Alan Rauch is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Useful Knowledge – CL

By Alan Rauch

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Alan Rauch
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326632

Chapter One

Food for Thought: The Dissemination of Knowledge in the Early Nineteenth Century

Society is now so far advanced, that the people must be supplied with the mental aliment. -Thomas Tegg, preface to the London Encyclopaedia (1826)

It may be easily demonstrated that there is an advantage in learning both for the usefulness and the pleasure of it.-Henry Brougham, Discourse on Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science (1827)

Although it is widely accepted that nineteenth-century England was preoccupied with knowledge, very little attention has, in fact, been directed toward the “knowledge industry.” For reasons that are not entirely clear, the rapid growth of periodicals, encyclopedias, and societies promoting knowledge is a phenomenon in English popular culture that has largely been ignored by students of literature and history. Yet the knowledge movement is an important record of a culture’s fascination with its own science and technology. The proliferation of books, periodicals, mechanics’ institutes, and even lending libraries celebrated the progressive accumulation of even more knowledge, to say nothing of the benefits that could be accrued from “mental improvement.” However slighted by history the literature of knowledge has been, the character that it helped produce-the polymath-remains a strong emblem of early Victorian culture. In fact, the term continues to be a title of distinction, if not outright admiration, in nineteenth-century studies. But comprehensive knowledge was not merely an ambition of the intellectual elite; a growing population of readers, from all classes, recognized that some degree of social status could be gained through learning. Publishers and authors were quick to recognize this substantial constituency as an important market; countless books claimed to have in their contents a “thousand” things that a man must know. Knowledge reflected the growing prosperity of the country and was emblematic of England’s stature within the scientific community. Still, the political implications of this movement were complex given that many believed that knowledge was foisted by the powerful and the wealthy on the working classes in order to indoctrinate them into a culture where knowledge validated a simple work ethic. Maria Edgeworth’s patriarchal General Clarendon, who appears in the novel Helen (1834), reflects a common sentiment. “The march of intellect,” we are told of Clarendon, “was not a favourite march with him, unless the steps were perfectly kept, all in good time.” Clarendon’s concern, that the pursuit of knowledge might not necessarily occur in lockstep, was well founded.

For the individuals who, by means of an increase in knowledge, were able to insinuate themselves into the higher tiers of society-occupied by the General Clarendons of the world-a certain amount of discretion was necessary. While one kind of knowledge might be valuable in the “making” of an individual, a somewhat different kind might be valuable in their unmaking; the Lady Dedlocks of the world live in fear of being exposed by the growing race of Tulkinghorns. Thus, as Dickens understood very well, the many years required to accumulate the knowledge that made one socially acceptable could be turned around in a moment by another kind of knowledge that threatened exposure. A “smart operator,” as it were, might profit well by gaining a little piece of knowledge that ultimately had great market value. Whether it involved Lady Dedlock’s secret indiscretion in Bleak House or Bounderby’s ironically unremarkable life history in Hard Times, the value of knowledge, as Alexander Welsh has pointed out, was very high, particularly across classes. Thus, whether illicit or not, the rewards of mental improvement were many and varied.

If we consider knowledge texts in the spirit of Roger Chartier’s recent admonition to understand how texts “can be differently apprehended, manipulated and comprehended,” a more complex picture of encyclopedias and their readers emerges. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of the “actualization” of a work in the process of reading, Chartier looks at the spaces of reading in the early modern period as well as the commodification of reading. For the present purpose, the most significant implication is the displacement of knowledge from a public sphere to a private one. In other words, encyclopedias encapsulated knowledge in relatively compact texts for consumption in private. While knowledge was still the mainstay of libraries, museums, and public lecture halls, it could also be absorbed in isolation, away from the gaze of others. The rude and uncultured Heathcliff is, for example, able to return to Wuthering Heights mysteriously transformed into, not merely a man of means, but a man of knowledge. Although this new private space is wonderful for the dissemination of knowledge, it made the interpretation and application of knowledge much more difficult to control. The officers of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), one of the great popularizing societies, recognized this problem and, as we shall see, were unable to do anything to rectify it. By offering a wide range of topics illuminated by substantial text and often profuse illustrations, knowledge texts thus functioned like the center of Bentham’s panopticon. At the core is, of course, the unobserved reader, who not only can scan the material around him anonymously but can then interpret, infer, and combine the facts and details with impunity.

