The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1768–1771) was a work of reference published in three volumes in quarto. It was founded by Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was initially sold unbound in installments over the course of three years. Almost all of the articles were compiled by William Smellie, while Macfarquhar handled printing and Bell the copperplates.
Publication history
The idea of publishing the Encyclopaedia Britannica came from Colin Macfarquhar, a bookseller and printer, and possibly Andrew Bell, an engraver, both of Edinburgh.Frank A. Kafker and Jeff Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition (1768–1771): A Modest Start", in The Early Britannica: The Growth of an Outstanding Encyclopedia (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 12–13. Although re-editions of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1728) were still popular, and despite the appearance of several new general encyclopedias on the English market since the 1740s,Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 11. Macfarquhar and Bell thought the time ripe for a new encyclopedia.
According to its title page, the first edition of the Britannica was "By a SOCIETY of GENTLEMEN in SCOTLAND."Encyclopaedia Britannica, first edition (Edinburgh: Bell and Macfarquhar, 1771), 1: title page. Previous encyclopedias as well had been ascribed to societies of gentlemen, presumably to glorify a situation in which an unprestigious compiler toiled nearly alone. Such, in fact, was the case of the first edition of the Britannica.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 19–20. Needing an editor who would work inexpensively, the two chose a twenty-eight-year-old printer and scholar named William Smellie, who was "always hard-pressed for cash."Richard B. Sher, ed., introduction to Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of William Smellie, by Robert Kerr, reprint edition (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2007), vii. Smellie accepted their offer of 200 pounds sterling to prepare the whole encyclopedia, including articles on "fifteen capital sciences."Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", p. 15. It is known that he had minor help from one contributor, James Anderson, who wrote the articles "Dictionary, "Pneumatics", and "Smoke", and it is possible that he had a few others.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 1920. For the most part, however, he worked alone.
Like the Cyclopaedia and other contemporary encyclopedias, the first edition of the Britannica was published serially. The weekly installments (often called "numbers" and equivalent to thick pamphlets), were later bound into three volumes. The installments were priced at 6 pence on normal paper or 8 pence on better paper. They appeared from December 1768 to around August 1771.Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 176. Once assembled as a three-volume set in 1771, the first edition had 2,391 pages and cost 2 pounds, 10 shillings on normal paper.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 17–18, 22. It went on to be reprinted in London in 1773 and 1775, selling at least 3,000 sets and probably a few thousand more.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 58–59.
Essay-style and organizational plan
Organizationally, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was different from any previous encyclopedia. What set it apart was the practice of including two kinds of typographically distinct entries, shorter "articles", and longer "treatises" in a single alphabetical sequence.Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History throughout The Ages, second edition (New York: Hafner, 1966), 138 This was the "new plan" that the Britannica boasted about in its subtitle. In principle, treatises were to cover the arts and sciences, leaving articles to deal with their subordinate objects. Most previous dictionaries of the arts and sciences, the Cyclopaedia included, had limited themselves to short entries, and while John Harris"s Lexicon Technicum (1704) had proposed "treatises" on a few topics, he had not distinguished them typographically or used them systematically. Such approaches to encyclopedia-making were derided as "dismembering the Sciences" in the anonymous preface to the first edition of the Britannica:
The idea of including treatises in an encyclopedia may have been inspired by Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745), an alphabetical encyclopedia that contained only treatises.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 23–24. There is some evidence that Smellie, rather than Bell or Macfarquhar, came up with the idea of combining Coetlogon's treatises with traditional articles.Jeff Loveland, An Alternative Encyclopedia? Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal History (1745) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010), 141–142. Regardless, the Britannica continued to intermix formally distinguished articles and treatises through the 10th edition.Jeff Loveland, "Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica", Book History 9 (2006): 73–74.
If one point of the treatises in the first edition of the Britannica was to avoid "dismembering" disciplines, another was to allow for self-instruction. On this score, the anonymous preface made a bold claim:
Chambers would have disagreed with this judgment. In his view, his ample use of cross-references allowed readers to learn the principles of any discipline by following all the cross-references in his short articles in disciplines. Furthermore, his overview of knowledge in the introduction to the Cyclopaedia listed articles to be read to understand any one of forty-seven major arts and sciences.Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 128–130, 132–141. In contrast, by presenting disciplines at length, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had less need of cross-references or an overview of knowledge. Accordingly, it dispensed with any overview and offered far fewer cross-references than the Cyclopaedia had.Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 178–180.
