Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition
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The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) is perhaps the most famous edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the day. The articles are still of value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries; they contain, however, a number of problematic areas for the modern scholar using them as a source. The eleventh edition is no longer restricted by copyright and has become available online, both in its original text and where parts of it have been incorporated into other online encyclopedias and works.
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[edit] Background
The 1911 eleventh edition was assembled under the leadership of American publisher Horace Everett Hooper, and edited by Hugh Chisholm. Originally, Hooper purchased the rights to the 25-volume ninth edition and persuaded the British newspaper The Times to issue its reprint, with eleven additional volumes (35 volumes total) as the tenth edition, which appeared in 1902. Hooper's association with The Times ceased in 1909, and he negotiated with the Cambridge University Press to publish the 29-volume eleventh edition. Though it is generally perceived as a quintessentially British work, the eleventh edition had substantial American influences, not only in the increased amount of American and Canadian content, but also in the efforts made to give it a more popular tone. American marketing methods also assisted sales. Some 11% of the contributors were American, and a New York office was established to run that side of the enterprise.
Some articles were written by the best-known scholars of the day, such as Edmund Gosse, J. B. Bury, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, Prince Peter Kropotkin, T. H. Huxley, G. K. Chesterton, Edmund Husserl and William Michael Rossetti, and others well known to that era. Among the lesser-known contributors were some who would later achieve greatness, such as Ernest Rutherford and Bertrand Russell. Many articles were carried over from the ninth edition, some with minimal updating, some of the book-length articles divided into smaller parts for easier reference, yet others heavily abridged. The best-known authors generally contributed only a single article or part of an article. The majority of the work was done by a mix of journalists, British Museum staff, and academics. The 1911 edition for the first time saw a number of female contributors, thirty-four women contributing articles to the edition.[1]
The eleventh edition introduced a number of changes to the format of the Britannica. It was the first to be published complete, instead of the previous method of volumes being released as they were ready. The type was kept in galleys and subject to continual updating until publication. It was the first edition of Britannica to be issued with a comprehensive index volume in which was added a categorical index, where like topics were listed. It was the first to break away from the convention of long treatise-length articles; even though the overall length of the work was roughly the same as its predecessor, the numbers of articles had increased from 17,000 to 40,000. It was the first edition of Britannica to contain biographies of living people.
According to Coleman and Simmons, p 32[2] the content of the encyclopedia was made up as follows:
| Subject | Content |
|---|---|
| Geography | 29% |
| Pure and applied science | 17% |
| History | 17% |
| Literature | 11% |
| Fine art | 9% |
| Social science | 7% |
| Psychology | 1.7% |
| Philosophy | 0.8% |
Hooper sold the rights to Sears Roebuck of Chicago in 1920, completing the Britannica's transition into becoming a substantially American venture.
In 1922, an additional three volumes were published, covering the events of the intervening years, including the First World War. These, together with a reprint of the eleventh edition, formed the twelfth edition of the work. A similar thirteenth edition, of three volumes plus a reprint of the twelfth edition, was published in 1926, so the twelfth and thirteenth editions were of course closely related to the eleventh edition and shared much of the same content. However, it became increasingly clear that a more thorough update of the work was required. The fourteenth edition, published in 1929, saw a considerable revision of the text, with much being dropped or shortened to make room for new topics. Nevertheless the eleventh edition formed the basis for every revision of the Encyclopædia Britannica until 1974, when the completely new fifteenth edition, based on modern information presentation, was published.
The eleventh edition's articles are still of value and interest to modern readers and scholars, especially as a cultural artifact: the British Empire was at its very height, imperialism was largely unchallenged, much of the world was still ruled by monarchs, and the horrors of the modern world wars were still in the future. They are an invaluable resource for topics dropped from modern encyclopedias, particularly in biography and the history of science and technology. As a literary text, the encyclopedia holds value as a voice of early 20th-century prose. For example, it employs literary devices, such as the pathetic fallacy, which are not as common in modern texts.[2]
[edit] Notable commentaries on the Eleventh Edition
In 1917 art critic Willard Huntington Wright published Misinforming a Nation, a 200+ page critique of inaccuracies and biases found in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. He says Britannica is "characterized by misstatement, inexcusable omissions, rabid and patriotic prejudices, personal animosities, blatant errors of fact, scholastic ignorance, gross neglect of non-British culture, an astounding egotism, and an undisguised contempt for American progress."
Amos Urban Shirk, who read both the entire eleventh and fourteenth editions in the 1930s, said he found the fourteenth edition to be a "big improvement" over the eleventh, stating that "most of the material had been completely rewritten".
Robert Collison, in Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout The Ages (1966), wrote of the eleventh edition that it "was probably the finest edition of the Britannica ever issued, and it ranks with the Italiana and the Espasa as one of the three greatest encyclopaedias in the world. It was the last edition to be produced almost in its entirety in Britain, and its position in time as a summary of the world's knowledge just before the outbreak of World War I is particularly valuable."
Sir Kenneth Clark, in Another Part of the Wood (1974), wrote of the eleventh edition, "One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by the facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopaedia in the tradition of Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only when it is slightly coloured by prejudice. When T. S. Eliot wrote 'Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopædia Britannica,' he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition."
