Of course there were weaknesses. There was a blindness towards issues we may now consider important (Freud and psychoanalysis), and a squeamishness around sex (which ensured there was no entry on Sex). Conversely, there was plenty of sober coverage of topics we would now regard as dubious (poltergeists and other paranormal activity, phrenology). We may attempt to pardon both omissions and errors with the catch-all explanation we use so often these days: those were different times, with different values and codes; ignorant historical errors of judgement will always be easy prey for those who come later.
In his introduction, the editor Hugh Chisholm carefully embraced the concept of controversy, something encyclopaedists had previously been reluctant to do (despite their revolutionary leanings, Diderot and D’Alembert were careful not to specifically endorse contentious entries for fear of imprisonment; inclusion was endorsement enough). Chisholm welcomed debate, for ‘impartiality does not consist in concealing criticism, or in withholding the knowledge of divergent opinion, but in an attitude of scientific respect’.*
But then we must face the entry entitled Negro. This is more than problematic; a prejudice so extreme that it can neither be explained nor forgiven, and yet remains visible, cold and hard, on library shelves (in my own beloved London Library indeed, not 10 yards from where I’m writing this, on an upper shelf, a shadow waiting to fall). It would be difficult to imagine assumptions more offensive. The entry will most likely leave you breathless, for it is history as written, and in 1911 it was believed to be both true and wise. It was written by Thomas Athol Joyce, the chief ethnographer at the British Museum.
NEGRO: (from Lat. niger, black), in anthropology, the designation of the distinctly dark-skinned, as opposed to the fair, yellow, and brown variations of mankind … The colour of the skin, which is also distinguished by a velvety surface and a characteristic odour, is due not to the presence of any special pigment, but to the greater abundance of the colouring matter in the Malpighian mucous membrane between the inner or true skin and the epidermis or scarf skin. This colouring matter is not distributed equally over the body, and does not reach its fullest development until some weeks after birth; so that new-born babies are a reddish chocolate or copper colour. But excess of pigmentation is not confined to the skin; spots of pigment are often found in some of the internal organs, such as the liver, spleen, &c. Other characteristics appear to be a hypertrophy of the organs of excretion, a more developed venous system, and a less voluminous brain, as compared with the white races.
It was of its time, of course, and it serves to remind us what a time it was. It will come as little relief, or even surprise, that Britannica expressed similarly assured prejudices against Chinese, Afghans, Arabs and Native Americans. (Other judgements appear so naive as to be almost comicaclass="underline" Antisemitism, for example, was a ‘passing phase in the history of culture’.) Some of these slurs appeared as a theoretical and political act, and chimed with the encyclopaedia’s entry for Civilization, which calls for the ‘betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity’.*
For many years after its launch, Britannica’s eleventh edition continued to be promoted as something between a knowledge circus and the latest time-saving gadget. Whereas once the Britannica was sold primarily on content – the calibre of its professors, the unique material between its covers – it was increasingly being marketed on price and value. ‘At the present price,’ an advertisement in the American Magazine proclaimed, it was ‘the cheapest book ever published’. How so? Because it eliminated the need for a reference library of 400 to 500 books and would be ‘about one-seventh’ of the cost. The set also eliminated sixteen ‘arduous’ years of ordinary book buying. The entire set would be yours for $5 down, followed by $5 per volume for 37 or 47 months, depending on your choice of dark-green sheepskin or dark-red full morocco (there was also a 31-month miserly cloth binding ‘regarded as entirely satisfactory by those who had to choose the cheapest form’, and a version in ‘full limp velvet suede’, price on application).
The Advertising entry in the eleventh edition, written by its advertising manager Henry R. Haxton, expressed a common concern: ‘In the French, and some English Newspapers, where an advertisement is often given the form of an item of news, the reader is distressed by the constant fear of being hoodwinked.’
But in 1913, two years after it launched, Haxton wrote another advertisement celebrating his and his encyclopaedia’s success. Published in The Times, it certainly matched the product it was selling – a thicket of text explaining why this edition was superior to all its predecessors, and no feature was omitted. It was ‘the most successful book of our time’. In the last two years, Haxton claimed, it had sold 40,000 sets, or 1,160,000 volumes, making it imperative ‘not to sell’ the encyclopaedia but merely to fulfil existing orders. But now, with only 10 per cent remaining, the set was available once more! The reader had a choice of paper – either ‘heavy book paper’, which brought each volume in at 2¾ inches, or English-made opaque Indian paper, which made the volumes only one inch thick: this innovation was ‘an inspiration of genius’.
Inevitably, Britannica would make ‘the ideal Christmas present’, and it was now so cheap that a clever reader would consider buying numerous sets as both an investment in knowledge and an investment in itself. ‘I bought two copies for the benefit of my two sets of grandchildren,’ Dr C.W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard, happily informed the campaign. ‘I find them altogether admirable, and my grandchildren, who are at the most inquisitive ages, are of the same opinion.’*
But not everyone thought highly of it. A review by Joseph Jacobs in the New York Times criticised the extent to which it relied on articles reprinted from earlier editions: he estimated that ‘not more than a fifth’ of the content was absolutely new. Hugh Chisholm replied that the obverse was the case – not more than about one-fifth was retained from previous editions (he claimed that a quick survey of one volume found only 16 per cent had appeared in the tenth edition). ‘I know it to be a fact that no previous edition has been so original in its matter, as compared with its predecessor, as that which I have had the honor of directing to its conclusion.’
The most forceful and prolonged battering came from the critic and poet Willard Huntington Wright, who also wrote detective novels under the name S.S. Van Dine. Wright/Van Dine’s entry in Britannica.com lists many of his titles, including his philosophy primer What Nietzsche Taught (1915) and The Kennel Murder Case (1933) – but there is one significant omission: Misinforming a Nation (1917). This was a 220-page assessment of how America had fallen fatally under the spell of the ‘assumed cultural superiority’ of England, noting how everything English was consistently overvalued and overpraised on American shores. Wright’s assault was fuelled by what he saw as English contempt for Catholicism, coupled with an intellectual prejudice he perceived against all aspects of American beliefs and aesthetics. The majority of his ammunition was employed specifically against Britannica’s eleventh edition, ‘this distorted, insular, incomplete, and suggestively British reference work’. Its framework was narrow and parochial, and he could find ‘no more vicious and dangerous intellectual influence’ on young American minds; if accepted as in any way authoritative it would ‘retard our intellectual development fully twenty years’. Wright barely drew breath. He also found that, far from being ‘universal’, the encyclopaedia was rather the home of ‘second- and third-rate Englishmen … given space and praise much greater than that accorded truly great men of other nations … The vocabulary of hyperbole has been practically exhausted in setting forth the dubious merits of this reference work … the ethics and decencies of ordinary honest commerce have been thrown to the wind.’*