Aunt Freda Opens a Door

One day in the late 1980s I had a call from my Aunt Freda. It came completely out of the blue, for although Freda had been my favourite godmother throughout my childhood, I had hardly exchanged a word with her – save the odd Christmas card – for what must have been twenty years. The purpose of her call was to tell me she had a box of books to give me and would I like to pick them up from my parents’ house in Sheffield, where she would drop them off on her next visit. ‘There’s a complete Shakespeare, Churchill’s Island Race and an encyclopaedia,’ she said by way of brief explanation.

Books were not the first thing I associated with Freda, a thoroughgoing countrywoman, a horse-rider and dog-breeder, who farmed a few acres in the wilds of North Yorkshire. Her reading matter was more likely to be Horse & Hound and Bantam Breeder’s Weekly than The Good Companions or even Wuthering Heights. Nevertheless, she had been a godparent nonpareil for a compelling reason: her Christmas presents were in a league of their own. So spurred partly by duty and partly by her track record as a present-giver, I gladly accepted the books and drove up to Sheffield to collect them. As soon as I looked in the box, I realized that Freda had lost none of her class in the gift department. The Island Race was a large-format edition with lavish illustrations; the Shakespeare was a facsimile First Folio; and the encyclopaedia was the 24-volume, half-leatherbound, gilt top-edged 14th (1929) edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia Britannica! While Shakespeare and The Island Race had been on the bookshelves in one form or another when I was young, this would be the first time I had shared living-space with a Britannica. From childhood I remembered the Pears Cyclopaedia – cyclopaedia, incidentally, being ‘an etymologically meaningless word, stigmatized as an inferior form by G. J. Vossius in “De vitiis sermonis 1645”’, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology – and, dimly, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. From schooldays, I recalled the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary and from university only the tip that, if you had spent the previous eight terms a complete stranger to lecture halls and libraries, boning up on the relevant entries in The Encyclopaedia Britannica could scrape you a second. (When, later, on an MA course I had to compare two editions of the Britannica for an essay, I understood why there might be something in this tip: the chances were the entry had been written by your professor.) Thus it was that for the first time I became the proud possessor of the ‘greatest encyclopaedia in the English language’. J. L. Garvin, the editor of the – my – 14th edition, ushered me into the Britannica world in his preface:

This Edition, then, is the Fourteenth of the series which began with the modest issue of six-penny numbers (‘or 8d on fine paper,’ said the Edinburgh printers) in December 1768 when George III was King. The talk was all of Mr Wilkes and of floods higher than could be remembered, spreading in many counties ‘like a sea’.

Floods spreading like a sea? So what’s new, the early twenty-first century reader is likely to ask, recalling the television pictures from the Somerset Levels. And ‘what’s new’, as it happens, is the essential question confronting any encyclopaedia editor as he contemplates the prospect of a new edition. Here are Mr Garvin’s reflections in 1929:

The map of the intellectual world, more than that of the political, is changed beyond recognition. On every side we see new mechanisms and agencies with consequent new social activities and habits: in many ways we are farther from the youth of our grandparents, even from the youth of our parents, than were they from the middle ages . . .

