The Nuttall Encyclopædia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Nuttall Encyclopædia^[1]: Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge^[2] is an early-20th-century encyclopedia, edited by Rev. James Wood, first published in London in 1900 by Frederick Warne & Co Ltd. It is named for Dr. Peter Austin Nuttall (d. 1869), whose works, such as Standard Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (published in 1863), were eventually acquired by Frederick Warne, and would be published for decades to come.

The encyclopedia has a strong editorial voice, and concerns itself mostly with people and places. It may be the only printed encyclopedia that has entries for fictional characters from Charles Dickens' books, but at the same time lacks entries for fruit. Entries generally are very short. It often reflects the personal bias of the author, and of course views events from its own perspective in time; both aspects can be seen in entries like Dates of Epoch-Making Events.

As another example, the entry for Venezuela displays both a strong pro-British bias and the recency of an 1899 event:

...the boundary line between the British colony and Venezuela was for long matter of keen dispute, but by the intervention of the United States at the request of the latter a treaty between the contending parties was concluded, referring the matter to a court of arbitration, which met at Paris in 1895, and settled it in 1899, in vindication, happily, of the British claim, the Schomburgk line being now declared to be the true line, and the gold-fields ours.

The title page proclaims this encyclopedia to be "a concise and comprehensive dictionary of general knowledge consisting of over 16,000 terse and original articles on nearly all subjects discussed in larger encyclopædias, and specially dealing with such as come under the categories of history, biography, geography, literature, philosophy, religion, science, and art".

In 2004, Project Gutenberg published a version of the 1907 edition, which is now in the public domain.