In the end, the first edition of the Britannica contained forty-four treatises. The longest were "Anatomy" (166 pages), "Chemistry" (117 pages), and "Medicine" (112 pages), while the shortest were shorter than many articles, though their large, centered titles continued to identify them as treatises.Loveland, Alternative Encyclopedia, 140–141. Page-wise, the treatises made up a little more than half of the encyclopedia.
Sources used Smellie compiled almost the entirety of the first edition alone. Supposedly, he "held Dictionary making in great contempt; and used to say jocularly, that he had made a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences with a pair of scissors, clipping out from various books a quantum sufficit of matter for the printer."Robert Kerr, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of william Smellie, reprint edition, ed. Richard B. Sher, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 1: 362–363. Most of his sources are among the roughly one hundred listed in the front matter of volume 1, although a few, notably the French Encyclopédie (1751–1772) of Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D'Alembert, were probably listed mainly for show. Although he did not use the Encyclopédie directly to any significant extent, except in imitating what what still an unusual title, Smellie did copy articles from other encyclopedias, including the Cyclopaedia and the second edition of Coetlogon's encyclopedia, the New Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1759). Above all, he copied many short articles from New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1754–1755), published by William Owen.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 20–22. Among non-alphabetical sources, Smellie borrowed from the English translation of Voltaire's article on taste in the Encyclopédie for his own article "Taste", and from Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), pieced together with material from Joseph Priestley's History and Present State of Electricity (1767), in the treatise "Elecricity."Kafker and Loveland, William Smellie's Edition, 32, 41–42. More generally, much of his borrowing came from Scottish authors.Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland & America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 135–136.
Scope and contents The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was subtitled A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Dictionaries of the arts and sciences are often considered as being the most direct precursors of modern, general encyclopedias. They emerged in the late seventeenth century and proliferated in Britain in the eighteenth century, the Cyclopaedia being the most successful example. In principle, they covered disciplines that could understood systematically (that is, the arts and sciences), not isolated facts, notably the facts of history, biography, and geography.Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 1216. Accordingly, historical dictionaries and dictionaries were still seen as complements for much of the eighteenth century. Well before the time of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, however, dictionaries of the arts and sciences had been encroaching on the territory of historical dictionaries.Jeff Loveland, The European Encyclopedia, from 1650 to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 16–28. This trend can be seen in the history of the Encyclopaedia Britannica itself. Already in the first edition, there are thousands of articles on places, many of them copied from the New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 29. In the second edition, a decision was made to offer biographies. In part, Smellie declined the editorship of the second edition for this very reason, reportedly saying that biographical articles would be "by no means consistent with the title Arts and Sciences."Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 176–177.
Not surprisingly for a dictionary of arts and sciences, the first edition was weak in history. In geography, we have seen, it flouted the ideal of the dictionary of arts and sciences by including thousands of articles on places, but they tended to be short and superficial.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 28–30. In dealing with the mechanical arts (that is, technology), it merely matched the poor record of previous British dictionaries and arts and sciences, ignoring the extraordinary coverage in the Encyclopédie. Medicine and the sciences, though not mathematics, were among the encyclopedia's strongest domains, constituting the object of most of the longest treatises.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 38. Smellie compiled many of the scientific and medical treatises from recognized authorities: "Anatomy" from the works of the anatomists Alexander Monro primus and Jacob Winslǿw; "Chemistry" from the works of the chemist Pierre-Joseph Macquer; and "Midwifery" from the works of the other William Smellie, a celebrated midwife and obstetrician.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 42, 47, 50. One of the more notorious treatises was "Botany." Smellie had been a skeptic of the notion of plant sexuality since his days as a student at the University of Edinburgh, and he used the third section of "Botany" to mount a forceful attack on the concept, which was widely but universally accepted at the time.Kafker and Loveland, "William Smellie's Edition", 44–46.
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