The spirit of self-improvement-or mental improvement, as it was commonly called-as well as the promise of scientific innovation held sway as the dominant ethos of the time. In this climate, knowledge, as a cornerstone of progress, improvement, and civilization, answered well as a vehicle for moral growth. “If knowledge were not itself one of the supports of morality,” wrote George Craik in his remarkable The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830-31), “it would not have been worthy of the commendations which have universally been bestowed upon it; nor would its diffusion deserve the warm encouragement it has uniformly received from an enlightened philanthropy.” Knowledge was clearly something worth acquiring and thus was enthusiastically produced, received, and promulgated by the culture.

In order to provide a brief overview of the status of knowledge in the nineteenth century, I have divided this chapter into three sections that consider the ways in which knowledge was popularized and made available. The sections complement each other and the remainder of the book in that they address the very real question of how ideas operate within a culture. Simply to say that science was influential within the culture does not adequately explain how literary figures with apparently only marginal connections to science and technology (Charlotte Bronte, e.g.) came to address those issues in their work. While broad cultural influences are always difficult to tease out, in the following pages I will suggest something of the modes and the mechanisms, specific to the nineteenth century, behind the influence of the knowledge industry. The first section deals with the phenomenon of encyclopedias as a reflection of the desire to accumulate knowledge as well as to classify and consolidate it. The second looks at the SDUK, one of the most interesting manifestations of the knowledge industry. The third section deals with the prolific publication of knowledge-oriented texts for young readers in the early part of the century. Here, I will make an effort to suggest that what nineteenth-century writers read-and were influenced by-in their youth deeply influenced their imaginative sensibilities.

Encyclopedias and Encyclopedism

In 1771, the newly completed Encyclopaedia Britannica became available to the British public (fig. 3). Although first taken to be only a “moderate success,” the Encyclopaedia, initially 2,670 quarto pages in three volumes illustrated with 160 copperplates, grew by 1827 (the seventh edition) to 17,101 pages in twenty-one volumes with 506 plates. The idiosyncratic style adopted by the first editor of the encyclopedia, the Scottish naturalist and printer William Smellie, allowed for lengthy articles on specific subjects that often had a vocational emphasis and brief reference articles on the remaining topics. Unlike Ephraim Chambers’s early Cyclopaedia (1728), the work included the arts and the sciences. The claim, made in one of the Britannica‘s early competitors, that the new revision of that encyclopedia “will be found to be more universal and more comprehensive than any work of the like nature” was surely made with some degree of sincerity. But Andrew Bell and Colin MacFarquahar, who were responsible for financing the Britannica, surely understood, whether working with Smellie or any editor, that encyclopedias were not only out of date by publication but also often cobbled together from sometimes dubious sources (fig. 4). According to his biographer, Robert Kerr, Smellie “held Dictionary making in great contempt; and used to say jocularly, that he had made a Dictionary with a pair of scissars, clipping out from various books a quantum sufficit of matter for the printer.” One way or the other, the Britannica was entirely written and compiled by Smellie, who, after earning ?200, declined further involvement in the even more successful later editions. “It is well known,” Robert Kerr reports,

that Mr. MacFarquhar left a handsome fortune to his family, all or mostly derived from the profits of the Encyclopedia; and that Mr. Bell died in great affluence, beside possessing the entire property of that great work, which still belongs to his executors; every shilling of which may be fairly stated as having grown from the labours of Mr. Smellie in the original fabrication of the work, which is confessedly superior; and all of which he and his family might have shared in equally with Mr. Bell and the other proprietor, if he had not been too fastidious in his notions, and perhaps too timid in his views of the risk which might have been incurred in the mercantile part of the speculation.

From an economic standpoint, knowledge texts thus had the potential to be financially rewarding, particularly because their very “quality” depended on revisions and improvements. Indeed, the commercial success of the Britannica‘s predecessors, John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (1704) and Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, which both went into multiple editions, was surely an incentive to Bell and MacFarquhar. According to Kerr, the two were “said to have cleared a net profit of ?42,000” from the ten thousand copies of the eighteen-volume third edition.

