Initially available as a fortnightly part-work between 1908 and 1910, and sold primarily on platform kiosks at train stations, the instalments would build into that well-worn encyclopaedic phrase ‘a treasury of knowledge’, but it wasn’t like most encyclopaedias that had gone before. For a start, it wasn’t alphabetical. It was a huge engaging hotchpotch of everything, and because it had no recognisable shape it was both surprising and barmy. It wasn’t even thematic, it was just all over the place; it read as though its editor Arthur Mee had thrown his index cards out of the window into a high wind.
The contents page of Volume 1 lists nineteen ‘groups’ of entries, although these too repel easy categorisation. For instance, Group 2, ‘Men and Women’, features articles on The First Flying Men, The Kings of Music, The Famous Men of Venice and The French Revolutionists. Or take Group 16, ‘Ideas’, which features Movement, Justice, Courage and Truth, all the Marvel heroes in one. The Children’s Encyclopedia was a huge success: its publisher, the Educational Book Company, claimed sales of 800,000 in its first decade, a great many of these to schools and libraries.
The entry on Truth reveals another aspect of the project, a hard-line faith in God. It cites Montaigne’s suggestion that we are born to enquire after truth, and ‘we should keep it constantly before our minds.’ But it is not enough. ‘He did not say that truth was hidden in a well. He said it was in the heights of the Divine. Truth is God, and in seeking truth we are seeking our creator.’
This was heady stuff for a child who has just learnt, in the same volume, about how to make their own sweets and a bag from a pair of gloves. And so the quest for truth became a game, ‘the greatest game of hide and seek that was ever invented. God had hidden his truth, and we shall never find it on this earth; but He has made the search for it so exciting and splendid.’ And on the following page – page 501 out of the 764 pages in Volume 1 – you can build a toy to measure the wind (‘… put the washer on top of the wooden post …’).
The encyclopaedia, composed at the height of empire, was also committed to a proudly British way of life (all except the title, which changed from Encyclopaedia to Encyclopedia as it broke into the American market sometime in the 1920s). A section on the slave trade provides a distinct flavour of this – supercilious, even-handed, very sure of itself. The entry was called ‘The Good Explorers and the Bad Explorers of the Long Ago’.
The early explorers were of two kinds: simple priests who went with incredible daring into realms of benighted savagery to baptise men, women, and children whose very language they did not know; and Spanish and Portuguese slave-dealers who, by the middle of the seventeenth century, were carrying 10,000 poor wretches a year from Africa to Brazil alone, where, toiling like beasts of burden, the unhappy creatures, if exceedingly strong and equally fortunate, might live out seven years, but not more than seven.
England, to her shame be it told, had her share in those slaves. In the century preceding the American Declaration of Independence, we carried three million African slaves to the New World; and threw another 250,000 into the Atlantic as they died in our ships. All the Negroes in the New World, and they number many millions now, are descended from the slaves stolen with cruelty and violence from the Dark Continent.
The children never tire: Arthur Mee moulds young minds in the 1930s
This was the encyclopaedia I had at school, a fact that now makes me feel slightly queasy, not least because the title of the editor’s preface read, ‘To All Who Love Children All over the World’. Arthur Mee’s manifesto proclaimed that he wanted to cram a child’s mind with everything relevant. His work would be written in words every child could understand, and the longest word in it would be ‘Encyclopaedia’. His grand project had not ‘come to steal away the joy of childhood and put a bitter grinding in its place’. Rather, it was ‘a gift to the nation’, and he hoped that every child who opened it would find something to engage him or her, not least upon gender-specific lines, ‘the mechanical interests of boys, the domestic interest of girls’.
He signed off with a further list of questions. ‘What does the world mean? And why am I here? Where are all the people who have been and gone? Who holds the stars up there?’
Initially, and perhaps unsurprisingly with conundrums like these, Mee had no competitors. La Petite Encyclopédie du jeune âge, published by Larousse, hadn’t been updated since 1853 and wasn’t available in English. The hugely successful World Book from 1917 was a richly illustrated encyclopaedia marketed to both children and adults, but it had little of Mee’s peccadilloes or charm. The first proper rival emerged in the United States in the 1920s with the ten-volume Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, heralded in its marketing as both more up to date than Britannica and more centred around classroom teaching (‘It teaches happily … it informs accurately … Compton’s keeps pace with annual progress.’) Compton’s would emerge as a significant mid-market rival to the highbrow Britannica, but this particular set was a general publication written for adults and much older children.
Britannica had its own plans to launch a junior version in 1914, but the war and its aftermath postponed the launch of Children’s Britannica until 1934. It was ‘a proper encyclopaedia designed for you,’ the editor of the second edition Robin Sales wrote to its young readers in 1969, ‘but with a plan that will help you to use, when you are older, a grown-up encyclopaedia.’ Like the grown-up’s Britannica, the articles were arranged in alphabetical order: in Volume 2, Badger was followed by Badminton, Baghdad and Bagpipe, taking one on a tour of the animal kingdom, the world of sports, an ancient Muslim civilisation and the disputed origins of resonant woodwind in a few colourful pages. Likewise in the last volume: Walnut would be followed by Sir Robert Walpole, who would precede Walrus, who would learn to Waltz. And because the slim nineteen-volume set was just a stepping stone to greater things, there was detailed instruction on how to use the index, knowledge judged indispensable when confronting the full 40 million words later in life (the children’s version contained 4 million). Thus there was no point being disappointed when you flipped the pages of Volume 8 to look up ‘goldfinch’ and found no such entry. The clever boy and girl would rather go to the index, find that the goldfinch was considered part of the large Finch family, and happily turn to page 132 in Volume 7. The quest for knowledge would usually involve a bit of detective work – yet more valuable preparation for adulthood.*
The first volume of Britannica Junior carried a list of the many hundreds of authors ‘who have helped to make this encyclopaedia know a great deal’. Many of them were not experienced at writing for children, so a specialist group of editors in the Britannica office ensured that every article could be easily understood. The entries were also sent to be read by the pupils and teachers at a junior school, and if anything wasn’t clear to them, more clarity was inserted. The authors then got the articles back, to ensure no errors had crept in during the clarification. The whole was then checked anew by an ‘educational adviser’.