Abstract
In the early eighteenth century, a new generation of encyclopedias and encyclopedists began to claim that they could put some version of complete knowledge in hand. John Harris and Ephraim Chambers both believed that some understanding of the relationships between the different branches of knowledge would prove useful not only to the reader but to the continued advancement of knowledge itself. Harris, for example, stressed in 1704 that his Lexicon technicum—England’s first self-described “Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences”—was a book “useful to be read carefully over” as well as consulted occasionally, as if by such treatment a reader might come away from it with a sense of knowledge as a totality rather than a mere collection of data.1 Chambers, editor of the subsequent and far more successful Cyclopædia (1728), thought that the ancient divisions of knowledge into discrete parts had severely impeded progress, and he positioned his own work as both the symbol and location of a new mode of knowledge production that embraced connectivity. “I do not know whether it might not be for the more general Interest of Learning,” he wrote, “to have all the Inclosures and Partitions thrown down, and the whole laid common again, under one distinguished name.”2 The Cyclopædia attempted to do both; it embraced an even greater number of arts and sciences than Harris’s Lexicon and attempted to demonstrate the relationships of their terms and parts with the help of a genealogical tree of knowledge as well as a detailed system of internal cross-references.
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Notes
Thomas Hobbes, ‘Preface’, in Translations of Homer, Eric Nelson (ed.), New York, Clarendon Press, 2008, p.6. The word “encyclopedia” did not exist in Ancient Greek; it most likely derives from the misreading of Greek texts by Quintilian and Pliny the Elder. Quintilian’s “encyclopædia” is the Latinized form of the Greek έγкνкλιος παιδεια (‘enkyklios paideia’).
See Robert Shackleton, ‘The Encyclopædic Spirit’, in Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene, Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen (eds), Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1984, p.377.
Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, in vol. 7 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, John Butt (ed.), 11 vols., New Haven, Methuen, 1967, pp.50, 5.
Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010, p.45.
Joseph Levine, Between the Ancients and Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999, pp.ix–x.
Dryden had contemplated a poem on Arthur and the Black Prince but never undertook it, and Pope destroyed all but a few fragments of his adolescent effort on Alexander. At the end of his life, he thought of Brutus for a subject but did not live long enough to put the thought into verse. See, for example, Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1970;
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973;
Alistair Fowler, ‘The Life and Death of Literary Forms’, New Literary History, 2, 1971, pp.199–216;
and Dustin Griffin, ‘Milton and the Decline of Epic in the Eighteenth Century’, New Literary History, 14.1, 1982, pp.143–54.
In The Dunciad in Four Books, William Warburton (writing as Bentley/Aristarchus) ponders if “we may not be excused, if for the future we consider the Epics of Homer, Virgil, and Milton, together with this our poem, as a complete Tetralogy, in which the last worthily holdeth the place or station of the satyric piece?” Aristarchus, though, is not to be trusted, and the Dunciad does not really qualify as epic. Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, Valerie Rumbold (ed.), New York, Pearson Education, Inc., 1999, pp.77–8.
Pope’s effort to maintain Homer’s permanence ironically came at the cost of changing his poems in order to better align classical epic values with “the superior human values of [Pope’s] own age and its preference for a culture united by the bonds of an at least tentatively rational society.” Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, p.303. As a result, several critics of the time pointed out, Pope’s Homer contained at least as much of the former as the latter, if not more. Richard Bentley (perhaps apocryphally) objected to Pope’s calling it Homer at all. See Roger Lonsdale, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, New York, Oxford University Press, 2006, 4:314, 285n.
Weber, ‘The “Garbage Heap” of Memory: At Play in Pope’s Archives of Dulness’, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33.1, 1999, pp.1–19.
John Brown, A dissertation on the rise, union, and power, the progressions, separations, and corruptions, of poetry and music. To which is prefixed, the cure of Saul. A sacred ode, London, 1763, p.104. Brown quotes from the opening lines of Milton’s ‘At a Solemn Music’: “Blest Pair of Syrens, Pledges of Heaven’s Joy, / Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse. / Wed your divine Sounds, and mix’d Pow’r employ!” John Milton, ‘At a Solemn Music’, in The Student’s Milton, Frank Allen Patterson (ed.), New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1933, ll.1–3. “So said the sublime Milton,” Brown explains, “who knew and felt their Force: But Those whom Nature has thus joined together, Man, by his false Refinements, hath most unnaturally put asunder.” Brown, A Dissertation, p.25.
John Dryden, Fables Ancient and Modern, in John Dryden: Selected Poems, Steven Zwicker and David Bywaters (eds), London, Penguin Books, 2001, p.410.
Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998, p.158.
See Douglas Patey ‘Ancients and Moderns’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Eighteenth Century, H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds), New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p.54.
Denis Diderot, ‘The Encyclopædia’, in Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 2001, p.290.
See Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, p.125.
