A similarly exhaustive task was nearing completion in France. Only this one was bigger – much bigger. The Encyclopédie Méthodique (1782–1832) was a vastly reorganised and expanded version of Diderot and D’Alembert’s work, published and edited by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, resulting in 203 volumes and over 100 million words.*
The Méthodique rejected an alphabetical arrangement in favour of ‘subject dictionaries’ that might allow readers a broader educational view. In his prospectus, Panckoucke compared the formation of his work to a brick-by-brick reconstruction of a beautiful palace. The old palace was Diderot’s; the new editor’s contributor-contractors installed conservatories as far as the eye could see.
The greater length of the treatises ensured that the more controversial doctrines of the Enlightenment could be maintained with greater concealment from censors, although the extended number and the length of these entries did little to guarantee quality or a high subscription rate. Some contributors may have lengthened their entries to increase their fee, while others couldn’t bear the thought of not including everything known on their subject. As for Panckoucke, its chief editor, it seemed as if he refused to actually edit. More was more. The ambition to create the ultimate work of reference must have been as frustrating as an attempt to reach the end of the Internet. Ultimate for whom? And how could this unique and overwhelming work possibly hope to keep pace with the nineteenth century? Abraham Rees had admitted as much in the preface to his own vast undertaking: ‘Science is progressive, and since the commencement of this work, its advances in several departments have not been inconsiderable.’
The scope of the Méthodique resembled the conception of perfect cartography by Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges: for true accuracy, a map would have to be the same size as the area it covered, at the scale of a mile to a mile. Such exactitude was clearly absurd, as absurd as the encyclopaedia of everything. The complete set of Encyclopédie Méthodique sold about 1500 copies.
As they aimed for an optimum size in the decades to come, all the editors of every encyclopaedia reluctantly agreed on one thing: they couldn’t win. A wider reading public, the expansion of trade and industry, cheaper costs of printing and more outlets for marketing hastened the growth of both the specialist encyclopaedia and the two- or three-volume general set. Even the editors of Britannica, which ran to twenty-one volumes for both its seventh edition (1830–42) and its eighth (1853–60) confirmed to readers that their sets contained everything they needed to know rather than everything knowable. By its ninth edition (1875–99) it was edging towards a specialism of its own – the foregrounding of experts, particularly on scientific matters. Its twenty-five volumes became known as the Scholar’s Edition, such was the academic style of its prose, frequently pitching itself beyond the capability of the general reader.
And underpinning all of this was a grander question, one we may argue stilclass="underline" what is knowledge, and how should it be presented in a book?
* Not that Brockhaus didn’t have competition. The generously illustrated Konversations-Lexikon produced by Joseph Meyer, for example, was a larger and more political work, and its size made it less nimble in adapting to changes and new events. The Wunder-Meyer, as it was known, was taken over by the Nazis during the Second World War. The two enterprises merged in the mid-1980s.
The word Lexikon translates formally as dictionary, but in the eighteenth century became applicable to anything in alphabetical order. Konversations-Lexikon came to denote the popular or accessible encyclopaedia of things, rather than a catalogue of words.
* Unlike Britannica, the Brockhaus had always been a fairly modest publication, its size adapting to the perceived demands of its readership, which in modern times meant a reduction due to financial constraints and narrowing attention spans. The sixteenth edition of 1952–57, for example, the first to be published after the war, reduced the number of volumes from twenty-five to twelve, and the number went down again for the eighteenth edition of 1977–81.
* Welcome to the world of knowledge and learning!
* The tables were published more than sixty years after John Harrison’s horological establishment of longitude at sea.
* One may be reminded of Franckenstein and Zedler’s comparably ambitious Universal-Lexicon from 1731, although that was a miserly sixty-four volumes published over eighteen years.
K
KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge confers majesty. The ownership of a large encyclopaedia may suggest grandeur in the manner of a drawing-room globe or a hand-drawn map of aristocratic lands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, possession of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had become a source of pride and privilege, of honour even. Such possession was often aspirational, an emblem of status, the Patek Philippe of the home library.
The fable is told, and it may even be true, of how Fath-Ali, Shah of Persia 1797–1834, took such pride in his acquisition of the eighteen-volume set of the third edition of Britannica at the beginning of his reign that he decided to change his title. The set had been transported from London by the British ambassador, travelling for many weeks with his arduous load, and its arrival so overwhelmed the Shah that he decreed he would henceforth be known as: ‘Most Exalted and Generous Prince; Brilliant as the Moon, Resplendent as the Sun; the Jewel of the World; the Center of Beauty, of Mussulmen and of the True Faith; Shadow of God; Mirror of Justice; Most Generous King of Kings; Master of the Constellations Whose Throne is the Stirrup Cup of Heaven; and Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’*
As the nineteenth century wore on, such a thing was increasingly seen. A well-bound set was now regularly purchased to furnish a room; the consultation of the volumes would be an occasional and secondary purpose.
But how was this knowledge best transmitted and absorbed? Writing in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1824, the philosopher Alexander Blair argued that the concept of the large-scale encyclopaedia had fundamentally failed, highlighting ‘an essential fallacy’. He claimed that knowledge is advanced by individual minds wholly devoting themselves to their own part of specialised enquiry. This was ‘a process of separation, not of combination’. He argued that previous attempts to display the ‘Circle of the Sciences’ were based on the misconception that this unity could be grasped by individuals. His point was reinforced by the fact that the title ‘Encyclopaedia’ was being increasingly attached to studies of single subjects: The Encyclopaedia of Wit (1804), for one, and An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) and An Encyclopaedia of Music (1825).*
Blair evidently regarded an encyclopaedia as something that failed twice: it was too big to be read in its entirety, but too wide-ranging and inclusive in its content to do any subject justice, even if treated at some length as a treatise. This was not an uncommon opinion. In their first half-century, the popular pioneering encyclopaedias of Chambers, Diderot et D’Alembert, and Bell and Macfarquhar underwent a subtle shift in their proposition, moving from the realm of expanded dictionary into a much larger knowledge base. They were still far from Chambers’s notion of many shelves of a library filleted into one publication, but they were increasingly designated items to be read rather than just referred to (more ‘this is all you need’ rather than ‘this may fulfil a need’). The decades would change this pattern back again, and marketing men found it easier to sell the encyclopaedia as a tool, an assistant, rather than an omniscient tutor. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century the debate about precisely how this knowledge was to be presented – indeed precisely what an encyclopaedia was designed to be – was still fluid.