Unlike adult encyclopaedias, each volume would end with a suggestion for hobbies and pastimes – how to act Shakespeare, how to draw animals – while the last volume included an alphabetical quiz to send you skittering back to previous volumes:
How did Androcles win the friendship of a lion?
What is meant by irrigation?
Of what metals does soft solder consist?
This was a publication aimed at the elementary years, although Britannica was keen to open up a market younger still. To this end, in 1954 it published a pamphlet called ‘Using Britannica Junior with your Preschool Child’. (The cover illustration showed a smiling mother standing behind a smiling father in an armchair, with a boy of about four standing smiling at the side and a smiling girl sitting on her father’s lap. They were all reading the same volume.) The foreword was written by Newton R. Calhoun, who was billed as a psychologist at Winnetka Public Schools in Winnetka, Illinois. ‘Has home seemed too confining for your child to discover new interests in it?’ he asked. ‘It will take a great many different subjects to interest him from hour to hour and day to day.’
The pamphlet explained that Britannica was the ideal way of dealing with a child’s insatiable (‘and, let’s face it, sometimes overwhelming’) curiosity. ‘Often a child asks the same question repeatedly because he remains confused or wants reassurance. It is important not to over-emphasise the giving of factual information if his question really refers to his feelings.’ Britannica chose an example one imagines that its committed editors had been asked by their own children: why do you drink so much coffee? ‘Sometimes actions are better answers than words,’ the adult should realise:
He may want to know why it’s right for you to drink but not for him. If this is his concern you will want to answer in a way that does not alarm him, and yet makes it clear that there is a good reason. Or the same question may mean that he wonders how you can like that stuff: it looks and smells quite unsavoury to him. If so, he will feel more satisfied by tasting coffee than by listening to words. You can give him some coffee diluted with milk and amply sweetened. He will be made to feel more secure because the gap between his and the adult word has been lessened.
He may then ask, ‘Where does it come from and what does it look like before it gets into the can?’, and this is where having Britannica on hand really pays dividends. Coffee uses water, of course, and so a child will probably have other questions, such as where the water comes from, how does it get into the pipes, and where does it go after it goes down the drain. ‘The answers to these questions are given in simple form in the articles rain (Volume 13, Page 30, column a), water supply (15, 58, a) and sewage disposal (13, 292, b) … You can be sure of finding the answers in Britannica Junior.’
The Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia (1948) reverted back to a thematic arrangement. The editors believed that it would be more ‘educationally beneficial’ for its eleven-plus readership if each of the twelve volumes tackled a broader but more cohesive subject matter, with the alphabet only coming into play within each volume, a system that harked at least as far back as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The subjects were humankind, natural history, the universe, communications, great lives, farming and fisheries, industry and commerce, engineering, recreations, law and society, home and health, and the arts.
The preface emphasised its serious intent: the work had been the subject of ‘authorizing’ by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press. The editors hoped their encyclopaedia would be an extended treatise on the value of reading as a whole. ‘To many children (and indeed to many adults) reading is not a natural activity; they do not turn to books for their own sake.’ They might be trained, however, to go to the Oxford Junior for a particular purpose, and thus ‘to form a habit which will be of lifelong value’.
The set was primarily intended for school libraries, and in its preface the editors Laura E. Salt and Geoffrey Boumphrey explained their desire to provide a work of reference suitable for those who found standard encyclopaedias too heavy and overly dense with technical information. They hoped that thousands of illustrations would lighten the load, as would their omission of ‘purely scientific’ topics. Theirs was a humanistic outlook, more concerned with the modern world than the past, more practical than abstract. An encyclopaedia, unlike a dictionary, ‘deals only with words and subjects about which there is something interesting to be said’.
But what, for example, would the first volume of the Oxford Junior (Mankind) say about Americans? After a demographic and social breakdown – ‘people of the States are of very mixed origin – British, French, German, Scandinavian, Russian, Finnish, people from the Balkans, Italians, Dutchmen, Greeks, Poles, Jews, even Chinese and Japanese’ – we learn:
The Americans are a people who are mentally very much alive. They have always stood for the great principles of liberty and democracy, although there are among them great variations of wealth and poverty and frequent bitter struggles between capital and labour. The spirit of free enterprise, still paramount in America, though it certainly stimulates initiative, may be leading to the development of an individualism which threatens the common good, and may lead Americans to put too high a value on financial and material success.
An entry titled British Peoples is illustrated by three photographs: haymaking in Suffolk, an aerial view of the pottery district of Staffordshire belching smoke from 100 chimneys, and Trafalgar Square, captioned ‘The Heart of the Empire’. The English are characterised as having a fondness for understatement (‘the expression “not bad” is a typical example’), something that Americans find ‘most conspicuous, and put it down to false modesty’. Elsewhere, Englishmen are noted for their ‘coldness’, although they are ‘companionable’ once one gets to know them.
England is also known abroad for what often appears as a willingness to combine expressions of high moral idealism with a very realistic ability to hold on to territory and business. The famous ‘White Man’s Burden’ as a slogan of empire has, for instance, always appeared to Britain’s competitors as a piece of hypocrisy.
We should remind ourselves of the date of this writing: 1948, the year Empire Windrush unloaded its Jamaican passengers by the Thames, the year the British mandate ended in Palestine, the year George VI lost his title ‘Emperor of India’. The young boys and girls reading those books will be in their eighties now, having run the country and influenced the course of the world for some fifty years.*
The critical response to the Oxford Junior was mixed. Because each of the volumes carried a different subject, they were reviewed primarily by specialist magazines. So the Modern Law Review of 1953 picked up Volume 10, Law and Order, and a certain J.A.G. Griffith found it diverse and excellently printed. He was less happy with the large number of errors: despite the statement to the contrary, Griffith observed, there was nothing to prevent a member of the National Coal Board standing for parliament; local authorities began to build housing estates long before the 1920s; and the explanation of the funding of the National Health Service was wrong. Apart from these mistakes and many others, the writer concluded, the volume was a ‘considerable achievement’.
In 1950 History magazine found much to admire in the first three volumes, covering Mankind, Natural History and the Universe, but there was one black hole: a stark lack of History. ‘The history teacher has a fundamental grievance,’ wrote the history professor R.F. Treharne. ‘Thanks to the highly arbitrary plan of the work, his subject seems to have been largely forgotten.’