In its tortuously metaphorical analysis, the Burlington Magazine found the encyclopaedia almost edible. Writing for the young is difficult, declared the author Wilfrid Blunt, brother of the art expert and spy Anthony Blunt. ‘The “older young” may be persuaded to accept simple nourishment, but they will revolt against pap; the stomachs of the “younger young”, on the other hand, cannot yet assimilate adult food.’ Irrespective of age and digestive systems, Blunt found that almost all readers would find the set admirable: ‘The pabulum there provided is easily digestible, yet not pre-digested; it is attractively served; it is eminently nourishing.’ Only occasionally was the editors’ taste questionable, he felt. There should have been no entry on the Limerick, for one. And he disapproved of sullying the publication with even a passing mention of the blues, judging it ‘irritating’ and ‘an ephemeral kind of music that is better forgotten’. The prejudices of the reviewer sit uneasily upon the prejudices of the product. But as to accuracy – we’ll see that this was anyone’s guess.*
* One American advertisement for what was also called Britannica Junior showed a mom and pop admiring their child from a distance: ‘Look! He’s actually studying on his own – and loving it!’
* Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopedia no doubt had a similar impact in the decades before. An entry on the British Empire in South Africa praised ‘the part that has been played by our country in opening up the great African continent … it is not generally realized that the British Empire controls in Africa [in 1910] a larger area of the Earth’s surface than it controls either in Canada or Australia.’ But we were slow to get going with our exploitation. ‘The reason for this was that only a small proportion of the continent had a climate in which white men could live healthily and work productively on white men’s industries.’ Trade could still be conducted to some extent, because the continent had a large population, ‘mostly uncivilized, but capable of bringing to the coast things which civilized people desired, particularly gold dust and ivory.’
* The blues received only a few lines of coverage within a one-page entry on Jazz. And its very last words are questionable. It states that many blues songs are ‘deeply expressive of sadness, fear, even satire upon the lot of the black man at the expense of the white, but never of vindictiveness or hatred.’
R
RULE BRITANNICA?
In the early 1960s, an American physicist named Harvey Einbinder took a break from his job advising defence contractors on missile projects to work on a series of television programmes designed to explain great breakthroughs in science to a general audience. Consulting Encyclopaedia Britannica for his show on Galileo, he read that he had once disproven an ancient theory of gravity by dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Not true, alas. Even when a biography of Galileo highlighted the error in 1935, it remained in Britannica for another thirty years.
And so Harvey Einbinder began to wonder: did the encyclopaedia contain many similar mistakes? Was it a catalogue of errors? He was alarmed by what he found. He brought his own knowledge to the entries on Heat, Vaporization and the Compton Effect, and discovered several flaws. Then he began a wider study, on the same principles as S.S. Van Dine’s assault Misinforming a Nation from 1919, and his 390-page The Myth of the Britannica (1964) was his influential bestselling result. There were many erroneous comments passing as indisputable fact. Equally problematic was his finding that many articles had not been amended for more than fifty years; some had not been changed since 1875. Opinions were outdated, and bigotry was rife. On the whole, societal attitudes towards many topics – the role of women, racial issues, sexual politics, censorship – had changed and liberalised, but on a great many issues Britannica still had its feet planted in Victorian soil. When new historical evidence came to light it was often ignored, Einbinder found, and there was a particular reluctance to amend those articles written by famous contributors.
Dr Einbinder chose for his survey the 1958 and 1963 printings, both updates of the fourteenth edition from 1929. If you had been one of the many purchasers of the 1963 printing in the United States (about 150,000 sets were sold annually in the early 1960s) you may have been convinced by the claims in its advertisements that it was ‘the most complete collection of facts and knowledge excitingly explained by leading authorities – learn about gardening, missiles, philosophy, science, just about any subject you’ve ever heard of and thousands you haven’t’. And you might have reason to feel both unsatisfied and misled if this turned out not to be the case.
Einbinder attacked his target with devilish pursuit. His study included a list of 666 articles, each occupying at least half a page in his two mid-century printings, that were unchanged from 1911 and in some cases 1889. Many were biographies – Hadrian, Henry Fielding, Goethe, Jonathan Swift, many King Henrys and Richards – and others considered major historical events without including any of the century’s new discoveries or interpretations: the Gunpowder Plot, the French Revolutionary Wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Battle of Waterloo. A twelve-page essay on the Renaissance by J.A. Symonds, grandiloquently composed, had lain virtually untouched for more than fifty years, even though modern scholarship had superseded many of its views.
Contemporary magazine advertisements from the 1960s considered the latest Britannica to be ‘the finest edition in 200 years’, with 36 million words written by 10,300 ‘of the world’s great authorities’. It claimed that 17,900 articles had been revised, although in some cases this just amounted to spelling corrections. Dr Einbinder found that some of these revisions inserted new errors, noting mistakes in a list of Beethoven’s quartets and the biographical details of Abraham.
The Myth of the Britannica had a lot of dastardly fun with animals, or what it called ‘fanciful zoology’. Historically, encyclopaedias have always had the biggest fun with animals, not least the mythical beasts to be found within Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia. But those are ancient classics; one might expect more from the middle of the twentieth century. But here is the camel, in which water is stored ‘chiefly in the hump’ (it isn’t – the hump is fatty tissue used as a source of food). The ‘voluntary suicide’ and ‘blind impulse’ that apparently causes hordes of lemmings to leap to their watery deaths is also a myth, still perpetuated: it is not blind impulse nor a death wish, it is rather overpopulation and a search for food. Similarly, wolves do not generally hunt in large packs, as Britannica attests, and birds happily and annually migrate, despite Britannica remaining doubtful of this activity.
Social issues that may directly impact the reader were also in need of an overhaul. The article on birth control, for example, reflected both a very conservative and chauvinistic attitude, and clearly a callous and obdurate one. In 1963, Britannica was still reporting that ‘the poorest and least successful families, commonly handicapped in health and education as well as economic resources, produce and rear more than their proportion of children.’ In a contrastingly absurd vein, ‘It is the successful members of the more industrialised and supposedly advanced populations who seem headed for extinction for lack of fruitful breeding.’