Parkwood Estate: Curious Curator: The Sirens Call of the Eleventh Edition Encyclopaedia Britannica

In the Parkwood Library, in a section specifically designed for the collection, one will find the 1910/1911, eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica set. Interpreters may or may not point this set out while on tour, but they lay horizontally in their custom made shelves, since the 29 volumes are printed on onion paper with exterior gilt edging and have flexible suede covers.

My attention was drawn to this set the other day, after the umpteenth call from a member of the general public asking me what they should do with their set of encyclopaedias, because no one wants them anymore. As one is well aware, encyclopaedias date, and not very well, as a reference item, and are finding themselves obsolete since the advent of the internet, and it is true that libraries, schools, etc. are not interested in them. A quick Google search confirms their demise, with Britannica issuing their final set in 2012.

Although obsolete as a reference item on the latest scientific work, the eleventh edition has proven longevity in the encyclopaedia world and its lasting quality is attributed to what a 2012 Guardian newspaper article references as a mythic quality among collectors, a glimpse into a colonial world before the world changed with WWI.

The volumes were created by Britannica at a time when the company was moving from British to American hands[i], and when one glimpses at the articles will find that the leading scholars of the time, among them T.H. Huxley and William Michael Rossetti, contributed to the research. The eleventh edition boasted the most female contributors of any edition, thus far, with thirty four women contributing articles to the set and was the first encyclopaedia to publish biographies of people still alive, a new and modern approach to reference materials.

Image used by The Guardian to evoke
bourgeois life captured by 11th edition

What has proven to be the lasting legacy of the set is its value as a cultural artefact. Ironically, Wikipedia has a great sentence that describes its value as an artefact,
“the British Empire was at its maximum, imperialism was largely unchallenged, much of the world was still ruled by monarchs, and the tragedy of the modern world wars were still in the future.”

Even the critiques of the eleventh edition from its contemporaries provide a glimpse into the value of the set from a social history perspective, Virginia Woolf wrote that the edition was bourgeois and had old fashioned opinions on art, literature and social sciences. Within its very pages, the eleventh edition has no biography of Marie Curie, despite her winning of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, although she is mentioned briefly under the biography of her husband Pierre Curie.

The Guardian, in its review of the eleventh edition, 101 years later, reference the sirens call of the set to collectors, scholars, social historians,

“To open an 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is to open a worldview lost forever in the staggering slaughter of the First World War. The 11th edition of the Britannica represents the high tide of optimism and belief in human progress that had dominated the Anglo-Saxon vision since the Enlightenment. Unabashed optimism – and unabashed racism – pervades many entries in the 11th, and provide its defining characteristics. “

The eleventh edition Encyclopaedia Britannica set sits at Parkwood in the corner of the Library and who knew that is was social history magic? Purchased by the McLaughlin’s, likely before Parkwood was built and eventually displayed within its own custom made shelves in their custom built home, the set represents the emergence of North America onto the world stage, the emergence of the auto baron in the 20^th century, Sam McLaughlin marking each volume with his own bookplate. It’s a nod to his roots, the British Empire, as well as the new emerging America which will dominate the 20^th century as a super power. The encyclopaedia set, both physically and content based, as well as its mythic attributes convincingly illustrates the McLaughlin story and legacy, the one we interpret today at the Estate.