[edit] 1911 Britannica in the 21st century
The 1911 edition is no longer restricted by copyright, and it is available in several more modern forms. While it may have been a reliable description of the general consensus of its time, for modern readers, the Encyclopedia has several glaring errors, ethnocentric remarks, and other issues:
- Then-common beliefs about race and ethnicity are no longer widely shared — for example, the entry for "Negro" states, "Mentally the negro is inferior to the white... the arrest or even deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts." The article about the American War of Independence attributes the success of the United States in part to "a population mainly of good English blood and instincts".
- Some articles are out of date with the most recent findings. For example the article about the origins of the Huns is inconsistent with recent genetic evidence.
- Some articles are out of date with most recent scientific methods. For example the article on Hottentots says "..the cranial capacity [of the Hottentots] is nearly the same (1300cc in the Bushman, 1365cc in the Hottentots) and on these anatomical grounds.. the two are of the same race." Cranial capacity is no longer an acceptable scientific measurement in determining ethnicity.
- Many articles are now factually outdated, such as those on science, technology, and medicine, or about geographic places (for example mentioning rail connections and ferry stops in towns that today no longer employ such transport).
- Even where the facts might still be accurate, new information, theories and perspectives developed since 1911 have substantially changed the way the same facts might be interpreted. For example, the modern interpretation of the history of the Visigoths is very different from that reflected in the eleventh edition which used the now out-of-favor Great Man method, such that there are no entries for Visigoth or Goth; rather the history of the tribe is found under the entry for Alaric I.
The eleventh edition has become a commonly quoted source, both because of the reputation of the Britannica at that time and because it is now in the public domain and has been made available on the Internet. The Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911 has been used as a source for many modern projects, such as Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Encyclopedia.
[edit] Gutenberg Encyclopedia
The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia is actually the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, renamed to address Britannica's trademark concerns. As of November 2006, Project Gutenberg only holds an electronic version of Volume 1 (in ASCII text only), the first portion of Volume 2, and part of volume 4. Distributed Proofreaders are currently working on producing a complete electronic edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which will be available from Project Gutenberg when finished. Proofreading has been completed with these volumes, and the final postprocessing and assembly is currently underway for volumes 2 through 5, and formal proofreading on volume 6.
| Section | From | To | Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volume 1: | A | – | Androphagi | [1] |
| Volume 2.1.1: | Andros, Sir Edmund | – | Anise | [2] |
| Volume 4.3: | Bréquigny | – | Bulgaria | [3] |
| Volume 4.4: | Bulgaria | – | Calgary | [4] |
[edit] References
- ^ Gillian Thomas (1992). A Position to Command Respect: Women and the Eleventh Britannica New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, ISBN 0810825678.
- ^ a b *All There is to Know (1994), edited by Alexander Coleman and Charles Simmons. Subtitled: "Readings from the Illustrious Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica". ISBN 067176747X
[edit] External links
[edit] Free, public-domain resources
- Full-page scans in TIFF format, at Tim Starling's Wikisource page. Requires the AlternaTiff plugin in most browsers. In particular, see:
- In Volume 1, the "Prefatory Note" and "Editorial Introduction," which discuss the history and objectives of the edition. (These, and the different Prefatory Note from the Handy Volume edition of 1915, are also included in the Wikisource 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.)
- The article on Encyclopaedia
- Project Gutenberg Volume I
- The Project Gutenberg Volume II
[edit] Versions of this public domain work claiming copyright
- 1911encyclopedia.org LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia World Wide Web edition, "based on" the 1911 encyclopædia. It is sourced from a raw, unproofread OCR-scanned version, without the illustrations: it contains a number of errors, many of them quite serious, as for example when the beginning of one article is spliced to the end of another with the intervening material missing, or tabular material is garbled across the columns, or again anything in a non-Latin script. Around July 10, 2006, the site was relaunched as a wiki using MediaWiki software. Wikilinks have been inserted, apparently automatically, and often with odd results. The wiki allows contributors to correct transcription and linking errors, and to add (in "what's new" pages) new information. An introductory page reads, in part: To the extent permitted by applicable law, all content, including but not limited to edits, changes and additions are © 2002 - 2006 by LoveToKnow Corp. This implies that the content should not be regarded public domain. Determining actual copyright status may require legal advice.
- encyclopedia.jrank.org Online 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica World Wide Web, OCR-scanned version of the encyclopædia, that has scanning errors. This source is very unreliable; for example, long articles (such as "Telescope") may contain only the first quarter of the original information. Links have been inserted, apparently automatically and frequently leading in irrelevant directions. There are also French and German translations, of unknown origin. Readers are invited to submit corrections and additions using a web form, and the content cannot be assumed to be original 1911 material. At the bottom of a page the following footnote can be seen: Site © 2007 - Net Industries.
[edit] Articles about the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition
- "Music and art in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica" by Charles T. Downey (Ionarts, 25 August 2006)
- Misinforming a Nation (1917), by Willard Huntington Wright.
