But the second edition would require a new editor. William Smellie declined to continue in the role, for he had other plans, with alcohol once more a prominent part of them. Twenty years from his initial engagement, and after years as an influential founding member of various philosophical and natural history societies, including the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Smellie found himself the celebrity owner of a drinking club on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile called the Crochallan Fencibles. His biographer Robert Kerr found him increasingly dishevelled during this period, and in financial disarray, while one fellow club member, the poet Robert Burns, revelled in Smellie’s inebriated joshery, and found him a ‘veteran in genius, wit and b[aw]dry’. Smellie, according to a source quoted by Kerr, used to ‘thrash the poet most abominably’.
Nonetheless, Burns honoured him with a verse:
His uncomb’d, hoary locks, wild-staring,
thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear
unmatch’d;
Yet, tho his caustic wit was biting rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.
Colin Macfarquhar died in 1793, William Smellie in 1795, and Andrew Bell in 1809. Their extraordinary publication lived on, surviving controversy, calumny, mutiny, bankruptcy, parody, ignominy and perfidy until it announced in 2012 that it would print no more.
* Caaba ‘properly signifies a square building; but is particularly applied by the Mahometans to the temple of Mecca … It is toward this temple they always turn their faces when they pray, in whatever part of the world they happen to be.’ Lythrum was a purple flowering plant, ‘a genus of the dodecandria monogynia class’. Macao was ‘an island on China, in the province of Canton, fifty miles south of Canton’. Zyglophyllum was another flowering plant, of which ‘There are eight species, none of them natives of Britain.’
* For reasons of space and comprehension I have not included samples of the lengthier and more detailed treatises, relying for flavour instead on these shorter definitions. But there was a conscious difference between the definitions in Britannica and those in the basic dictionaries that preceded it. The aim in the encyclopaedia was connectivity: definitions were often cross-referenced, and when two or more were considered together, greater knowledge would be attained. For a closer examination, visit:
https://digital.nls.uk/encyclopaedia-britannica/archive
* This entry lasted five pages, and often read like something from the Marx Brothers: ‘The probability that a person of a given age shall live a certain number of years is measured by the proportion which the number of persons living at the proposed age has to the difference between the said number and the number of persons living at the given age.’
* A ‘miscarriage procured by art’ is achieved by interventionist means; a deliberate abortion.
* This is necessarily a highly truncated account: I have made no mention, for example, of the parallel Arabic script that emerged in Petra, nor the role played by Phoenician traders in the second millennium BCE. For a full and illuminating history of this development see A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders (Picador, 2020). Flanders observes that the word ‘alphabet’ was not itself employed until surprisingly late. The Romans preferred either letter (leterae) or element (elementae), and it wasn’t until Hippolytus of Rome wrote ‘ex Graecorum alphabeto’ to mean ‘from the Greek alphabet’ (and derived from the first two letters in that language, alpha, beta), around 200 CE, that the word probably entered regular usage.
* Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture by Richard Yeo (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
* Thirty years later, with the publication of Britannica’s fourth edition (1801–09), the consideration of women in relation to men had entered a new phase. ‘The man, more robust, is fitted for severe labour, and for field exercise; the woman, more delicate, is fitted for sedentary occupations, and particularly for nursing children. The man, bold and vigorous, is qualified for being a protector; the woman, delicate, and timid, requires protection … The man, as a protector, is destined by nature to govern; the woman, conscious of inferiority, is disposed to obey.’ One may, at this point, believe this to be parody, but it is not. And it goes on: ‘Men have penetration and solid judgement to fit them for governing, women have sufficient understanding to make a good figure under a good government; a greater portion would excite dangerous rivalry between the sexes, which nature has avoided by giving them different talents. Women have more imagination and sensibility than men, which make all their enjoyments more exquisite; at the same time they are better qualified to communicate enjoyment … With respect to the ultimate end of love, it is the privilege of the male, as superior and protector, to make a choice; the female preferred has no privilege but barely to consent or to refuse.’
B
BACKSTORY
In 1964, the historian Robert Collison compiled a chronology of more than forty encyclopaedias that predated Britannica. Not all of these exist to be perused today, and not all are what we might recognise as encyclopaedias. A great many Latin works contained a varied display of intellectual artistry without holding to a recognised or ordered system, while others seemed unnecessarily ambitious. In 1245, for example, the French priest Gautier de Metz composed L’Image du Monde, laying claim to be the first encyclopaedia written in verse (it was part fact, part religious fantasy, with references to angels and dragons and a belief that the sky was made out of some sort of very early concrete).*
Collison’s list highlighted a diverse attempt at uniqueness – the first German encyclopaedia, the first encyclopaedia for women, the first encyclopaedia with a specifically Catholic view of the world – but they shared with Britannica a familiar intention: ‘The chief mirage that hovered tantalisingly before so many generations was that it was possible to compile a work that would supersede all other books and render them unnecessary.’
Collison claims that the first encyclopaedic work was written by the Greek philosopher Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, around 370 BCE, although later scholars question this.* It may be that the philosopher’s writings should be considered encyclopaedic in their scope, given that they covered such topics as mathematics, legislation and the gods, and that Speusippus believed that knowledge stemmed from the ability to understand not one thing alone, but one subject’s relationship to others. Perhaps Aristotle may stake the greatest claim to have studied matters so wide in variety that his knowledge may be justly classified encyclopaedic, no matter how unsystematic in form was the result. An encyclopaedia by Aristotle would surely be a thing to behold, his knowledge arranged perhaps into the strict taxonomic disciplines of metaphysics, ethics and poetics; alas, what we know of his mind was principally written down by students at his Lyceum, a university by all but name.
The first Roman encyclopaedia is sometimes named as Cato the Elder’s Praecepta ad Filium (Precepts to His Son), c.185 BCE, a collection of teachings derived from his speeches, although nothing of this survives in the original. But as great a case may be made for his encyclopaedic if particular De Agri Cultura (On the Cultivation of the Field), a ramshackle and exhaustive guide to agriculture and husbandry, combining the latest scientific practices with superstition, including much reverential consideration of asparagus and cabbage.*