Who was this overwhelming book intended for? In Chambers’s words, for anyone wishing to reclaim the mind ‘from its native wildness’. It was for those wishing to shrink rather than expand their library, an early desire for downsizing. Chambers wasn’t alone with his wish. In 1680, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz detected a ‘horrible mass of books which keeps on growing … disorder will become nearly insurmountable’. There is a connected dilemma: not only so many books, but nowhere to put them all, and an inequality of access that ensured only the well educated could afford to consult them. Leibniz, incidentally, had read so many of these books that he was referred to by King George I as ‘a living dictionary’, a phrase we might more commonly translate as ‘a walking encyclopaedia’. By the time Ephraim Chambers picked up his quill in the early eighteenth century, this phrase was already a mild insult, a term for an insufferable know-it-all. In classical Greece, and even in the Middle Ages, it was possible to imagine that the feat of committing a whole book’s worth of factual content to memory was both desirable and possible. With the emergence of the Cyclopaedia it was clear that this was no longer the case.
Chambers dedicated his book to the newly crowned King George II. The nature of his fawning tribute may partly account for his work’s impact. He ‘lay at Your Majesty’s feet … an attempt towards a survey of the republic of learning.’ He believed that Great Britain now enjoyed a reputation for scientific and artistic expression that was once the province of Rome in her Augustan age; Rome would soon envy our own. To underline this British mastery, Chambers stressed the difference between ‘Your Majesty’s subjects and the savages of Canada, or the Cape of Good Hope.’ He claimed his readers had recently been ennobled by a monarch ‘inspired with a generous passion to devote his cares to the welfare of mankind’; and the author was one of the countless many ‘conspiring with unexampled ardor and unanimity to all his glorious views’.
Among his ‘E’s, Chambers includes:
EARNEST: Money advanced to complete or assure a verbal bargain, and bind the parties to a performance thereof. By the civil law, he who recedes from his bargain loses his earnest.
EARTH: (extract) The orbits of all the planets include the sun as the common centre of them alclass="underline" the earth … is not in the centre of any of them.
The earth’s orbit being proved to be between those of Venus and Mars, it follows that the earth must turn around the sun. For, as it lies within the orbits of the superior planets, their motion would indeed appear unequal and irregular; but they would never be stationary or retrograde without this supposition.
EMPALEMENT: A cruel kind of punishment wherein a sharp pale or stake is thrust up the fundament and through the body. It was frequently practised in the time of Nero; and it continues to be popular in Turkey.
And …
ENCYCLOPAEDIA: The circle or chain of arts and sciences. The word is compounded of the in, circle and learning: the root being child, infant. It is sometimes also written cyclopaedia. Vitruvius in the preface to his 6th book calls it encyclios disciplina. See Cyclopaedia.
Padding back some 100 pages one finds:*
CYCLOPAEDIA: The word cyclopaedia is not of classical authority, though frequent enough among modern writers to have got into several of our dictionaries. Some make it a crime in us to have called the present work by this name; not considering that names and titles of books, engines, instruments etc are in great measure arbitrary, and that authors make no scruple of coining new words on such occasions.
The word ‘encyclopaedia’ wasn’t used in the title of a book until the Croatian polymath Paul Skalich published Encyclopaedia, seu Orbis disciplinarum tam sacrarum quam prophanarum Epistemon (Encyclopaedia, or Knowledge of the World of Disciplines) in Basel in 1559. It was a minor work.*
By 1750, when the word was used in a prospectus for a French publication, it was still such a novelty that its meaning had to be explained, and not entirely satisfactorily: ‘The word “Encyclopedia” signifies the interrelationship of the sciences’. Then as now, the word could be spelt either way.
* The Chambers we may now associate with almanacs and other reference books was not him: that was Robert Chambers, operating about a century later.
* John Harris hoped his Lexicon would provide more than mere reference; he longed to have composed ‘a Book useful to be read carefully over’. But in its first year of publication, Jonathan Swift was able to satirise (in A Tale of a Tub) what he saw as the plethora of ‘index learning’, a trend towards abridgement and summation, which Swift considered a poor substitute for actually reading an entire work. (Without using the phrase, he accused them of dumbing down.)
* Is it necessary to observe that our understanding has advanced, and that the earth is not hollow, and nor does it enjoy the sun revolving around it? See below for the rather more accurate interpretation in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia.
* The engraving is by ‘G. Child of Covent Garden’. Chambers had learnt his geographical knowledge of the world from the great map and globe maker John Senex, with whom he apprenticed not long after arriving in London in his mid-thirties.
* The only way to be sure is to count them, as the pages are not numbered.
* The word ‘encyclopaedist’ is believed to have been first used by John Evelyn in 1651 in reference to Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Encyclopaedia Septem Tomis Distincta, a seven-volume set once again claimed by the compiler to be ‘the totality of knowledge’.
F
FABULEUX!
Denis Diderot was born in Langres, north-eastern France, on 5 October 1713, and from this day the world was fated to change just a little.
As with the first Britannica, his story begins with a problematic nose. Denis Diderot had four sisters, the eldest named Denise. Denis sometimes referred to this sister as ‘a female Socrates’, such was her power of thought. Her early years passed without incident, but in her middle years she developed a little spot on her nose. The spot turned into a larger pimple, and the pimple alas grew larger and turned cancerous. The cancer consumed her face, and then her chances of finding a husband. She wore false noses made from wood and glass, and is reported to have remained astonishingly cheerful throughout, drawing strength from her Christian faith. Denis Diderot’s daughter concluded that her aunt ‘possessed the rare secret of finding heaven on earth’.
The way he described his birthplace, Denis Diderot had found a similar haven. Returning there from Paris in middle age, he wrote to his lover Sophie Volland of ‘a charming promenade, consisting of a broad aisle of thickly verdured trees leading to a small grove … I pass hours in this spot, reading, meditating, contemplating nature, and thinking of my love.’ A century later, with his legacy secure, a statue of Diderot was erected in the square facing his childhood home. The sculptor was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the man who designed the Statue of Liberty.
Upon what was this eminence founded? Initially it was a printed advertisement he wrote towards the end of 1750. Diderot offered a new product – new in length and scope, new in rigour and expertise, new in ambition and cost. It was the first encyclopaedia that could lay claim to changing the world.
The prospectus was mouth-watering, but to appreciate it fully we should compare it to another prospectus issued five years before. This one was called a ‘dictionary’, but was actually a modified French translation of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. It was to have five volumes, each of approximately 250 pages. The reader was promised beautiful vignettes, and the text was to be composed and designed ‘by good masters’, not least the principal editorial force behind the project, John Mills, an Englishman with good French, and his German colleague Gottfried Sellius. The volumes were due to be published between 1746 and 1748, at a total cost, when purchased as a set, of 100 livres.