Predictably, Britannica did not take kindly to the attacks on its principles and practice. The eighth edition (1853–60) contained a biography of Coleridge by the author and literary critic Thomas De Quincey, and the vitriol flowed unceasing. He was ‘capable of immense service to poetry’, his verse imbued with ‘simplicity and lucidness’. But his prose style, evidenced in both his literary criticism and (it was implied) his groundwork on Metropolitana, was ‘disfigured by turgidity, and the affected use of words’. His humour was ‘ponderous and unwieldy’. Coleridge, De Quincey concluded, ‘lived on the future; and Coleridge’s future was a bad bank on which to draw; its bills were perpetually dishonoured.’
Coleridge’s initial ambition, expressed in 1803, for a series of volumes designed to ‘set up the reader, give him at once connected trains of thought and facts, and a delightful miscellany for lounge reading’ had long been abandoned. By the time its second edition was concluded in 1858, thirty-four years after its founder’s death, the prospect of such popular appeal had been thoroughly replaced by text both earnest and exhausting, and the modern reader was looking for something else from their encyclopaedias.
The publishers of Britannica were having their own problems keeping pace with a changing world. Nothing had transformed modern lives so much as electric light, elongating both working and leisure hours, improving safety, transport and entertainment; for our particular purposes, the encyclopaedia could be printed more swiftly, sold more efficiently, and be read for longer. But an attempt to actually explain the scientific principles of light could still easily run aground on the triple hazards of old-fashioned alphabetical order, traditional publishing methods, and the missed deadline.
In the 1870s, Britannica was still published piecemeal. The first volume of the ninth edition appeared in 1875, and the last, the twenty-fourth, only in 1888. The contributor specialising in acrobats had to write his entry more than a decade before the one specialising in yaks. And if you were writing about Light, it was no use submitting your entry after Volume 14 (Kaolin–LON), which had gone to press in 1882.
Both earnest and exhausting: a new volume of Metropolitana hits the streets
Unless your name was John William Strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh. Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919) was just too clever for deadlines. A student of Eton and Harrow, a professor and chancellor at Cambridge, a president of the Royal Society, and a recipient of many scientific medals, Rayleigh was expert in mathematics, hydrodynamics, viscosity, explosives, acoustics, photography and electromagnetism. He discovered and isolated the rare gas argon, for which he would receive the 1904 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Britannica invited him to contribute the entry on the physical properties of Light for its ninth edition. He was given a deadline, but more pressing demands caused him to miss it, and the volume was deprived of his insights (another man hurriedly and inadequately filled his shoes). But there was still hope that the Lord’s expertise could be employed, and an enterprising editor ensured that Volume 17, MOT–ORM (1884), made space for an article from Rayleigh entitled Optics. But a similar calamity occurred: the Lord failed to get his act together. And then, as the twenty-third volume (T–UPS) approached, a few blank pages were set aside for Undulating Light, and the editor held his breath. But, oh dear again – no dice from his Lordship. With almost all hope lost, Rayleigh submitted his celebrated entry, Wave Theory of Light, for Volume 24 (1888), and the world learnt that among the many suppositions regarding the propagation of light as a vibration, ‘the most famous is that which assimilates light to the transverse vibrations of an elastic solid. Transverse they must be in order to give room for the phenomena of polarisation.’ How illuminating that was, or how murky, only an individual reader could decide.*
This was another problem for Britannica: the transformation of knowledge into comprehension. Contributions from experts often failed to prove useful to a lay reader approaching the subject for the first time, and while few entries came as close to the thicket of specialist detail that marked the Metropolitana, many faced their own problems of readability. Britannica’s ninth edition was a towering masterwork of the British ivy-walled university, but its mastery did not initially extend to dirtying itself with the practicalities of sales or the popular market. Men like Lord Rayleigh, even if they met their deadlines, were writing for their peers, and this was not an attribute likely to expand the readership. But then something happened to transform Britannica’s fortunes: the arrival of two brilliant and shameless Americans intent on dragging the worthiest of institutions into the modern age.
* Mussulman is an ancient Persian term for Muslim. The story was proudly recalled by Herman Kogan in The Great EB (University of Chicago Press, 1958).
* As quoted in Richard Yeo, Lost Encyclopaedias: Before and After the Enlightenment (Book History, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, vol. 10).
* Though no more readable now than then (and probably less so), the Metropolitana does have its champions today, not least those who credit the role it played in establishing a framework of applied science, a term that Coleridge was the first to use and popularise after acquiring it in Germany. The historian of science Robert Bud has noted that one of the encyclopaedia’s later editors, H.J. Rose, was also principal of the new King’s College, London, where the many rational treatises on applied science found a practical application in numerous areas of engineering, including the railways and mining, as well as several areas of the arts and manufacture. It is likely that the Metropolitana was also employed as a useful educational tool within the nascent polytechnic movement; see Robert Bud, ‘“Applied Science”: A Phrase in Search of a Meaning’, Isis, University of Chicago Press, September 2012.
* The Lord had the last laugh. When word got out that Britannica was planning a tenth edition for 1902 (the ninth edition reprinted with supplements), Rayleigh was asked to write about Argon. No one in the world knew as much about this noble gas as he did, except perhaps his fellow professor and co-discoverer, Sir William Ramsay. So it would have been a travesty had anyone else composed the Britannica entry about such an inert subject. Rayleigh conjured around 3000 words, frequently referring to his original research published in academic journals. He explained how he had isolated argon from other gases in the air, and how he and Ramsay had presented their discovery to an astonished Royal Society in 1895. Equally astonishing was the fact that he managed to get his unique account to the editor of Britannica early enough to appear in Volume A–AUS.
L
LIBERATION?
In the last years of the nineteenth century, full-page advertisements appeared in The Times offering the twenty-four-volume set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for £27, less than half of the original asking price of £65. That was for the full morocco binding. The half morocco binding was only £20 (once £45), while the no morocco cloth-bound version was only £16 (originally £37).
What could you expect for a bargain like that? Prospective buyers were reassured that while the price had fallen dramatically, the value of what they were getting had not fallen at all, ‘not by one word’. They would receive the same extraordinary fare as the people (pity them!) who had paid top whack: 30 million words across 22,000 pages, 338 full-page plates and 671 maps, and a separate 499-page index in a supplementary volume. Swinburne wrote on Keats; Robert Louis Stevenson wrote on the French poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger; mathematicians descended from their lofty perches to explain complex proofs in impenetrable style. For just one guinea down, the purchaser would find the entire set ‘in every respect as desirable’ as the one printed for libraries and other institutions, and on the same high-quality paper.