A popular approach: hounds, locomotives and English artistry in the expansive Brockhaus
In Edinburgh, the importance of the regular update wasn’t lost on Britannica. Facing increasing competition, its publishers realised that the depth and quality of its entries, not to say its dependability, would only continue to appeal if it kept pace with the world around it. Revolution was everywhere: technological, medical, philosophical, geopolitical. The answer would be supplements and yearbooks, but it wouldn’t entirely solve the problem. Rival publications appeared more in tune with the times merely because they were new.
And at the turn of the nineteenth century there were a lot of them. One could choose between William Henry Hall’s New Royal Encyclopaedia, Kendal’s Pocket Encyclopaedia, the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, the English Encyclopaedia, and the Domestic Encyclopaedia. All of them were smaller, cheaper and more hastily assembled than Britannica, and while envious of Britannica’s success, they claimed their brevity made them more suitable to the general reader.
But the biggest threat came from an updated version of an old friend and spur, the Cyclopaedia. This was no longer the concise two-volume folio edited by Ephraim Chambers in 1728; in fact, it was almost its opposite – a vast thirty-nine-volume quarto edition, with 32,000 pages and about 32 million words of text, with an additional five plate volumes and an atlas with sixty-one folding maps, making it almost exactly twice as large as Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the 1810 fourth edition of Britannica. It appeared serially and alphabetically between 1802 and 1819, which meant – as with similar publications – readers learnt a lot about the world’s As and Bs years before they learnt anything about its Ys and Zs; during its seventeen years of completion, this occasionally made a mockery of the extensive system of cross-referencing, with the reader of ‘Acorn: denotes the fruit of trees of the Oak kind … see Seed’ having to wait years and many volumes before their enquiry was rewarded.
Its editor was Abraham Rees, a Welsh Presbyterian minister, a fellow of the Royal Society, a man determined to spread knowledge ‘far beyond the schoolroom, even the university’. His new enterprise satisfied the desire for biography and contemporary history, while its sympathetic coverage of revolutionary Europe led to accusations of subversive sympathies. To counteract this, its editor went to sincere lengths to stress its Protestant leanings and Englishness, even referring to King Louis as ‘King Lewis’. In other ways the volumes were exemplary examples of the Enlightenment: some of the most numerous and longest articles tackled the latest interpretations of the atomic system, the cosmos and the origins of the earth, as well as recent research in botany, zoology and natural history.
There were many engaging and surprising anomalies. Some of the alphabetical ordering, for example, was originaclass="underline" New York appeared as ‘York, New’ and St Ives as ‘Ives, St’. Occasionally an entry starting with a letter earlier in the alphabet would invade a later one – entries beginning with I and J often appearing quite randomly, as if the editor had thought of a new addition when it was too late to reset the printing plates. And some of the editorial judgements were erratic, or at least acutely specialised, such as the sixteen pages of arcane tables devoted to the heliocentric tracking of the latitude and longitude of Jupiter, which required two pages of explanatory notes and made a rocket ride to the planet an easier option:
From Table 1 of the epochs, take out the epochs of the mean longitude of the aphelion and node, with the Arguments II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and place them in an horizontal line. But if the given year not be found in that Table, take the nearest year preceding the given year as an epoch, and take out as before; under which, from Table II, place the mean motion in longitude, of the aphelion and node, with the Arguments.
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Other entries now provide us with an intriguing glimpse into technological and scientific progress at the beginning of the nineteenth century:
BATTERY: In electricity, a combination of coated surfaces of glass, so connected together that they may be charged at once and discharged by a common conductor. Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin […] constructed a battery consisting of eleven panes of large sash-glass, coated on each side, and connected in such a manner that the whole might be charged together. A more complete battery is described by Dr. [Joseph] Priestley, of which he says, that after long use he sees no reason for wishing the least alteration in any part of it. This battery consists of 64 jars, each ten inches long and 2½ inches in diameter, coated within 1½ inch of the top; and contains in the whole 32 square feet.
The most perfect batteries of modern construction since that of Dr. Priestley have been made in Holland for Teyler’s museum at Haerlem by Mr Cuthbertson of Poland Street, London, then residing in Amsterdam […] Teyler’s second grand battery was finished by Mr. Cuthbertson in 1789. This is the largest and most complete battery that was ever made […] 100 jars […] the whole battery contains 550 square feet of coating and for convenience it is put into four separate cases.
COLUMBIUM: In chemistry, a new metal discovered by Mr [Charles] Hatchett in the year 1802, in a mineral which he had from the British Museum. The mineral, it appears, had been sent with some specimens of iron ore from Massachusetts in America to Sir Hans Sloane, in whose catalogue it is described as ‘a very heavy black stone, with golden streaks’. Its lustre is vitreous, slightly inclining in some parts to metallic, moderately hard, and very brittle.
RAILWAY: Tram or Dram-road, or Waggon-way, in Rural Economy, a track constructed of iron, stone, timber or other material. […] Speaking of the great utility of canals in the carriage of various articles in [Shropshire], it is observed by Mr [Thomas] Telford, an able engineer, that another mode of conveyance has frequently been adopted to a considerable extent; which is that of forming roads by means of iron rails laid along them, upon which materials are carried in waggons, which contain from six to thirty hundred weight; experience, he thinks, has now convinced us that in countries the surfaces of which are rugged, or where it is difficult to obtain water for lockage, where the weight of the article of the produce is great in comparison with their bulk, and from where they are mostly to be conveyed from a higher to a lower level, that in those cases, iron railways are in general preferable to canal navigation.
When the project was complete, its preface announced that the publication was ‘very much to the relief of the Editor’s mind’. Writing in the godlike third person, Abraham Rees explained how neither expense nor energy had been spared in its construction, although ‘if he had foreseen the time and attention which the compilation and conduct of it required, and the unavoidable anxiety which it has occasioned, he would probably never have undertaken it.’ Further, he calls upon our sympathy, for ‘he has devoted almost twenty years of his life, measured not by fragments of time, but by whole days of twelve or fourteen hours … and in so doing impaired his health and constitution.’
And even in the preface he admits an element of failure. Some of the details in his contributors’ articles appeared to him ‘erroneous … they are actually controverted and contradicted in other parts of the Cyclopaedia.’ And he regretted its unanticipated length: ‘It would have been … more gratifying to the Editor to have compiled a Cyclopaedia in fewer volumes … as in all probability the sale would have been greater and the sum of money expended upon it would of course have been much less.’