His complaints appear not to have affected sales. The eleventh edition was an extraordinary global success. It sold about 1 million sets, more than every previous edition combined. It won a famous army of fans, not least Ernest Shackleton, who took the entire edition on his two-year voyage aboard Endurance, and would report how it saved him and his crew, socially and psychologically, as they battled the Antarctic ice. They believed they were carrying the sum of human civilisation along with them, a talisman in which they would themselves soon feature as heroes.
The eleventh edition was to be the last of its kind, the last to be so sure of itself, the last before the war. Many of its contributors died between 1914 and 1918, and with them died the superiority, the callousness and the downright brilliant know-it-all assertiveness of Britannica’s imperial tone. As Hans Koning concludes, one is ‘almost tempted to envy the writers … their doubtlessness’ in this unthreatened world. The key word here is ‘almost’. One re-examines the entry that observed how the Negro had ‘dark tightly curled hair … of the “wooly” or the “frizzly” type’, or the lines that claim Haitians are ‘ignorant and lazy’, ‘the Chinese character is inferior to the European’, and the Afghan is ‘cruel and crafty’ – and one begins to understand how the next generation of Britannica readers (those children who were once told they would be intellectually undernourished if they didn’t consume its pages) might form their worldview.
LITTLE WOMEN
In 1926, Janet Courtney published a memoir called Recollected in Tranquillity, a title suggesting her career had hitherto been hectic. She had worked as a secretary at the Royal Commission on Labour, and as a clerk at the Bank of England, but her most interesting years occurred at the High Holborn offices of Britannica. She was a lynchpin of administration, a role that entailed discretion, sublimation and being underappreciated on a daily basis.
But in December 1910, at the launch of the eleventh edition, when she was still known as Janet Hogarth, she had a rare evening in the limelight, albeit in a tokenistic way, when she was called upon to give a speech at a banquet celebrating the role of women at the encyclopaedia. The banquet was at the Savoy, the last in a sequence of four; the first three had been men only.
Hogarth adored her job and most of her colleagues. ‘There never was an office so gay, so self-confident, so crowded, so uncomfortable, yet so irresistible in its attraction.’ She was proud of her own entries in the new edition, most of them small and all of them unsigned, and prouder still of her achievements as chief indexer, a highly complicated assignment covering and cross-referencing 30,000 pages in less than a year, a half-million separate entries, a volume in itself.
She was introduced at the dinner by the editor Hugh Chisholm, who praised the number of women who had ‘lent their assistance’ to bring the eleventh edition to publication. The number of contributors was still small compared to men, ‘but in the sections relating to social and purely feminine affairs their contributions were of the first importance.’*
Rising to her feet after the meal, holding a cigarette, Hogarth observed how the lighting in the ballroom had been softened ‘to make us look our best’. She said that the cleverest answer to the question ‘What are women put into this world for?’ was ‘To keep the men’s head straight.’ And she agreed that although the number of women was still small, at the launch of the ninth edition thirty-five years before ‘if anyone had suggested to the then editors and proprietors that women’s share in the work should be not only acknowledged but proclaimed upon the housetops, the suggestion would have been regarded as absolutely revolutionary, if not positively indecent.’ But now, as the Daily Telegraph reported a few days after Hogarth’s speech, Britannica had ‘given them the chance to demonstrate in this way their rightful place in the learned world’.*
Up to a point. It was true that Britannica had always been a male preserve. Indeed, this had barely changed for more than a century since the first edition of 1768 (the one that had succinctly informed readers who chanced upon the entry Woman that they were the female equivalent of Man and should ‘See Homo’). But even now the improvement was marginal. In the tenth edition, compiled by almost 1800 contributors, only 37 had been women. In the eleventh, the figure was actually smaller at 35 women, although the total was also smaller at about 1500. A woman’s ‘rightful place in the learned world’ amounted to less than 2.5 per cent. As the historian Gillian Thomas points out in her biographical study of those 35 women, A Position to Command Respect, far from being ‘proclaimed upon the housetops,’ as Hogarth claimed, ‘the vast amount of women’s work on the eleventh Britannica was invisible and unacknowledged’.*
Gillian Thomas attempts to rectify this by recognising the many women who acted as ‘literary devils’ on Britannica – a term encompassing ghostwriting, researching long articles that would be credited to men, and writing small articles that usually went uncredited. These included Agnes Muriel Clay, a tutor in classics at Oxford; Agnes Mary Clerke, a classical scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of four books on astronomy; Pearl Craigie, classical scholar at University College, London, a popular novelist and playwright; Agnes Mary Duclaux, poet and literary critic, whose contributions to the Times Literary Supplement introduced English readers to Proust; Alice B. Gomme, a founder of the Folklore Society; Margaret, Lady Huggins, a leader in spectrography and honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society; Flora, Lady Lugard, ‘Colonial Editor’ of The Times; and Alice Meynell, poet and essayist.
The women shared differing and unpredictable political views. One, Lady Emilia Dilke, was a committed trades unionist, while Agnes Clay was involved in the Association for the Education of Women. Others, including Pearl Craigie, Mary Ward and Janet Hogarth, were supportive of the Anti-Suffrage Movement, arguing that women should stay above the fray of demeaning politics, fearing that a woman’s influence in the home and education of children would be adversely affected.
But not all their contributions were anonymous. The more unusual their specialisms, the more they received personal acknowledgement. Alice Gomme wrote on Children’s Games; Mary Ward wrote on Spain; Jessie Weston on Arthurian Legends; Flora Shaw tackled the British Empire; Victoria, Lady Welby explained Significs, a precursor to the study of semiotics. It was primarily in areas of the traditional university syllabus that their work was ignored, not least in the fields of classics, mathematics and science.