He is less impressed with later editions of Britannica. He welcomes part of it, singling out recent entries on Architecture, Pottery and Porcelain. But he wanted more of a debating arena, ‘on general ideas such as the idea of property, or the creative possibilities of financial or political reorganization’. Wells wanted radicalisation of thought, in other words, something that ‘would reach down to direct the ideological side of human education’. Diderot’s venture aside, this wasn’t something modern encyclopaedias were generally proficient at, or desired to be.*
But this is where his early ideas for the World Encyclopaedia slotted in. It would not necessarily be alphabetical, he suggested, for this would constrain its desire for continual updates. It would be philosophical and factual, discursive and organic, consistently liberal rather than predominantly reactionary.
And so it was that a few years later Wells’s brief historical survey would rub up against the calamitously violent nature of the world, and germinate – or congeal, or coagulate – into his grand encyclopaedic scheme on the eve of war. ‘You see how such an Encyclopaedic organisation could spread like a nervous network, a system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious co-operating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity, informing without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny.’
It may appear, albeit fleetingly, as if Wells – like Paul Otlet before him – was planning the Internet. Or rather the ideal Internet, a force for intellectual good, guided only by the principled. He was closer, perhaps, to Wikipedia, and closer still to a child’s view of the world, with a child’s eternal optimism, and a masterfully naive solution to all our great dilemmas.
PYTHON, MONTY (a diversion …)
Eric Idle is at the door with malicious intent. He is smiling in that cheeky way he has, but don’t be fooled: he is after your family silver. The door to the flat is answered by a slightly nervous woman played by John Cleese. The sketch is from November 1969, the first BBC series of Monty Python, the episode entitled ‘Man’s Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the 20th Century’.
The woman asks the man what he wants. He says he’d like to come in and steal a few things. The woman is suspicious: ‘Are you an encyclopaedia salesman?’
No, the man repeats, he burgles people.
The woman is doubtful; she still thinks he may be an encyclopaedia salesman.
No, he insists, he’s really not.
The woman wonders whether if she lets him in he’ll then sell her a set of encyclopaedias.
He can’t make it any clearer: he’d simply like to come in and ransack her flat.
‘No encyclopaedias at all?’ she asks.
‘Correct – none at all.’
Still wary, she finally opens the door.
Once inside, the man says: ‘Mind you, I don’t know whether you’ve really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopaedias …’
The sketch shifts to Michael Palin sitting at a desk. That man, he announces, was a successful encyclopaedia salesman. But not all of them are quite so successful.
Cut to: a clip of a man falling from a tall building.
And now, Palin says, here are two more unsuccessful encyclopaedia salesmen.
Cut to: two more bodies falling from a tall building.
Palin: ‘I think there’s a lesson there for all of us.’
Palin took the lesson to heart. In the 1980s he published, with fellow Python Terry Jones, Dr Fegg’s Encyclopaedia of ALL World Knowledge, which, inevitably, had very little knowledge of the world at all. Dr Fegg was a salivating monstrosity with a blood-soaked axe. His principal source of education was Parkhurst prison, where he spent time for grievous bodily harm. The previous title of his encyclopaedia was Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls, but this updated edition contained a lot more misinformation. The entries were generally not to be found in other publications: Aladdin and His Terrible Problem; the Patagonian Shoe-Cleaning Rat; Do-It-Yourself Teeth. The Patagonian Shoe-Cleaning Rat was not a fearsome thing, but rather a sad one: ‘This rat lives by hiring itself out as a shoe brush. Once it goes bald its career is at an end, and it has to rely on what it can make out of selling Patagonian Rat’s Cheese (which understandably isn’t very popular).’
By contrast, there was a certain frisson of danger to be found in the entry Parlour Game: Pass the Bengal Tiger. This game requires seven boys, seven girls, chairs, wrapping paper, tiger. One plays by passing the wrapped tiger around until the music stops, at which point a child unwraps a layer of paper (good luck to you!), and the loser is the child holding the now completely enraged mammal during the final unwrapping.
* Another World Brain was conceived in Belgium in 1990, a far more conceptual notion than either Paul Otlet or H.G. Wells dared imagine, although it acknowledged the influence of both. The Principia Cybernetica, the child of Francis Heylighen, is based on the notion of evolutionary cybernetics, encompassing new networked forms of recorded knowledge, and lies outside the scope of this book. It remains an ongoing project, as does the Global Brain Institute in Brussels, and is well described by Alex Wright as an attempt to create ‘a grand synthesis of philosophical work … by breaking the entire spectrum of philosophical thought into “nodes” in the network. These “nodes” might include a chapter from a book, a paragraph from an essay, or even more narrowly targeted units of information.’ The plan, says Professor Heylighen, is to transform the Web ‘into an intelligent, adaptive, self-organising system of shared knowledge.’
* Wells couldn’t resist a dig at the airy specialists he saw as Britannica’s main contributors. ‘The rooms of these individuals are sometimes in the dignified colleges of universities, sometimes in carefully sought country retreats … These fundamental people are not very gregarious as a rule … some are negligently dressed and distraught in their bearing, but for the most part they look fairly well cared for.’ Wells found this species generally unobtrusive and ineffective. They were not sufficiently political, in other words, or forward thinking. ‘A single shipyard at work makes more noise than all the original thought of the world put together.’
Q
QUESTIONING
For the child in the real world, the year 1910 began with a lot of questions. Do animals know when they are treated kindly? Is the country healthier than the town? Why does it rain so much in Scotland?
Because we once lived in simpler times, these things once had simple answers. They appeared in The Children’s Encyclopaedia, which was known as The Book of Knowledge in the United States, a hugely successful and unpredictable enterprise that made at least a modest contribution to shaping young opinion between the wars, and thus adult opinion after it. (One could build a fair case suggesting that a junior encyclopaedia would always be more influential than an adult one, given the impressionable age of its readers.) The answers are: we don’t know, but it certainly does the human good; yes if you like pure air and sunshine, but no if you’re more interested in better water and drainage systems; and Scotland is farther north than England, and so its colder climate condenses more water in the atmosphere (it also has a very broken west coast, and the water of the sea comes far up into the land).