* Quotations taken from the introduction to the English translation of The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Jacques Barzun (New Directions, New York, 1967). See also ‘Flaubert, C’est Moi’ by Julian Barnes, New York Review of Books, 25 May 2006.
* Translated by Jorn Barger, 2002. Barger also compiled a thematic grouping of Flaubert’s dubious advice. Categories included: Things to Make Fun Of, Things to Thunder Against, Things to ‘Wax Indignant’ About, Things to Despise and Things Nobody Knows.
* See New Yorker, 27 August 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/in-place-of-thought
* Commonly, and with some relief, the lavishly titled project soon became known as either Universal-Lexicon or Zedler’s Encyclopedia, after its publisher and principal life-force Johann Heinrich Zedler. Zedler almost went bankrupt producing the encyclopaedia in its early days, and he spent much time in litigation protecting its copyrights.
* Lest this coverage appeared inadequate, Wolff was also mentioned extensively in separate articles on geometry, colour theory, lexicography and medicinal horticulture.
* P.E. Carels and D. Flory, ‘Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Universal Lexicon’ in Studies on Voltaire in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 194, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 1981.
See also: Jeff Loveland’s comprehensive and illuminating The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
G
GERMINATION
Encyclopaedias are not like rose bushes, for which pruning is everything. They are usually the opposite, more like Japanese knotweed, spreading wildly and germinating freely, invasive and persistent in all countries where a foothold is possible.
When the second edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica completed its publication in 1784, sixteen years after the first, it had greatly increased its scope and cost, and had grown from three volumes to ten. It was issued in 181 instalments, usually weekly, between 1777 and 1784, a total of 8595 pages (although some of the pagination was erratic: page 7099 was followed immediately by page 8000). The cost per issue had risen from 6 pence to 1 shilling, while the cost of the total set a year after completion was 12 pounds, more than four times the first edition. To afford it all, a skilled London carpenter would have to save everything he earned (and go without food) for fifteen years.*
Its increase in size was due partly to the addition of biography, primarily of dead writers, artists and churchmen. The majority were Britons, with a heavy bias towards the Scots. Isaac Newton received one of the longest entries at almost three pages, while Pythagoras received a single column (he ‘made his scholars undergo a severe noviciate of silence for at least two years; and it is said that where he discerned too great an itch for talking, he extended it to five’). One of the few living subjects was George III, who appeared briefly in entries on his ancestors. And women were no longer just the female of man; they too now received biographical reverence, not least the literary lights Eliza Haywood, Aphra Behn and Laetitia Pilkington. (Pilkington appears to have been astute at all manner of literary pursuits. Caught by her husband with another man in her bedroom one night, she explained that it wasn’t what it seemed: the man had simply refused to let her borrow a book she wanted, but he was perfectly content to have her read it in his company until she reached a, well, happy ending.)
Most of the 1000-plus biographies were laudatory and moralistic, with rulers commonly praised for advancing the lives of their people (encouragement for the biographical expansion seems to have stemmed from the Duke of Buccleuch, one of Britannica’s most generous subscribers). Kathleen Hardesty Doig observes that when it comes to the entries on writers, most ‘lead exemplary lives while composing masterpieces’, while the more arresting lifestyles of the ancients pass without censure, not least Nero’s cross-dressing and Sappho’s lesbianism. When it comes to religion, only Protestant ethics are commended.
What made this edition twice as expensive as its forerunner? Certainly its greater length, but certainly not its new editor James Tytler. The second edition had the same publishers, Andrew Bell and Colin Macfarquhar, and their replacement for William Smellie must have raised eyebrows in the literary world. For James Tytler wasn’t an established part of it and not one of them; he was a pharmacist, a songwriter, and once served as a surgeon on a whaler ship. He edited and wrote pamphlets, although his intended masterwork, printed on his small, self-built press, Essays on the Most Important Subjects of Natural and Revealed Religion, was abandoned in mid-sentence on page 64. The closest he got to commercial publishing may have been his supposed authorship, just two years before, of a detailed guide to Edinburgh’s prostitutes. But he came cheap, at 16 shillings a year, and he took to his new task with gusto.*
Tytler’s tastes ran wide and happily odd. His work on the second edition was both authoritative and subjective, his opinions controversial and his technique slipshod. He compared the work to a navigator’s compass, though a reader often ran aground. Some editorial decisions appear both baffling and appealingly romantic, not least the open-handed approach to the veracity of mythical creatures and beasts of the sea (mermaids were just the beginning). Other strange judgements we credit to the exciting times. The entry on Bastard informs that anyone who fathers an illegitimate child under a particular oak tree in Staffordshire will be safe from reprimand. And there was no way of knowing how much the steam engine, afforded seven pages, might prove more significant in the world than Fluxions, an impenetrable type of mathematical calculation, afforded six.
A higher calling: Britannica editor James Tytler (right) sets off from Edinburgh in 1784
In the realms of history and geography, his entries were notably expanded: America increased from thirty-one lines to twenty pages, Britain from five lines to eighty-one pages, and France from fifteen lines to twenty-six pages. But within those pages, written when the Revolution was either under way or complete, many American states are still apparently under colonial rule of the British, and Native Americans are depicted as lazy except when they’re out for ‘revenge’. The entry Colony explains that ‘the sad reverse that has taken place is well known to all our readers. For us to depict it would be a task equally superfluous and painful.’
In a similar (and to the modern reader, shocking) tone, there are ‘inferior’ people all over. Cypriots are lazy; the Hottentots are lazy and stupid; Highlanders are savage. The Chinese are in ‘misery’ due to the corruption of their magistrates. Closer to home, in the entry on Leith, we learn that the commodities exported to the West Indies include wine, clothing, shoes and Negroes. Elsewhere, vivid exoticism is the key: the Congo contains ants that will surround men and beasts at night ‘and devour even to the very bone’, while Mount Etna in Sicily contains a funnel with a ‘tremendous and unfathomable gulph, so much celebrated in all ages, both as the terror of this life, and the place of punishment in the next’.
The new Britannica omits to credit its contributors, providing instead an extended bibliography (four times the length of the first edition’s) prefaced by this explanation:
To accomplish a task so arduous and important, neither labour nor expense has been spared. The best authors on each particular science have been collected and compared. Such as could be abridged without disadvantage have been epitomized with all possible care: others who were more concise and tenacious of their subjects have been more closely pursued and more faithfully retained. When topics have been obscurely or imperfectly treated, the utmost endeavours have been used to supply [amend] these defects, and upon such parts of science as the compilers have not found properly illustrated by other authors, original essays are inserted. Nor do these amount to an inconsiderable number.