Together Bell and Macfarquhar announced their intentions: a weekly part-work in 100 instalments, sold initially from Macfarquhar’s printworks, each twenty-four-page instalment (or ‘number’, or ‘fascicle’) costing 6d on ordinary paper and 8d on more refined stock. Every week would see an advancing accretion of letters until the instalments were compiled into three volumes, and the volumes were compiled into a set. The first volume ran from Aa to Bzo, ‘a town of Africa, in the kingdom of Morocco’. The second covered Caaba to Lythrum, while the third stretched from Macao to Zyglophyllum.* The second and third volumes contained significantly shorter entries, or at least distinctly fewer long ones. The page size was quarto and the typeface was small. The enterprise, in double-columned text we might now regard as 8-point, and sometimes 6-point, benefitted from the application of a magnifying glass (not supplied), especially if a reader hoped to tackle all of its 2391 pages. The first complete leather-bound set was published in August 1771 at a cost of £2 and 10 shillings on plain paper and £3 and 7 shillings on finer. The number of its pre-publication subscribers is not known, but after moving its sales efforts to the bookshops of London it sold its entire 3000 print run within a few months.
Who had written and compiled this magnificent thing? Almost certainly the same people who bought it. Collectively they were known as ‘A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland’ and their names appear at the beginning of the first edition. It’s a list of more than 100 experts and authors, a small handful of whom were direct contributors. Most of the names were simply sources, the authors of books filleted and condensed for a fresh purpose. The titles were arcane, at least to us today: Bielfield’s Universal Erudition, Calmet’s Dictionary of the Bible, Cotes’s Hydrostatical Lectures and Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica. Then there was Priestley’s History of Electricity and Macquer’s Chemistry. The use of the authors’ surnames suggests a long-standing familiarity with the standard text, in the vein of Gray’s Anatomy; the full and correct title of Pierre-Joseph Macquer’s textbook (translated into English from the French and published in Edinburgh five years earlier) was Elements of the Theory and Practice of Chymistry (the author was a Parisian chemist). These works underlined one of the Britannica’s prime objectives: the accumulation in one publication of the key titles one might expect to find in a university library.
But the precise content of the first Encyclopaedia Britannica was ultimately the responsibility of one man, its principal editor William Smellie. Perhaps it was inevitable that a man with an enormous nose would engage a man with such a surname, but Smellie also possessed other attributes. He appears to have been rescued from a possible life of debauchery and alcoholism by the twin redemptive forces of education and remuneration. He was a Presbyterian with much experience of proofreading, editing and printing, while his regular attendance at a wide variety of classes at Edinburgh University had rendered him a polymath, and he became an expert in bees and plant sexuality, the telescope and the microscope, and botany. Bell and Macfarquhar paid him £200 for four years’ work, his contract demanding Smellie oversee the entire publication and compose fifteen articles on ‘capital sciences’, which included, in the first volume alone, lengthy entries on anatomy and astronomy.
In his preface to the first edition, William Smellie claimed his ‘professed design’ was to ‘diffuse the knowledge of science’. To this end he and his compilers had ‘extracted the useful parts’ of many books, ‘and rejected whatever appeared trifling or less interesting’. In other words: astute editing.
The historian Herman Kogan found Smellie a ‘roisterer’, ‘as devoted to whiskey as to scholarship’. He was fond of reciting his father’s ‘tedious’ poems in Latin. At the age of twenty-eight he already had many literary friends and connections, rendering him something of an intellectual show-off. There may have been no individual in the whole of the British Isles better suited to marshalling such an august and high-reaching publication.
Despite his own modest status (his father was a builder), Smellie held a generally elitist view of his fellow beings. In his entry on Mythology, he suggested ‘common people were prone to superstition’ and ‘born to be deceived in everything’. Ignoring for a moment his Scottish environs, he believed that ‘people of distinction’ tended to live in London. His employment was intended initially as a part-time occupation, but it entirely consumed him.
It is not certain precisely how much of the first edition was written by Smellie himself, nor how much was created anew by his band of gentlemen scholars. All the articles went uncredited. ‘I wrote most of it, my lad,’ Smellie announced facetiously in his later years, ‘and snipped out from books enough material for the printer. With pastepot and scissors I composed it!’
Agriculture spanned thirty pages (‘Agriculture is an art of such consequence to mankind, that their very existence, especially in a state of society, depends upon it.’) Algebra occupied thirty-eight pages (‘A general method of computation by certain signs and symbols, which have been contrived for this purpose, and found convenient’). Medicine ran to 110 pages, with much on gout, quinsy and other agues, but it did not cover Midwifery, which merited its own forty-six-page entry, providing a step-by-step guide that assumed to eliminate the need for training and experience. The accompanying three pages of highly detailed anatomical engravings outraged many, not least churchmen, who urged readers to tear them out and burn them.
The birth of Britannica: an anatomical guide to midwifery upsets the church in 1771
Among his personal contributions, Smellie almost certainly composed the entry entitled Abridgement, for within it he laid out his intentions for his entire enterprise. ‘The art of conveying much sentiment in few words is the happiest talent an author can be possessed of,’ he declared, in an entry much longer than those surrounding it (Abrax, an antique stone; Abrobania, a town and district in Transylvania). ‘This talent is particularly necessary in the present state of literature,’ the entry maintained, ‘for many writers have acquired the dexterity of spreading a few critical thoughts over several hundred pages … When an author hits upon a thought that pleases him, he is apt to dwell upon it … Though this may be pleasant to the writer, it tires and vexes the reader.’
Smellie’s conclusion may be judged abusively anti-academic. ‘Abridging is particularly useful in taking the substance of what is delivered by Professors,’ he writes. ‘Every public speaker has circumlocutions, redundancies, lumber, which deserve not to be copied.’ He recommended concision, elision and omission. This ‘would be more for the honour of Professors; as it would prevent at least such immense loads of disjointed and unintelligible rubbish from being handed about by the name of such a man’s lectures.’
Smellie’s suggestion was unmistakable: Encyclopaedia Britannica was an alternative university, the modern way with knowledge. Buy these volumes, he seemed to be saying, and you need buy nothing more; this set will set you up for life. Those whose task it was to sell Britannica and other encyclopaedias to cynical households in the years to come would seldom waver from this pitch.