Chambers, ‘Preface’, in Cyclopædia, 1:i. He goes on to say that the “bare Vocabulary of the Academy della Crusca was above forty Years in compiling, and the Dictionary of the French Academy much longer; and yet the present Work is as much more extensive than either of them in its Nature and Subject, as it falls short of ’em in number of Years, or of Persons employ’d.” The Accademia della Crusca, a linguistically conservative society founded in Florence in 1582, began to publish their official dictionary, the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, in 1612. Chambers does not specify to which edition he refers. The first was a single volume in folio; the most recent edition he might have had access to or known of was the third, published in Florence in 1691 and by then expanded to three volumes in folio. See Clarence King Moore, ‘L’accademia Della Crusca: Some Historical References’, Italica, 12.2, June 1935, pp.128–9. Two editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française were available in 1728: the first of 1694 and the second of 1718. The current ninth edition, first published in 1992, contains just over 35,000 words.
Subscription was cost-prohibitive, but reading clubs offered unlimited reading for “as little as one and a half livres a month.” Though access seems to have diminished in relation to economic status, “it is impossible to know where the downward penetration of the book stopped.” Elites, then, were certainly the primary audience, but “one cannot exclude the possibility that the Encyclopédie reached a great many readers in the lower middle classes.” Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1979, pp.297–9.
See Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp.101–20.
Marjorie Swann has argued that in the seventeenth century, “English writers created what Foucault would term ‘author-functions’ that were rooted in activities of collecting and cataloguing.” Swann, ‘The Compleat Angler and the Early Modern Culture of Collecting’, English Literary Renaissance, 37.1, 2007, p.101. The eighteenth-century encyclopedists would have shared in a version of this author-function.
Collective credit was difficult to distribute evenly. Diderot, the abbé Mallet, and Boucher d’Argis composed the best part of the Encyclopédie; the chevalier de Jaucourt wrote about a quarter of it. Roughly one-third of the authors wrote only one article. Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1979, p.15.
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1966, p.255.
Pope, The Dunciad Variorum, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, John Butt (ed.), Methuen, 1965, p.51.
Kevis Goodman connects the notion of “noise” to Thomson’s The Seasons and through The Seasons to twentieth-century information theory: “‘Let us call noise the set of these phenomena of interference that become obstacles to communication,’ writes Michel Serres. For Serres, if not for Thomson, such instances of static in the flow of ‘information’ are not entirely evils to be overcome. They are marks, vital residues, of an observer’s awareness of his or her participation in a larger system of forces.” Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.64. Though Goodman focuses on history, this description of “noise” applies equally well to Pope’s representation of both the written and oral “obstacles to communication” produced by the dunces, which are described in the verse and reproduced in the apparatus.
Goodman quotes from Serres’s Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, Lawrence R. Schehr (trans.), Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (eds), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p.66.
Seth Rudy, ‘Pope, Swift, and the Poetics of Posterity’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 35.1, 2011, p.10.
Aubrey Williams, Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of Its Meaning, London, Methuen, 1955, p.62.
Conradus Crambe, the educational companion of Martinus Scriblerus in his fictional memoirs and a figure of Scriblerian ridicule, claims that his life is as orderly as his dictionary, for by his dictionary he orders his life. “I have made a Kalendar of radical words for all the seasons, months, and days of the year,” he tells Scriblerus. “Every day I am under the dominion of a certain Word.” Alexander Pope, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, Charles Kerby-Miller (ed.), New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, p.128.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, New York, Penguin Books, 2003, p.171.
Martin Gierl, ‘Science, Projects, Computers, and the State: Swift’s Lagadian and Leibniz’s Prussian Academy’, in The Age of Projects, Maximillian E. Novak (ed.), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2008, pp.304–6.
Pope, Peri Bathous; or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry, in The Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, Aubrey Williams (ed.), Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969, pp.428–9.
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard Labaree, Ralph Ketcham and Helen Boatfield (eds), 2nd ed., New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003, p.91.
Paula Backscheider, ‘The Verse Essay, John Locke, and Defoe’s Jure Divino’, ELH, 55.1, 1988, p.101. The origins of the verse essay, Backscheider writes, go back to Persius, Juvenal, and Lucretius. Davies’s poem remained in print (in Latin and English) throughout the first half of the eighteenth century; it gave rise to several like poems many or all of which Dryden, Defoe, and Pope would have known.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Roger Woolhouse (ed.), 2nd ed., London, Penguin Books, 1997, p.89.
Sandro Jung, ‘Epic, Ode, or Something New: The Blending of Genres in Thomson’s Spring’, Papers on Language and Literature, 43.2, Spring 2007, p.146.
Jung refers to Chalker’s The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form, London, Routledge, 1969, pp.90–132,
and Cohen’s The Unfolding of The Seasons, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, p.92.
Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, p.76.
Jung, ‘Thomson’s Winter, the Ur-text, and the Revision of The Seasons’, Papers on Language and Literature, 45.1, Winter 2009, p.62.
Starr offers as a principal example Russel Noyes (ed.), English Romantic Poetry and Prose, New York, Oxford University Press, 1956, p.76.
Jung, ‘Print Culture, High Cultural Consumption, and Thomson’s The Seasons, 1780–1797’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44.4, Summer 2011, pp.497–8.
John Scott and John Hoole, Critical essays on some of the poems, of several English poets, London, 1785, p.251; quoted by John Barrell, Poetry, Language, and Politics, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988, p.79.
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Rudy, S. (2014). Worlds Apart: Epic and Encyclopedia in the Augustan Age. In: Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411549_3
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