We have met the most famous debater before, but now his voice was louder. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was last seen berating the publishers of Encyclopaedia Britannica for presenting their instalments in alphabetical order (this ‘huge unconnected miscellany … a worthless monster’). His dissatisfaction endured through the years, so that by 1817 it had expanded to a fully formed manifesto, and the manifesto brought forth a brilliant adventure called Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In tone it wasn’t that dissimilar from Kubla Khan, the epic fever dream he had published the year before, with its stately pleasure domes and caverns measureless to man. In his new vision Xanadu was now London, and the dream was a compendium of knowledge unlike anything that had appeared before.
Coleridge’s grand project emphasised the systematic relationships within knowledge bases, presenting the sciences, the arts and other subjects as a rational and unified progression rather than a scattered constellation. This was the way to learn and document the world’s learning, he argued, and to show how the soul of wisdom may exceed its circumstances.
His thoughts are first glimpsed in a letter he wrote to a friend in 1796. On his return from university studies in Germany he proposed to open a school ‘for 8 young men at 100 Guineas each … and perfect them in 1. The history of savage tribes. 2. Of semi-barbarous nations. 3. Of nations emerging from semi-barbarism. 4. Of civilised states. 5. Of luxurious states. 6. Of revolutionary states. 7. Of colonies.’
When it came to his encyclopaedia, the key word was method. He employed it in the way mathematicians and physicists do, and in the way Francis Bacon did before him: the methodical and systematic advance from one piece of information or thinking to another. ‘All things, in us, and about us, are a chaos, without Method,’ he wrote in his preliminary treatise. ‘There may be transition, but there can never be progress; there may be sensation, but there cannot be thought: for the total absence of Method renders thinking impracticable.’
This wasn’t entirely fanciful. The Metropolitana exists as fifty-nine parts, or thirty volumes, (22,426 pages, 565 plates) issued between 1817 and 1845, the work of four editors and Coleridge as founding supervisor/cheerleader. The ‘divisions’ of its contents page displayed both the variety and approach of its subject matter, but it also suggested quite a different type of publication to the Britannica.
In many ways it harked back to the ancient world. The ‘Pure Science’ division included Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Morals and Theology. ‘Mixed and Applied Science’ covered Mechanics, Pneumatics, Optics, Astronomy, Heat, Light and Sound; among the ‘Fine Arts’ one would read about Painting, Heraldry, Music and Engraving. The ‘Useful Arts and Natural History’ featured Agriculture, Carpentry, Fortification, Anatomy and Zoology. These were lengthy, subdivided studies packed with academic fervour and exhausting thoroughness. They were not for random consultation on an inclement Sunday. If you bought the Metropolitana, you ended up with a big library of small books on major topics.
The entry on Numismatics, for example, stretched to thirty-one tight double-columned pages, about 30,000 words. Both sides of every coin of every reign were scrutinised, and every symbol of war or God or chariot race had a story and a purpose. A reader would discover symbols on Grecian coins derived ‘from the productions of the climate’, including wines, melon and parsley; the diminution in the size of Roman coins (signalling a deflation of the currency); a pyramid indicating the relative value of coins in 300 BC and 200 BC (where one Sestertius equalled 2 Quinarius, and 20 Quinarius equalled 2 Tremissis); the use of abbreviations denoting high office (Trib Pot for Tribunitiâ Potestate, Pont Max for Pontifex Maximus); the differing value of brass, copper and silver coins in the age of Augustus – until every coin was appraised. It ended with a look at various coin cabinets and caskets, one for every level of collecting, and advice on how best to arrange a collection within them (here the alphabet was rejected as well, in favour of ‘a system more accordant with truth’, specifically the truth of chronology and a tour of dusty locations where coins once circulated and buried hordes might yet be found: Gaul, Thrace, Macedon, Thessaly, Illyria, Epirus, Euboea, Zacynthus, Commagene, Phoenicia, Parthia and Zeugitania.
And this was letting the reader off lightly. Entries like these (and I’ve picked one of the most involving) appeared hewn from the side of rock cliffs, and they were not uninteresting once you hacked your way in (through the story of coins, some of the hubristic glory that was ancient Rome also emerged). But these huge essays run next to each other with hardly a breath between them, the surrounding pages distinctly lacking the occasional geographical or literary diversion one might encounter in other encyclopaedias, the sort of thing that makes them as engaging as they were instructive.
In Britannica’s seventh edition, for example, published at the same time as the Metropolitana between 1830 and 1842, one overruns a search for James Mill’s thoughts on the Freedom of the Press and finds brief insights into the Necropolis, Nepal and the Netherlands. In Volume 5 of the Metropolitana, by contrast, there are 165 uninterrupted pages on Meteorology and fifty-one on Engraving (followed by twenty more on Notes on Engraving). The authors were the sort of leading figures to command respect, but none of them considered concision a virtue. Fellows of the Royal Society, a conclave of bishops and reverends, the astronomer William Herschel, the mathematician and computing pioneer Charles Babbage, professors from St John’s, Cambridge and Oriel, Oxford – the great, the brilliant, the pedantic and the windy.
Admittedly, something unexpected happened in the Metropolitana’s fourth division. The last volumes suddenly turned alphabetical and catch-all, and more of a glossary. They contained a Complete Vocabulary of Geography, a Philosophical Lexicon, and a History of the English Language, seemingly an attempt to cover everything not considered in the essays that had gone before, perhaps a sop to everyone who had expected the sort of traditional encyclopaedic dictionary they had grown used to.
Although possessed of extraordinary philosophical scope, Coleridge’s vision was swimming so fiercely against the tide that today its memory, not to say its physical presence, has been largely washed away. It was widely read within the universities, but failed to leave a lasting impression on either the popular psyche or the popular market. Its critical reception was mixed. In 1862, the editor of the monthly magazine British Controversialist found it a ‘magnificent projection’ that ‘dazzled … by its excursive brilliancy’; the treatises on Logic and Rhetoric ‘added greatly to the estimation in which the “Encyclopaedia” began to be held’. But a year later The Quarterly Review sniped that ‘the proposals of the poet Coleridge … had at least enough of a poetical character to be eminently unpractical’. In subsequent years, the journal noted, a large proportion of the contents was ‘dug out of the ruins and re-issued in separate volumes by fresh publishers who acquired the property of the work, and thus distinctly recognised it as a mere quarry of valuable materials’.*