‘It would be generally but not universally held, also, that the negroes in the United States progressed under slavery, that they were far better qualified for incorporation as a vital and contributing element of the country’s civilization at the time of their emancipation than they were on arrival or than an equal number of their African kindred would have been. But probably the rate of progress has been more rapid under freedom than it was under slavery.
‘The negroes in the United States have played and are playing an important and necessary part in the industrial and economic life of the southern states, in which in 1908 they formed about one-third of the population. But that life was changing with marvellous rapidity, becoming less simple, less agricultural and patriarchal, more manufacturing and commercial, more strenuous and complex. It was too early to say whether the negroes would be given an equal or a fair opportunity to show that they could be as serviceable or more serviceable in such a civilization as they had been in that which was passing away, and whether the race would show itself able to accept and improve such chances as were afforded, and to remain in the future under these changing circumstances, as they had been in the past, a vital and essential part of the life of the nation.’
It is a particular misfortune of Britannica’s wide-ranging influence and authority that it may have both delayed and withheld the possibility of progress advanced in the paragraph above.
In 1970, a social studies teacher in New York called Irving Sloan published a survey of the treatment of black Americans in nine popular encyclopaedias. He found considerable improvement in recent decades, including far more comprehensive and less prejudiced articles on the general history of the ‘Afro-American’. But he also noted a paucity of individual entries on the achievements of black men, and very few for black women. See: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED090113.pdf
* Dr Eliot knew a good length of books when he saw one. He was the editor of the fifty-book set of Harvard Classics, known as ‘the five-foot shelf of books’.
* Wright, Willard Huntington, Misinforming a Nation, New York, B.W. Huebsch, 1917. Wright was most likely reviewing one of the many American editions of the eleventh Britannica adapted for sale through many regional newspapers and department store catalogues. These would have included additional material pertaining to the United States, written by American specialists. It was telling that when Britannica was considered by one of its staff many decades later it was judged too American and certainly prejudiced against Britain. In 1988 the genealogist Charles Mosley, who worked for Britannica for several years, first as a subeditor and then as its London editor, wrote in the Guardian how the pro-American bias ‘amounts to more than impertinence’. ‘The full horror of what an American editorial monopoly entails is seldom appreciated. The American editors who write short in-house articles are ignorant and parochial … The Encyclopaedia Britannica is a publication so contemptuous of Britain, the land of its birth, that it cannot be bothered to ascertain correct usage when speaking of The Thames.’ Mosley questioned its priorities when it came to biographical selections: he balked at the inclusion of globetrotting television journalist Alan Whicker, and mourned the lack of the Conservative cabinet ministers Lords Carrington or Whitelaw.
* It was not immediately clear what these ‘purely feminine affairs’ consisted of, but an American advertisement for the eleventh edition sold by Sears, Roebuck & Co provides a clue. Beneath the subheading ‘The Britannica in Women’s Affairs’ we read that the encyclopaedia ‘gives to the woman fundamental information on politics, on economics, child welfare, domestic science, on foods and their relative values, on hygiene, sanitation, home decorations, furniture, rugs and furnishings.’
* Hogarth changed her name to Courtney upon marriage in 1911, after which she found her work increasingly stressful. She served as assistant editor on Britannica’s twelfth edition after the war, but regretted not being able to devote more hours to the work. ‘Men really need not be so frightened,’ she wrote in 1926. ‘They will never find the labour market flooded with married women. It is not an easy matter to combine professional work with matrimony. No doubt there is greater security, but there is also the added strain of another person to consider.’
* A Position to Command Respect by Gillian Thomas (Scarecrow Press Inc, Metuchen, New Jersey and London, 1992). In her introduction, Thomas recalls her father frequently referring to the eleventh edition to settle arguments, the green volumes behind a glass-fronted bookcase. Though her father, like the volumes, was regarded as rather old-fashioned, Britannica ‘still seemed an oddly comforting piece of cultural furniture’; he had bought the set on an instalment plan ‘as a young man intent on self-improvement’.
* In the 1950s, Herman Kogan wrote that Britannica’s Walter Yust, the editor of the fourteenth edition, was apparently surprised when informed by the historian Mary Ritter Beard how few were the biographies of women compared to men. Of roughly 13,000, fewer than 800 described the lives of women. Yust asked Beard for a list of omissions, and she obliged. Subsequent progress was slow.
M
METHOD
We do not have the guidance notes given to contributors for the Eleventh Edition of Britannica, but we do have them for the next major set published eighteen years later in 1929.* It’s a revealing document, part style sheet, part commissioning form, part sincere editorial cheerleading. And as a statement of intent it provides a rare insight into encyclopaedic purpose early in the twentieth century.
Produced at Britannica’s London headquarters in High Holborn in the spring of 1927, it began by justifying why a new ‘epoch-making’ edition was necessary. ‘It is planned to perform a service for the average intelligent man or woman that has never been done before. It has been attempted only in part, and then inadequately and intermittently.’
The proposed service was the continuation of a familiar policy: the further broadening of accessibility, the further diminution of the ivory tower. The editorial policy was ‘a result of careful study … extending over a period of more than a year’, the twelve-page leaflet began.
The last few generations, and more particularly the last half century, have seen an increase in knowledge beyond all precedent. While the man of to-day does know more than his forebears of one or two centuries ago, he is relatively much more ignorant. The reason is simple. There has been no organised attempt to present the results of modern research in a form that would be comprehensible to him. This is an age of specialisation, and with a few exceptions specialists have been content to write for other specialists rather than inform the public. Consequently a vast section of what is known to-day remains a sealed book to the average person. This situation is one that has caused lively concern to many students of our contemporary life. It is a situation which the new edition of the
Britannica
will be designed to meet.
*
To bridge the gap between the average reader and modern knowledge, the editors drew up a fifteen-point plan. In summary: