Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture

  • Richard Yeo
Cambridge University Press: 2001. 358 pp. £40, $59.95

One of my son's babysitters was an elderly woman who also looked after children of other Cambridge research students. When she closed her cottage to move in with her own son, she rewarded all her bookish friends with a remembrance: each received a single volume from her set of the Everyman Encyclopaedia. I never knew if the fact that I got the first volume was a particular sign of affection, or something rather more random.

Credit: DAVID NEWTON

Odd volumes of encyclopaedias may contain a lot of useful information, but they are best in complete sets. 'Twas ever thus, as Encyclopaedic Visions, Richard Yeo's sensitive and engaging study of Enlightenment encyclopaedias, makes clear. After all, the cycle embedded in the word 'encyclopaedia' carries with it the implication that all human knowledge is connected in some organic way. Most medieval and early modern works within the genre carried a statement or diagram, or both, attesting to such unity.

In spite of this rich historical tradition, modern encyclopaedias emerged only during the Enlightenment. At first glance, the Enlightenment reference book might be thought to be the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean D'Alembert. Much has been written about the creation, publishing history and influence of this monumental work, whose aggressively secular nature brought both of its editors (and some of its contributors) into confrontation with the authorities in ancien régime France.

As Yeo reminds us, however, the Encyclopédie began its life as a planned translation of a work produced single-handedly by an English hack, Ephraim Chambers. So successful was Chambers' Cyclopaedia, first published in two volumes in 1728, that it turned its obscure author into a successful man of letters and earned him election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society (the eighteenth-century Royal Society was happy enough to elect science popularizers to its midst).

Chambers' Cyclopaedia is central to Yeo's analysis, and science was at the heart of Chambers' work, as well as that of his successors and imitators. The objectivity of scientific knowledge gave it a special place in Enlightenment culture, raising it above the divisiveness of politics or religion. Science was thus fundamental to the ethos of self-improvement that featured in the rhetoric with which encyclopaedias were announced, advertised and justified. The scientific and technical contributions of Chambers, John Harris, Abraham Rees and the other encyclopaedists of the period were often highly original and much remarked upon.

But if the encyclopaedias were surrounded by an aura of utility and progress, they were, especially in Britain, products of commercialism and profit. In continental Europe, several learned societies undertook the systematic task of producing versions of the encyclopaedic ideal. Most of these projects either foundered or took decades to be realized. The British seemed to vacillate between pride at their own individual enterprise and initiative and envy of the more systematic way in which learned activity was organized on the Continent. Thus, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (three volumes, 1768–71) was written single-handedly by the Edinburgh printer William Smellie (by his own admission with a paste-pot and a pair of scissors). Its title page, however, announced that it had been produced by “A Society of Gentlemen”.

Smellie's mode of composition was hardly surprising: no one, even in the Athens of the North, could be expert in all branches of human knowledge. The key to producing a good encyclopaedia was knowing which authorities to summarize. This raised the tricky issue of copyright, even at a time when the legal protection of intellectual property was weak and pirated editions were regularly produced. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannia actually produced a lawsuit, partly because of Smellie's liberal use of the scissors and paste-pot, but mostly because London publishers and booksellers were nervous that this new encyclopaedia on the block originated in Scotland.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica not only survived these early rumblings, it actually thrived, and by the time of its third edition (1788–97) it had swelled to 18 volumes and acquired many of the trappings of modernity. Although still responsive to market forces, this EB was the work of identified experts. Although it aimed at comprehensive coverage of all branches of human knowledge, its scientific content was still central, science being recognized as the most active and rapidly changing field of knowledge, and therefore the one that dictated the necessity for frequent updating.

Yeo's monograph is solidly historical, but it reminds us that many of the issues of encyclopaedic form and content grappled with during the Enlightenment are still with us. Should encyclopaedias be principally repositories of authoritative knowledge where the learned can refresh their knowledge, or instruments to educate the novice? If science is about the objective understanding of nature, should it be subject to copyright? These and many other themes that Yeo scrutinizes are still current in our age of electronic publishing and the Human Genome Project.