In the main, fictional encyclopaedias are objects of duty, both to write and to purchase. Most often they are drudgery personified, cumbersome as furniture. Dickens set the tone, and Arthur Conan Doyle followed, and by the time Vonnegut and Borges got their hands on a set, the encyclopaedia had become an absurd folly, a monument to human futility.
Imaginative fiction presented the antithesis of the multi-volume reference book, and it was no wonder that it took until 1910 for Britannica to define what a novel should look like, and how it got its name. The word derives from the Latin novus, meaning new. It is ‘the name given in literature to a study of manners, founded on an observation of contemporary or recent life, in which the characters, the incidents and the intrigue are imaginary, and therefore “new” to the reader.’ Such a thing was ‘founded on lines running parallel with those of actual history’.
The entry classifies the novel as ‘a modern form of literature’, a sustained story which is not historically true ‘but might very easily be so’. It has been made the vehicle for ‘satire, for instruction, for political or religious exhortation, for technical information’, but these were side issues, for the main purpose of the novel is to entertain ‘by a succession of scenes painted from nature, and by a thread of emotional narrative’.
The article was written by the poet, biographer and critic Edmund Gosse, a leading reviewer for the Sunday Times, a champion of neglected poetry and librarian to the House of Lords. He identifies key literary trends in France, Spain, Germany and Russia (where, since Gogol set the pace in the 1830s, the novel has been one of ‘resignation and pity, but wholly divorced from sentimentality’). The novels of China, by contrast, are predominantly moralising and virtuous in intent, not least the sixteenth- (or possibly seventeenth-) century work The Twice-Flowering Plum Trees. Nearer to home, Gosse reliably singles out Congreve, Fielding, Richardson and Sterne as central to the early structure of the English form. His tastes run to the traditional, and he is scathing of the popular ambitions of most authors. The novel’s presence in literary life only became ‘absolutely predominant’ in the nineteenth century, after which, he writes, everyone seemed to have a go, able or not:
The novel requires, for those who are content to be only fairly proficient in it, less intellectual apparatus than any other species of writing. This does not militate against the fact that the greatest novelists, always a small class, produce work which is as admirable in its art as the finest poetry. But the novel adapts itself to so large a range of readers, and covers so vast a ground in the imitation of life, that it is the unique branch of literature which may be cultivated without any real distinction or skill, and yet for the moment may exercise a powerful purpose.
Sixty years later, in 1974, Britannica’s appreciation of the novel was written by Anthony Burgess. Ranging over many forms of fiction, serious and less so, his approach is predictably more welcoming towards the modern and the experimental. But his own idiosyncrasies are no less apparent: he reasons that ‘it may or may not be accidental that the novels most highly regarded by the world are of considerable length’, citing Don Quixote, War and Peace and David Copperfield. And his own work is seldom far from his mind. Among the novels Burgess selects for special mention in the category of Fantasy and Prophecy are Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, while the books he chooses for his discussion of the upending of classical myth are Joyce’s Ulysses and A Vision of Battlements by Anthony Burgess.
His entry ran to a novella-ish 22,000 words and displayed great care for structure – passages on Plot were followed by Character, Setting, Narrative Method and Point of View. He found no distinction between ‘plot’ and ‘story’, as both propel the novel ‘through its hundred or thousand pages’. A plot may be a very simple device, ‘a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope’, and he offers three examples. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol might have been conceived as ‘a misanthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on Christmas Eve’; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice could be plotted as ‘a young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice’; Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was ‘a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment’.
In 1974, when his entry was published, the reader may have detected a note of frustration in Burgess’s claim that the novelist ‘is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artefact as well balanced and economical as a table or chair’. Burgess concludes that ‘since he is an artist, the claims of art, or artifice, frequently prevail’. He reasoned that the novelist is required to show much ingenuity. ‘The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or biography – a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare – but the novelist has to produce what look like novelties.’
The fictional encyclopaedia has never been a mouthwatering proposition. In David Copperfield, the amenable but plodding clerk Tommy Traddles dreams of the legal profession but is struggling for funds. When David calls on him at home in Camden Town (they are old school friends) Traddles is working for a man ‘getting up an Encyclopaedia’; he describes himself as a ‘compiler’, but it is clear he is a mere copyist. The work is perfect for him, he reasons, for he has ‘no invention at all; not a particle’. He supposed ‘there never was a young man with less originality than I have.’
About forty years later, in The Red-Headed League, Sherlock Holmes encounters Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker described by Watson as ‘obese, pompous and slow’. He too is earning money by copying, on this occasion Abbots, Archery and Architecture from Britannica, but before beginning on the ‘B’s he uncovers the true reason for his dreary and diversionary employment: his paymasters are not publishers but bank robbers, digging a tunnel that ends up at his pawn shop.
In the short story ‘Where I Live’, from 1964, Kurt Vonnegut shifts the focus to commerce. His narrator describes a salesman trying to sell the latest Britannica to a baffled librarian in a run-down place on Cape Cod’s north shore called Barnstable Village. The library has an edition from 1938, ‘backstopped’ by a 1910 Americana, and the salesman observes that rather a lot has happened since those volumes appeared, including penicillin and a world war, and the town’s children would surely fall behind without his updates. But the librarian can’t make these purchasing decisions without consulting his trustees, and they are nowhere to be found. So the salesman wanders around, describing what he sees in the village, not all of it charmless, and then, one supposes, leaves the area in pursuit of better leads. At the end of the story the reader learns that the library has indeed provided shelf space to the new Britannica, and a new Americana too, both of which mention the Iron Curtain. ‘But so far, the school marks of the children and the conversation of the adults have not conspicuously improved.’
In 1975, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges introduced another salesman, this one selling Bibles. He knocks on the door of the narrator, but the narrator already has a lot of Bibles, including rare ones (both salesman and narrator are unnamed). The salesman says he also has one other book, something special, the Book of Sand. It is special because it’s always producing more pages, and has unpredictable pagination (page 40,514 is followed by 999). The little primitive illustrations are equally mysterious, appearing and vanishing at whim.*