Previously Wells had forsworn the American lecture tour for reasons of inadequacy, specifically his weak voice. ‘The microphone is a great leveller,’ he announced, but it was just one of the things he regarded with a combination of wonder and terror. The aeroplane shrunk the world, but its bombs destroyed cities; the microphone was a useful boon to dictators.
‘Our world is changing,’ he always began his lectures (the script hardly varied from city to city), ‘and it is changing with an ever increasing violence. An old world dies about us.’ The principal culprits were politicians, particularly those who had failed at Versailles and misdirected the League of Nations (they simply refused to acknowledge the extent to which scientific advance clashed with their own centuries-old values). The gap that appeared between the ‘futile amazement’ of the Great War and the rapidly accelerating progress of the present was now a chasm, and he feared that our leaders were on the wrong and crumbling side of it.
And not only politicians, but educators too. He saw the most intelligent individuals in the world – university intellectuals, captains of industry, lawyers and doctors, conquerors of science – and observed their lack of connection with the requirements of modern society. He remarked how seldom their talents were designed to benefit the common good.
He had his solution: a world community linked by reason and enlightened thought. In one sense, he argued, such a thing already existed. ‘An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today, a wealth of knowledge [that might] suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but that knowledge is still dispersed, unorganised, impotent in the face of adventurous violence and mass excitement.’
And so he proposed ‘a greater encyclopaedism … an intellectual authority sufficient to control and direct our collective life’. He imagined ‘a permanent institution, untrammelled by precedent, something added to the world network of universities, linking and co-ordinating them with one another and with the general intelligence of the world.’ He referred to the great French achievements of Diderot and D’Alembert, and how he would use their spark to launch something vastly more elaborate.
They served their purpose at the time, but they are not equal to our current needs. A World Encyclopaedia … would be in continual correspondence with every university, every research institution, every competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the world. It would develop a directorate and a staff of men of its own type, specialised editors and summarists. They would be very important and distinguished men in the new world. This Encyclopaedic organisation need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralise mentally but perhaps not physically.
His American lectures were a refined précis of an address delivered the year before at the Royal Institution in London. There he called his ‘oligarchy of professors’ and other exceptionally competent people ‘a sort of modern priesthood’, although religion itself would not play a part. Instead, like Plato, ‘they would make the philosopher king’.
For the sake of argument, Wells placed himself in the role of ‘ordinary educated citizen’.
I will ask you to imagine how this World Encyclopaedia organisation would enter into his life and how it would affect him. From his point of view the World Encyclopaedia would be a row of volumes in his own home or in some neighbouring house or in a convenient public library or in any school or college, and in this row of volumes he would, without any great toil or difficulty, find in clear understandable language, and kept up to date, the ruling concepts of our social order, the outlines and main particulars in all fields of knowledge, an exact and reasonably detailed picture of our universe, a general history of the world …
After this, the student of knowledge could go deeper. The row of volumes would include a trustworthy reference to more detailed primary sources. In fields where there was controversy, ‘casual summaries of opinions’ would be replaced by ‘very carefully chosen and correlated’ arguments. Wells proposed that this World Encyclopaedia ‘would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world’.
Wells foreshadowed Orwelclass="underline" ‘What a dreadful, dreadful world it will be when everybody thinks alike.’ But it wouldn’t be so, he insisted, decrying a dictatorship of knowledge. That said, some uniformity of order would be required. ‘It may be worthwhile remarking that it really does not enhance the natural variety and beauty of life to have all the clocks in a town keeping individual times of their own, no charts of the sea, no timetables, but trains starting secretly to unspecified destinations.’ He prioritised a garden over a swamp.
He had an early outline of what his new venture should contain. It would begin with an account of the philosophies of the world ‘compared critically and searchingly’. A history of languages would be interesting, followed by the origins and development of writing. Then it would be time for mathematical signs and symbols, accompanied by conceptions of time and space. After that, pure physics. After physics, chemistry and astronomy. Then the general science of life and biographies of scientists, pursued by health and medicine, ‘mental health as well as bodily health’, followed by sport and pastimes. Greek and Roman history would now find its unexpected place, next to stories of outstanding men and women, next to education, religion and ethics. ‘Two huge parallel sections would give a double-barrelled treatment of economic life,’ the first covering production and economic organisation, the second distribution and finance. Wells’s leftist interest in the principles and laws of property would get a look-in here, accompanied by an economic geography and global atlas.
The final part would have a different tone, for it would deal with beauty, culture and the artistic life. In this category, ‘Aesthetic criticism would pursue its wild incalculable, unstandardised career, mystically distributing praise and blame’ towards the cinema, radio, architecture and ‘the high mystery’ of the novel.
It was quite a soufflé. Wells admitted there was a lot here already covered by the Encyclopédie and Britannica, but now was the time to ‘bring those gallant pioneer essays properly up to date’. How much would such a thing cost, he asked himself. Only about half a million pounds annually, but ‘as much money to bring it into existence as would launch a modern battleship’.
Wells thought it preposterous that one newspaper had reported that he was to write the encyclopaedia himself, ‘all with my own little hand out of my own little head … at the age of 70!’ Instead, he planned to write only ‘an infinitesimal’ part. He suggested an ‘Encyclopaedia Society’ to handle the administration. He hoped it would be written in English, but a team of translators should be on hand to make it accessible to everyone in the world. He imagined a bibliography of between ten and twenty thousand items. He hoped the vast enterprise would constitute a world monopoly with no serious competition, and thus income would be generated from its sale to repay the investment.*
In London, Wells made it clear that while his ideas were yet to be executed, he was not ‘throwing casually formed ideas before you’. Instead, ‘I am bringing you my best.’
One of the earliest manifestations of his thinking, albeit not yet his best, surfaced in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind in 1932, in which he wrote of the need for an encyclopaedia produced by a Committee of Intellectual Co-operation. A photograph in the book shows the Central Reading Room of the British Museum Library; the caption is ‘A Cell of the World’s Brain’; the room is conspicuously deserted.
The section in the book devoted to encyclopaedias is useful for the survey of volumes already in existence, an opinionated potted history not dissimilar to this one, although much more potted. Wells charges through the bases: the Great Library at Alexandria (which he calls a Museum), Aristotle, Pliny’s Natural History. He praises Diderot and his ‘first encyclopaedia of power’, noting its cardinal importance in the intellectual movements of the time, not least the ideological content and impetus it leant the Revolution. ‘It released minds,’ he reasoned, and it set a precedent in recognising diversity of opinion.