There is a compelling word for this concept: abecedarianism. While in its most neutral form it means something arranged in alphabetical order, or the process of learning an alphabet, or indeed buying something in alphabetical order, it has also taken on a slightly condescending tone, not least in tech circles, where it may be applied to something rather simplistic, perhaps a piece of programming progressing in an uninterrupted or obvious fashion. As such it may also suggest a lack of imagination, a strict pedagoguery. And then there is another apt definition: an Abecedarianist is one who rejects all formal learning. Applied most commonly (and with some disputation) to the sixteenth-century German sect of Anabaptists, it suggests a person wholly reliant on spiritual, instinctual and religious guidance on how to live one’s life. An encyclopaedia, therefore, of any description and in any order, would not have been part of an Abecedarianist’s armoury.
ANCIENT MARINER
Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a dim view of Smellie and his schemes. Today, his reputation as a fantastical poet tends to overshadow his work as a vociferous literary critic, but in late-eighteenth-century London his influence was considerable. And his criticism of Encyclopaedia Britannica was the literary equivalent of gunboat diplomacy.
For a start, he regarded the concept of alphabetical order as absurdly random and completely nonsensical. In its place he offered a superior intellectual approach to the organisation of knowledge (and thus, almost by definition, a less marketable one). He advocated a ‘rational arrangement’ and a strict ‘scientific method’, a circular philosophical relationship between all subjects in an encyclopaedia, organised into ‘one harmonious body of knowledge’, an organic connection of past and present. The historian Richard Yeo has suggested that Coleridge wished for all branches of sciences and fine arts to be arranged in terms of class, order, genus or species, each of which derived its ‘scientific worth, from being an ascending step towards the universal’.* By contrast, any encyclopaedia organised around the alphabet was ‘mechanically arranged’, a caged animal compared to Coleridge’s promotion of the safari park.
Despite its alphabetical strictures, Coleridge argued that Britannica was characterised by ‘more or less complete disorganization’ of its subject matter. In 1803, Coleridge wrote to the poet Robert Southey of the ‘strange abuse’ that ‘has been made of the word encyclopaedia!’ He found the ‘huge unconnected miscellany’ of the Britannica too frequently determined ‘by the caprice or convenience of the compiler’; knowledge was splintered and fractured, he complained, and thus rendered almost useless.
The complaint was a simple one, and William Smellie had heard it before. The reader might be obliged to search back and forth through several entries in several volumes to acquire a thorough understanding, say, of industrial growth or meteorology; the experience was comparable to printing chapters of a novel in an order that made comprehension purposely difficult. Also, there was a tendency for entries appearing in Britannica late in the alphabet to be condensed in order to meet printing deadlines and financial constraints (in the first edition, the letters A and B occupied 697 pages, with the remainder squeezed into 2000). What was Coleridge’s solution to these dilemmas? It was called Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, a publication as big, burdensome and doomed as the albatross. We shall mark its rise and fall a little later in this chronological alphabet.
ANOMALIES AND APOLOGIES
By today’s standards Encyclopaedia Britannica was not wholly enlightened. The fact that it was compiled by men for men may be borne out by consulting the entry Woman, which read, in its entirety: ‘The female of man. See Homo.’*
Women do fare slightly better when it comes to religious affairs. Here, the entry for God runs in its entirety: ‘One of the many names of the Supreme Being,’ while Goddess receives the greater coverage, in length at least:
A heathen deity of the female sex. The ancients had almost as many goddesses as gods; such were Juno, the goddess of air; Diana, the goddess of woods etc. And under this character were represented the virtues, graces, and principal advantages of life; Truth, Justice, Piety, Liberty, Fortune, Victory etc. It was the peculiar privilege of the goddesses to be represented naked on medals.
There were similar anomalies elsewhere, and many idiosyncratic editorial choices. The entry on Mahometans, the outdated term for those who followed Muhammad and would be now regarded as Muslim, runs to seventeen pages, covering all forms of cultural history and religious observance. The entry on Jews and Judaism, by contrast, extends to one paragraph (‘Those who profess obedience to the laws and religion of Moses … they lay great stress upon frequent washings … every Jew is obliged to marry, and a man who lives to 20 unmarried is accounted as actually living in sin.’)
Elsewhere, bloodletting from the penis is a bit of a cure-all, squinting is a contagious disease (and may be caused by nurses placing a child’s cradle in a wrong position with regard to the light). And you didn’t necessarily want to buy the first edition if you were hard of hearing. ‘Some say, the eggs of ants bruised and put into the ear, with the juice of an onion, cure the most inveterate deafness.’
In his preface, William Smellie excused himself early. For all the fanfare, and for all the work employed in its creation, he explained that in his opinion Encyclopaedia Britannica was still a little rushed. The editors, he said, ‘were not aware of the length of time necessary for the execution, but engaged to begin the publication too early’. Even though the publication was delayed by a year, ‘still time was wanted’.
And then there was a plea for forgiveness. A work of this kind, Smellie argued, was bound by its very size to contain errors, ‘whether falling under the denomination of mental, typographical or accidental’. He reasoned that those familiar with a work of such an extensive nature ‘will make proper allowances’.
Any reader – indeed any writer – would surely have sympathised. Of course there would be mistakes in a work of this complexity. And most of them were straightforward: St Andrew’s Day – for the thirteenth, read the thirtieth; Interlocutor – for extacted read extracted; Law – read 1672, not 1972. And then there were entries that would only prove suspect with time.
ASBESTOS: A sort of fossil stone, which may be split into threads and filaments, from one inch to ten inches in length, very fine, brittle, yet somewhat tractable, silky, and of a greyish colour, not unlike talc of Venice. It is almost insipid to the taste, indissoluble in water, and endued with the wonderful property of remaining unconsumed in the fire, which only whitens it … Pliny says he has seen napkins of it, which, being taken foul from the table, were thrown into the fire, and better scoured than if they had been washed in water. This stone is found in many places of Asia and Europe; particularly in the island of Anglesey in Wales, and in Aberdeenshire in Scotland.
By the time the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica sold the last of its 3000 sets in the 1770s, the notion of this grandly ambitious multi-volume publication attempting to encompass the sum of human knowledge had became a sport, a pastime and an enduring sensation. Britannica was one of the eighteenth century’s most enduring brands. Although at first there was no indication that the first edition wouldn’t also be the only edition, it was decreed that like the dasypus it should in future come in different sizes, with updates and printings and additions.