The exponential growth of the Encyclopaedia Britannica itself would suggest that the encyclopedic spirit was well entrenched in England by the early nineteenth century. Robert Collison, surveying the major encyclopedias, mentions fourteen, but many more small encyclopedias and subject dictionaries were published. Some, like John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plants (1829), were highly specialized; others, like Joseph Guy’s Pocket Cyclopaedia (1832), were affairs of convenience. Still others, like William Bingley’s Useful Knowledge (1814), John Timbs’s Knowledge for the People (1831), and R. S. Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum (1820), were distinguished by little more than their success in competing, some through brevity and others through lavish or outrageous illustrations, for a spot in the encyclopedia market (fig. 5).

Central to the emergence of encyclopedias was the growing interest, in the eighteenth century, for “useful” knowledge and instruction. Not least among the reasons for the proliferation of knowledge texts was that they offered a relatively cheap way, in contrast to clothing or furnishings, to adopt a more gentlemanly air. Members of the rising mercantile class found themselves in any number of new situations where business might be improved by even the thinnest veneer of learning. In his sermon on “The Advantages of Knowledge” (1788), Abraham Rees, a dissenting cleric and later an encyclopedist himself, touted the advantages of knowledge for gaining an edge in commerce: “Professional reputation, nor indeed, any considerable credit and influence can be acquired or maintained, in the present day, without the accomplishments of literature and science, which were little regarded in the former ages.” Indeed, for those who could not afford the trappings of wealth, knowledge could be turned to good advantage by giving one the air of accomplishment. Rees recommends the acquisition of knowledge on religious grounds as well, but it is the potential economic advantages of knowledge that strike the reader most forcefully. “Whatever may be the rank or station in society which they may be destined to occupy,” writes Rees, the “mental and moral endowments [of the young] will recommend them to persons of discernment and integrity much more effectually than any external advantages, to which their birth or fortune may entitle them. It will ensure reputation, and command respect, in a much greater degree than any hereditary honour or affluence which they may possess, and which, with uncultivated minds would merely render them more conspicuous objects of contempt and reproach.

Rees’s emphasis on the value of “reputation” and “respect” underscores the importance of the connection between science and civility advanced by Steven Shapin in A Social History of Truth. Rees understood that tradesmen, no less than scientists, depended on an air of truthfulness in order to be successful and thus would prosper by drawing on the appearance of civility and integrity. Although drawn from the seventeenth century, Shapin’s observations are borne out not merely by Rees but by the growing sense in the early nineteenth century that a smattering of knowledge-often scientific knowledge-might elevate an individual’s stature in social circles. Thus, Rees is well worth keeping in mind when, in The Mill on the Floss, the rough-hewn packman Bob Jakins, not only impresses Mr. Glegg as a “knowing fellow,” but manages to make a customer of his more fastidious wife. Jakins’s success is due, in part, to a motley collection of books, including “a superannuated Keepsake and six or seven numbers of a Portrait Gallery,” which he eventually gives to Maggie. “I sot up till the clock was gone twelve last night a-lookin’ at ’em,” he tells Maggie of the portraits of distinguished ladies. “But lors! I shouldn’t know what to say to ’em.” But, despite Jakins’s claims of ignorance, the books he gives Maggie have helped him immeasurably in his trade. Alone, in the darkness of his home, he has made a study of ladies of fashion and will, when the time comes, know perfectly well “what to say to ’em” by applying the knowledge of his studies.

Although virtually every encyclopedia touted the knowledge that it contained for its practical value, such works were also important sources of entertainment. In a world as yet unexposed to the variety of nature in distant continents, the descriptions offered by encyclopedias were completely novel. “Truth” was, of course, a cornerstone for the encyclopedia, and, no matter how fanciful an entry seemed, the context reassured the reader of its veracity; with each turn of the page, a new, equally astonishing fact was brought to the reader’s attention. The Encyclopaedia Britannica capitalized on the desire for new facts and on the fascination with pictorial representation by including a volume devoted entirely to illustrative plates. Other encyclopedists quickly followed suit, including Abraham Rees, who commissioned the notoriously slow William Blake to engrave some designs for his work.

Continues…
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