper.
21
(Those who paid the surcharge were probably disappointed, since the printing of the whole set was sloppy; the page numbering was often wrong, and at one point two hundred page numbers were skipped.)

Even Smellie’s most ardent defenders had to admit that his was not a work of profound original research. His biographer wrote that he “used to say jocularly, that he had made a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences with a
pair of scissors
, clipping out from various books a
quantum sufficit
of matter for the printer.” Far from denying his dependence on other sources, he advertised his wide reading in more than 150 books.
He claims to have “had recourse to the best books upon almost every subject, extracted the useful parts, and rejected whatever appeared trifling or less interesting.” In fact he seems to have cited some books that he never actually read, relying on secondhand summaries.
22

About a third of the Encyclopædia is taken up by eighteen long entries called “treatises”: agriculture, algebra, anatomy, arithmetic, astronomy, bookkeeping, botany, chemistry, farriery (caring for horses), geometry, law, medicine, metaphysics, midwifery, moral philosophy, music, navigation, and surgery.
23
The rest of the entries were very brief, most no more than fifteen lines. Some subjects were omitted altogether:
there were no biographical entries at all. There was plenty about falconry but nothing about historical method. As Smellie put it in his preface, “Utility ought to be the principal intention of every publication. Wherever this intention does not plainly appear, neither the books nor their authors have the smallest claim to the approbation of mankind.”
24
That is characteristic of the British approach to practicality, and Smellie’s biographer explained that the Newtonian Society was named “in honour of the immortal N
EWTON
, the author, so to speak, of the true science of nature, as founded upon observation and rigid mathematical induction, in opposition to the wild theories of D
ESCARTES
and others.”
25
British common sense trumps airy-fairy French theorizing.

Unlike the
Encyclopédie
, the
Britannica
is conventional in its religious beliefs. And even though it was created by a Scot during the Scottish Enlightenment, the radical figures who played such a large role in that movement were absent from the
Britannica
. Unlike the freethinkers of the French Enlightenment, the Scots at the helm of
Britannica
had no interest in tearing down old structures of knowledge. That is not to say religious subjects were avoided entirely. Islam received a great deal of attention; the entry
Mahometans
is seventeen pages long, and the articles on
Alcoran
(that is, the Qur’an),
caliph
,
hegira
, and
mosque
are clear, thoughtful, and, by the standards of the age, reasonably impartial.
26
The only entry that seems to have stirred real controversy in its day was the long treatise on
midwifery
, with its associated illustrations. According to some sources, moralists were scandalized by the explicit gynecological details and urged readers to tear out the offending pages.

Considering the book’s monumental importance over the next two and a half centuries, we know frustratingly little about what early readers made of it. None of the great writers of the day—James Boswell, David Hume, Adam Smith—left any comments on the first edition of the
Britannica
, and the few comments we do have by others are mostly negative. Sales, though, were apparently good enough to warrant London reprints in 1773 and 1775, for a total of maybe three thousand sets.
27

The
Encyclopédie
was a one-off—no one has ever had the temerity to produce
Encyclopédie II
. The book’s influence can be measured not
in the number of subsequent editions but in terms of the skeptical, Enlightenment-friendly conception of the world that emerged from it, and it may well have contributed to the collapse of the Ancien Régime.

The compilers of the
Britannica
, on the other hand, had more modest ambitions than those of Diderot and d’Alembert, but their book has stayed alive. The first edition was seriously flawed by any measure, but its sales were enough to lead to a second edition, which introduced biography. It was so successful that it was promptly pirated in an American edition (with the offensive word
Britannica
and the dedication to the hated George III omitted). By the time of the third edition in eighteen volumes (1788–97), it was much larger than any other English-language encyclopedia, and it began to feature entries contributed by experts in various disciplines.
28
The book continued to grow.
Britannica
hit twenty-two volumes and 17,801 pages with the seventh edition of 1842.
Meliora
, a quarterly review, was rapturous about the eighth edition, calling it “the greatest collection of literary wealth ever compiled… . Three hundred and forty writers … have united their learning to make this gigantic store-house of knowledge. The possession of such a work is a library, for its matter is equal to one hundred ordinary octavo volumes. No library of English literature is complete without this Encyclopaedia.”
29
Britannica
connoisseurs are especially enamored of the eleventh edition (published November 1910), which continues to sell briskly on the secondhand market.

CHAPTER
13 ½

DICTIONARY OR ENCYCLOPEDIA?

This book uses terms like
dictionary
,
encyclopedia
,
thesaurus
,
atlas
, and so on, on the assumption that readers will be able to tell them apart. Usually it's easy. Two reference genres, though, are disconcertingly close to each other: the dictionary and the encyclopedia.

Dictionaries are traditionally about words and encyclopedias about things, but many works we would call encyclopedias were originally published as dictionaries or lexicons (such as John Harris's
Lexicon Technicum
of 1704, the
New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences
of 1769–71, and, across the Channel, Bayle's
Dictionnaire historique et critique
of 1697), and many works called themselves by both names apparently interchangeably (such as Ephraim Chambers's
Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences
and the
Encyclopædia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences
of 1771).

Still, we can make some generalizations. Entries in encyclopedias tend to be longer than those in dictionaries, and encyclopedias usually cover just nouns, while dictionaries cover all the parts of speech. Some say a dictionary cannot be translated into another language, whereas an encyclopedia can be. Whether or not that definition will hold up to serious scrutiny, it's not a bad test. Dictionaries also tend to exclude proper nouns (people, places), unless in appendixes.

As soon as we establish those rules, though, reality intrudes. Law dictionaries, biographical dictionaries, gardening dictionaries—all are really encyclopedias. And some encyclopedic information tends to find its way into even the general-purpose dictionaries: the proper names
Lothario
or
Einstein
have come to serve as synonyms for
lover
and
genius
, and in that sense they need to be defined rather than
discussed. Some dictionaries offer other encyclopedic information, such as the altitudes of mountains, lists of kings and presidents, characters in famous works of literature, populations of cities, and so on. (American dictionaries have been more welcoming of encyclopedic information than dictionaries hailing from Britain.)

A dictionary explains that a
barometer
is a device for measuring atmospheric pressure, and an encyclopedia explains how a barometer is constructed, how it measures the atmosphere, and what the readings mean. But the two often run into each other. Most encyclopedias start out with a short dictionary definition, and many dictionaries will venture into encyclopedic information, whether they want to or not. Even
Webster's Eleventh Collegiate
, a dictionary that avowedly has no room for encyclopedic information, defines
barometer
as “an instrument for determining the pressure of the atmosphere and hence for assisting in forecasting weather and for determining altitude”—but the uses to which the instrument is put are really part of an encyclopedic understanding, not a linguistic one.

One of the great sources of frustration over the publication of
Webster's Third New International Dictionary
in 1961 was its abandonment of nearly all the encyclopedic information; many reviewers were emphatically not pleased. The
Second
(1934) was loaded with encyclopedic information—lists of presidents and popes, characters in Dickens and Shakespeare, hundreds of figures from mythology, thousands of places, and thirteen thousand “noteworthy persons.” It aspired to be the only reference book an educated person needed on his or her shelves. Not so the
Third
: all that information was unceremoniously deleted. It was to be pure dictionary. Some critics were appalled: “Think if you can,” wrote one reviewer, “of a dictionary from which you cannot learn who Mark Twain was … or what were the names of the apostles.”
1