Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition

Encyclopædia Britannica, the 11th edition

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 its time. The articles are still of value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries; however, they contain 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.

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 increased amount of American and Canadian content, but also 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 age, such as Edmund Gosse, J.B. Bury, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, Prince Peter Kropotkin, T.H. Huxley, 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 contributed articles to the edition.

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 — 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 have biographies of living people.

According to Coleman and Simmons, p 32 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 a substantially American venture.

In 1922, they published an additional three volumes 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 11th edition formed the basis for every revision of the Encyclopædia Britannica up 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, particularly certain passages. The encyclopedia abounds in the use of pathetic fallacy and other dated literary devices which often confound a modern reader, yet portions have some appeal to the modern literary reader.

Notable commentaries on the Eleventh Edition

1913 advertisement for the 11th edition

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."

Amos Urban Shirk, who read both the entire Eleventh and Fourteenth Edition in the 1930s, said he found the Fourteenth Edition 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: "..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."

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 was indeed a reliable source for its time, for modern readers, some articles are now less so for a number of reasons including systemic nationalism, polemic authors, hagiographic treatments and factual inaccuracy:

• Articles about sensitive topics are today considered biased — such as the First French Empire.
• Similarly, 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 polemic, such as the Stockholm Bloodbath, where the author clearly supports one faction against the other.
• Articles about nobility were often hagiographies, such as in the case of Umberto I of Italy being in favour of a king widely perceived as a tyrant by his people.
• Many articles are now factually outdated, such as 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, in some respects the modern interpretation of history is very different from that reflected in the eleventh edition.

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.

Gutenberg Encyclopedia

The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia is actually the 11th Edition of the EB, renamed to address Britannica's trademark concerns. As of February 2006, Project Gutenberg only holds an electronic version of Volume 1 and the first portion of Volume 2. 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]

External links

Free, public-domain resources:

• Full-page scans in tiff format, at Tim Starling's Wikisource page. Probably requires the AlternaTiff plugin. 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

Versions of this public domain work claiming copyright:

• LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia World Wide Web edition. This appears to be 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 foreign language. A footnote reads: Although linking to this site is encouraged, reproducing Contents on another site or redistributing Contents is forbidden. Taking Contents from this site and editing it and posting it on another site is forbidden and will result in swift legal action. This implies that the content is not public domain. Determining actual copyright status may require legal advice.
• Online 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. World Wide Web, OCR-scanned version of the encyclopedia, that has scanning errors. This source is VERY unreliable. Long articles (such as "Telescope") may contain only the first quarter of the original information! At the bottom of a page the following footnote can be seen Site content, images, and layout Copyright © 2005 - Net Industries, worldwide. Do not copy, download, transfer, or otherwise replicate the site content in whole or in part. Links to articles and home page are always encouraged.