The content of the eleventh Britannica was, predictably, also very male-dominated. There was no entry for Marie Curie, for example, despite the extensive coverage given to radioactivity elsewhere; her work, and her Nobel Prize for Physics, was covered only briefly in the entry about her husband Pierre Curie. Elsewhere, historical events seemed to have been placed in what Thomas calls ‘a hall of distorting mirrors’. The story of Mme. Roland, a popular hero of the French Revolution, appears only within a biographical entry for her husband Jean Marie Roland. While she occupies almost three-quarters of the text, ‘the heading and the story’s frame implies that the reader’s attention ought to be devoted to her husband, even though the article itself can find little to say about him’.
The strangest entry was the one entitled Women. This is signed simply ‘X’, the only lengthy article in the whole edition with this credit, and it is thought to have been written by the editor Chisholm himself. It runs to seven pages (compared to ten on the subsequent Woodcarving), and betrays signs of wrangling. Much of the article is devoted to the legal standing of women in a historical and matrimonial context, and the issue of education, where it manages to be both chivalrous and patronising, describing the ‘temperate, calm, earnest demeanour of women’ as a credit to school and university teaching, something that has ‘awakened admiration and respect from all’. Women are said to have ‘invaded’ other professions, including journalism, law-copying, plan-tracing and factory inspection, where nonetheless they are found to be ‘hard-working, persevering and capable’ and quite able to ‘hold their ground’; a woman may also succeed as a queen and regent. The other main topic concerns women’s suffrage, something Britannica appears to be largely against. The word ‘suffrage’ and the subject of ‘the vote’ seem initially so unpalatable that their appearance is replaced by ‘the movement for the abolition of the sex distinction in respect of the right conferred upon certain citizens to share in the election of parliamentary representatives.’*
There was another reason why the entry entitled Women was subject to wrangling: an error in carpentry. The bookcases for the eleventh edition had been ordered and built a year before the completion of the set, and when it was clear the edition would run to one more volume than originally planned, Hugh Chisholm faced a dilemma. According to Gillian Thomas, he issued instructions to keep entries beginning W–Z down to a minimum. But Janet Hogarth, the contributor and chief indexer, recalled how Chisholm once tried to justify cutting the entry on Women in its entirety.
I vividly remember a winter afternoon when he called me ‘into counsel’ as he called it, in the editorial sanctum, which … meant that whilst I sat meekly by the fire, he walked up and down, expounding to me that the then position of women as an integral part of the human race made it unnecessary to write about them as though they were a race apart! I cordially but respectfully agreed, and we decided that only a few columns, chronicling the suffrage movement and certain educational advances need be inserted.
More than any other publication, the storage of encyclopaedias has always been an issue. But storage can also be an affectation, and from the time in 1860 when the eighth edition offered a £3 revolving mahogany bookcase to house its twenty-one volumes, spinning furniture became as much a status symbol as the books it was holding.
By the time of the eleventh edition, it had become an important selling point for the set, with three different designs. The first was a mahogany single-tier open case topped by a narrow ‘consulting table’, while the other two came in ‘Jacobean Oak’ with glass fronts, one of sturdy and compact design with the volumes placed vertically in three rows, the other of a more precarious build resembling a grandfather clock, with all the books stacked horizontally flat on top of each other. They were all ‘free’, the way a mobile phone may now come free with a thirty-six-month contract, and only available ‘while stocks last’ which almost certainly meant ‘while demand lasts’.
By 1930, the bookcases had become a dominant feature in the advertisements. ‘Presented Free with each set is a beautiful bookcase-table, made of solid brown mahogany,’ proclaimed one, with everything in the accompanying photograph just as solid: a dad smoking his pipe in a chair by the edge of the bookcase, his wife on the edge of the chair consulting the Britannica, the long bookcase centre stage with a lamp and vase on it, and behind the bookcase two very engaged children, a boy and a girl, each busting their buttons to get their hands on their mother’s volume.
A few years later, a family in Port Washington, New York, posed on two sofas with the Americana in a bookcase between them. ‘The Americana made a real improvement in the homework of our fifteen-year-old daughter Kathleen in just a few months,’ reported Mrs Raymond Saunders. ‘When people ask us if we use The Americana much, we just point to the bookcase, for at least one volume is always out of place and being used by one of the children.’ And Mrs Howard W. Colburn of Goodwater, Alaska, concurred. ‘My oldest boy even learned how to work his algebra problems from the article on algebra.’
* Yet, despite reflecting all the greatness and progress of the world, the edition somehow managed to neglect half its people; the value of women to Britannica, both as subjects and contributors, would only slowly emerge and be recognised in the new century. There was one notable exception to this in the ninth edition (1888): the entry ‘Women, Law Relating to’. It began: ‘The law as it relates to women has been gradual in its operation, but its tendency has been almost uniformly in one direction. Disabilities of women, married or unmarried, have been one after another removed, until at the present day, in most countries, the legal position of women differs little from that of men as far as regards private rights. Politically and professionally the sexes are still not upon an equality, but even in this aspect women have considerably greater rights than they once possessed, and the old theory of their intellectual and moral inferiority is virtually exploded. Those who defend their exclusion must now do so on other grounds.’
* It helped that it was out of copyright.
* Everything Explained That is Explainable: On the Creation of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910–1911 by Denis Boyles (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016).
* In his memoir Another Part of the Wood (1975), Kenneth Clark wrote of how, in the eleventh edition, ‘One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by the facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopaedia in the tradition of Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only when it is slightly coloured by prejudice.’ His use of the word ‘slightly’ may now be considered understatement.
* Denis Boyles points out that the notoriety – i.e. blatant racism – of the Negro article has ensured that it is one of the eleventh edition’s most widely read. There is no record of any conflict or objection from the encyclopaedia’s editors or fellow contributors at the time of sale, and any objection from readers may have been treated just like an objection to any other entry, and dismissed with the assuredness that populates the rest of the publication. (You may choose not to read on, but for factual context I’ve included some further representative extracts below.)
‘Mentally the negro is inferior to the white. The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: “The negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence.”