The expansion of knowledge in the mere twenty years that had passed since the previous landmark edition – the 11th of 1911 – required ‘a bold departure from precedent and a fundamental change in the method of encyclopaedia-making’, according to Garvin. It was no longer possible, as it still just about had been in 1911, for any one man or even one central staff to map out the world of contemporary knowledge, with its ‘major and minor configurations and boundaries’. Knowledge was now too vast and too subdivided, too many new fields and sub-fields had sprung up; in science alone ‘the difference between the Eleventh Edition and its present successor is like an advance not of twenty years but of a hundred’. Garvin’s solution to encompassing this explosion of knowledge in so many fields was to delegate the task to teams of specialist editors, each a monarch in his own realm. Formally, his solution was to divide each corpus of knowledge into a more differentiated range of headings, some as in the great 11th edition almost of book length but many more of only a few paragraphs. This would make the Britannica a much handier work of ready reference than before. To complement these changes, the new edition added a larger and more refined index and would be furnished ‘with every resource of illustration’, as Garvin boasted. Marshalled by the two staffs of editors, one in London, the other in New York – the 14th was the second joint Anglo-American Britannica – was a team of 3,000 contributors ‘from across the world’. A glance down the names singled out by Garvin for special mention conveys their calibre. Under the arts, Roger Fry on Cézanne, Max Reinhardt and Constantin Stanislavski on Theatre, Donald Tovey on Beethoven; under the sciences, J. B. S. Haldane on heredity, Niels Bohr on the atom, Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity and one Dr Einstein on space-time; Bernard Shaw and G. D. H. Cole on socialism, Baden-Powell on boy scouts; philosophers Benedetto Croce on aesthetics, Ernst Cassirer on transcendentalism and Edmund Husserl on phenomenology (where, the editor notes, the author writes ‘as an originator’); Gilbert Murray on Greek drama, J. B. Priestley on the English Romantics, G. K. Chesterton on humour and Lion Feuchtwanger on the modern novel; under history, Ernest Barker on the Crusades, John Addington Symonds on the Renaissance and on US financial history no less an authority than the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon, ‘secretary of the Treasury under three administrations’. The roll-call makes clear just how eager were the editors to enlist the top names in each field, not only academics but also men and women of action, and likewise how much pride these men and women attached to being asked to contribute. Their erudition and experience aside, these people could write. The readability for which the 11th edition of the Britannica has so often been praised was retained by its successor. One might suppose that the purpose of an encyclopaedia is simply to provide information, that content is king and the form neither here nor there. But the best Britannicas give the lie to this. The 11th and 14th editions both contain articles of such authority and style that they readily stand the test of time; indeed some are so informative, balanced and well-written they have been separately anthologized and reprinted. Its readability is one of the reasons why my Aunt Freda’s gift of the 1929 Britannica – its 24 volumes, each 1,000 pages long, containing a total of 35,000,000 words – still occupies an honoured place on my bookshelves. But, you might ask, isn’t it now completely out of date? Surely the 14th edition of 1929 was made redundant by its successor the 15th in 1974, just as the 14th had replaced the 11th? Sort of, but not really. First, as Garvin wrote in his preface, every such undertaking as a general encyclopaedia is ‘a sort of landmark in the history of knowledge’ and of interest as such. Second, certain kinds of knowledge barely increase from one generation to another or only in minor or inconsiderable ways: the early history of Alexandria is still much as it was in 1929 and the geological features of my native Sheffield and its environs haven’t changed hugely in the interim either. Even for rapid reference, this seemingly antiquated work comes in handy: a short way into Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes I ran to the Index for ‘netsuke’ and was directed to Ivory Carving (Vol. 12) and the charming examples in Plate VIII. More seriously, my 1929 Britannica offers an even more profound example of how exaggerated our opinion of our intellectual or scholarly progress may prove to be. The other great change that fell between 1911, the year of the previous edition, and 1929, besides those in science and the ‘mechanisms and customs of life’, as Garvin calls them, was the World War. ‘The interval’, he wrote, ‘is like an abyss between two political epochs. A rending convulsion continues its influence upon the circumstances and the thought of mankind.’ Garvin – who, like Kipling, lost his only son in the conflict – gave ample space in his new edition to a consideration of the war, of its causes, conduct, conclusion and legacy. The task of co-ordinating and ordering the contributions, extending to ‘some hundreds of articles and some thousands of pages’, was handed to Captain B. H. (Basil) Liddell Hart, as associate editor, with different aspects considered by, among others, Marshal Foch, General Pershing, Colonel Fuller and Colonel T. E. Lawrence. What is striking when one reads these Britannica articles now, 85 years later, on the centenary of the war’s outbreak, is how little the overall assessment has changed. The summary of C. Seignobos, professor of history at the Sorbonne, of the ‘question of responsibility’ might have been written last week:

It is certain that no government really desired a European war. . . The governments of the three empires wished to avert a general war but they were too distrustful of one another frankly to consult upon the means of avoiding it; for each feared to reveal its plan lest it should become the dupe of a bluff or ruse. France and England were powerless spectators of the conflict. France was bound by the Russian alliance; the British cabinet did not dare to risk action which had not been approved by the nation. The war was not the work of personal ambitions but the result of the system of the three military empires, Austria, Russia and Germany . . .

The point is not whether this is the ‘right’ view but that a view so familiar to us today was already fully formed and being persuasively set out in time to be published as part of the 24-volume Britannica in 1929. A further warning against the assumption that, because we come after, we necessarily know better, is offered by the subsequent history of the Britannica itself. In 1974 a new team of editors took it upon themselves to reinvent the entire work. In an act of supreme hubris, made worse by their condescension towards their distinguished predecessors and their dismissal of the great 11th Edition as ‘little more than a historical novelty of interest largely to sentimentalists’, these brave new editors came up with a newfangled arrangement which turned out to be messier, more obscure and less manageable than either of its immediate predecessors, as well as being less readable and more poorly printed. It is only just that their (15th) edition has now itself passed into history, superseded not by a later printed edition but by an entire new technology: for the Britannica, like the OED, now has only a virtual existence. What Hazlitt said about new books – that he preferred to read old ones – turns out to apply almost as well to encyclopaedias, or to the Britannica at least. Can my late Aunt Freda possibly have read Hazlitt?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 44 © Anthony Wells 2014