Dobson’s principal American contributor was the geographer Jedidiah Morse. He wrote about American Indians, the history of several states, and specific revolutionary battles. Inevitably, his interpretation of the war was rather different from the British one. The original view from Edinburgh was that ‘the beginning of every political establishment is contemptible’, and went on to cast ‘the turbulence of some North Americans, and the blunders of some British statesmen’ as the villains. Morse had a more positive outlook: in the past, in the Old World, new political institutions were marked by ‘the barbarous manners of savage tribes’. But ‘very different were the circumstances which gave birth to this new republic.’ The causes of the revolutionary conflict were very different too. Gone was the British blaming of French emissaries for the uprising and the destruction of the ‘warmth of attachment to the mother-country’. More significant, Morse added, was an American ‘abhorrence of oppression … love of liberty, and … quick sense of injury’. Further, he claimed, the English found the cause of the conflict ‘in any source rather than their own misconduct’.
While early instalments of his work were well received by readers, Dobson was struggling financially. Each of his letters to his subscribers contained increasingly urgent appeals for payment. The Gazette of the United States carried a notice in which he took the liberty of ‘representing to such subscribers as are in arrears, the indispensable necessity of punctuality … Though the importance of a few dollars may be but a trifle to the individuals, yet the accumulation of these trifles UNPAID leaves the publisher under very serious embarrassments.’
And then disaster struck. In September 1793, with precisely half of his eighteen volumes published, a fire swept through his building destroying not only the volume in progress but the means of printing subsequent ones. His entire type foundry melted, with total losses exceeding $5000. Dobson praised the kindness of strangers for his swift recovery, not least the printer who donated an entire library of new metal type.*
The set was complete in 1798, and one of the earliest reviews appeared the following year. ‘The magnitude of the work far exceeds any thing ever before issued from the press in the United States,’ announced Charles Brockden Brown in his Monthly Magazine and American Review. Brown acknowledged both the great labour and hazard involved in such a production, and excused the errors and omissions as an inevitable consequence of having so many hands tackling such a large spread of topics. He particularly admired the cross-referencing, the ‘relation which the various objects of knowledge bear to one another’, the distinguishing feature of an encyclopaedia over a dictionary.
And then, as Professor Arner observes, Brown turned lyrical, finding inspiration in Paradise Lost to praise not only Dobson’s project, but encyclopaedias as a concept. Nothing better exemplified the new American nation in aspiration and purpose:
The Encyclopaedist conducts his reader to a lofty eminence, from which he is enabled to descry the boundless prospect that stretches before him; he points out to his view the accumulated labours, experience, and wisdom of ages; he assists him to survey the history of the human mind in its progress from rudeness to refinement, and to teach him to anticipate the glorious destiny which awaits the full development and exertion of intellectual energy in a more enlightened age.
* For a compelling forensic account see Robert D. Arner, Dobson’s Encyclopaedia (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1991).
* A note on a printer’s page sizes is overdue. Before the twentieth century, encyclopaedias were usually printed in one of two sizes. The earliest, heaviest and most prestigious was folio, somewhere in the range of 12 × 19 inches. Quarto, which measured around 9.5 × 12 inches, became the more popular and manageable form. The terms refer to how many times a large original sheet of paper was folded: historically, a quarto volume was printed on sheets folded in half twice, with the first fold at right angles to the second, to produce four leaves (or eight pages). By the same process, an octavo book, a format still in use today for many modern hardbacks, has been folded in half again, producing eight leaves.
We are familiar with Shakespeare’s First Folios, printed in 1623, although earlier and less reliable texts of his plays were widely distributed in quarto. Gutenberg’s first printed books were also in quarto size. The earliest Britannica was in folio, while the ones most of us own or have consulted in libraries are slightly smaller than the traditional quartos, at 8.5 × 11 inches. Modern book sizes are complex things, with different terms applying in different countries. The UK’s demy, royal, A, B and C formats will be less identifiable in the United States, while the US crown octavo and duodecimo will confuse Japanese printers versed in shinsho or bunkobon paperbacks. And of course manuscript and printing paper sizes – A3, A4 and foolscap etc. – are different again. If you want to be really bamboozled, may I recommend: wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size.
* The fire was a personal tragedy for Dobson, but the yellow fever that swept Philadelphia and the eastern seaboard in these years was a broader one, which also had a large impact on his production schedule and sales.
I
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Three new articles in the third edition of Britannica (1788–97) defined the far-seeing, near-seeing age in which it was published. Micrometer occupied nineteen pages, Microscope thirty-two and Telescope fifty.*
The entry for Microscope began simply enough: lenses, mirrors, Leeuwenhoek. We read of different makes – Withering’s ‘Portable Botanic’, Ellis’s ‘Aquatic’ – and what to look for: ‘The circulation of the blood may be easiest seen in the tails or fins of fishes, in the fine membranes between a frog’s toes, or best of all in the tail of a water-newt.’ Copper plates showed more than thirty types of lens and calibration tooclass="underline" ‘Place your object either in the needle G, in the pliers H, on the object plate M, or in the hollow brass box O, as may be most convenient.’
The pace of science and technology was accompanied by a thirst to absorb and interpret it. The editors of the Britannica would never want for new findings, for ‘research’ was now the buzzword in specialist publications of the age. The cultural historian Peter Burke has identified severaclass="underline" Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains by the Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw (1768); Asiatic Researches, a journal from 1788; Recherches sur les principaux paits physiques (1794) and Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (1802) by the French naturalist and evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; Researches, Chemical and Philosophical by the Cornish chemist Humphry Davy (1799); Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles by the French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier (1812).*
The ‘second age of discovery’ also announced big geographical finds – the West’s exploration of the South Seas, the interiors of Africa, North and South America, Siberia and Australia – filling in the ‘dark’ and blank spaces on the map and rendering them prime for plunder. As each new expedition enthralled members of the Royal Geographical Society in London and the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, so the explorers entrenched their reputations: David Livingstone, Alexander von Humboldt, Mungo Park, James Cook, Lewis and Clark. The hunger for discovery was accompanied by the desire to contain, own and exploit.