Reverend Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859) was a key figure in the movement to popularise knowledge in the 1830s; his Cabinet Cyclopaedia participates in the intellectual legacy provided by the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert (17 vols. 1751-1765), whose ideas have the distinction of being able to “exert a profound influence on the subsequent direction of European thought” (Einbinder 24). Above all, the Encyclopédie influenced people’s intellectual conceptions in advocating religious tolerance and the right of people to think according to their conscience: “No other encyclopedia has exerted such a deep political influence on the history of its country, or occupied such a conspicuous place in the literary and intellectual life of its century” (Einbinder 25). Lardner then was capitalizing on a literary phenomenon that was less than a century old and was tied to the growth of the middle class. Although Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728) predates the Encyclopédie, the British truly embraced the idea of the encyclopaedia with the appearance in 1768 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, under the editorship of William Smellie. The Britannica reached eighteen volumes by its third edition (1788-1797) and the sixth edition of 1823 (20 volumes) sold 30,000 copies. There were also competitors, including David Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (18 vols. 1809-1818), the London Encyclopaedia (22 vols. 1829) and Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia in 45 volumes (1802-1819). All of these were organized in alphabetical order, though the unsuccessful Encyclopaedia Metropolitan, begun 1817, adopted a systematic organization of contents developed by S.T. Coleridge and articulated in his “Treatise on Method” (1818) (McCalman et al. 497). If Lardner can’t be said to be as influential, his awareness of the cultural power of the encyclopaedia meant for a more popular audience than was earlier conceived, but is produced within ‘the corruptions of trade’ (Saunders 175). Lardner’s encyclopaedia is testament to how those directing the book trade had to reconcile themselves to the “terrible era of cheapness” whose date of inception bookseller Charles Knight names as 1827 (Jack 431). By the 1830s there were a number of projects meant for middle-class readers contemporary with Lardner. In 1830 Colburn and Bentley projected four series: National Library of General Knowledge, Novelists Library, the Library of Voyages and Travels and the Juvenile Library [not Godwin’s]. Constable and Murray had their own lines and the Library of Useful Knowledge by Knight for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was produced for the working class, and sold in fortnightly parts of 32 pages at six pence a part, which in the case of some issues, sold 30,000 copies (Jack 431).
What was distinctive about the Cyclopaedia was its volume format, a departure from works like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which arranges its subjects into alphabetical order. The volumes of the Cyclopaedia were organized into nine “cabinets,” (including Arts and Useful Arts, Biography, Geography, History, Natural History, and Natural Science), partly working on the principle of the cabinet of curiosities and partly because Lardner and his publishers envisioned people displaying the volumes in cabinets in their homes. The volumes were bound in cloth and priced at six shillings each, which made them affordable to members of the middle class. Morse Peckham places an importance on the project, calling the revolution in literacy as having an “effect on modern society almost as profound as the industrial and agricultural revolutions” (38). Most purchases were not through subscription; in fact, projects like Lardner’s demonstrate a transformation of the book trade from dependence upon subscription to a concentration on advertisement for sales (41). Peckham points out that the project appeared in a time of changing sensibility, and if its advertisements which guarantee it will “claim a place in the drawing-room and the boudoir” draw upon language of the Regency, “the appeal to a serious audience is a sign of the growing earnestness of the Victorian world” (41). More evidence of burgeoning Victorian values is present in promotional literature, which reassured that nothing would be admitted “which can have the most remote tendency to offend public or private morals.” The principal object was to “enforce the cultivation of religion and the practice of virtue” as a “principal object with all who undertake to inform the public mind” (Peckham 41). Another principle made clear in Lardner’s prospectus was that the volumes were intended for the general reader rather than the specialist. Knowledge of the arts and sciences is meant “to awaken a taste for the contemplation of the works of nature and the results of art” (Peckham 42). Not all of the projected authors wrote volumes, so that is likely how Mary Shelley came to write for the project (Peckham 47). If Peckham has some contempt for its popular nature, he makes the helpful observation that “it is not every authority who can write on a popular level and still write well, accurately, and seriously” (47).
At the same time the project might be seen to have radical political undertones. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1826 elected the first Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at London University (now University College, London), Lardner was a key figure in the movement to popularise knowledge. He gained a reputation as a lecturer on science and mechanics, as well as on subjects like the railroad. In 1827 or 1828 he approached the publisher Longman with the idea of the Cyclopaedia and between 1829 and 1846 there appeared 61 titles in 133 parts (Hays and Peckham 37). Lardner recruited a number of significant figures to write for the project: Thomas Moore, James Mackintosh, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Southey were literary figures who contributed volumes of history. The legal scholar Henry Roscoe wrote a volume as did John Hershel on natural philosophy, and Sir David Brewster on optics. The eminent historian J. C. L. de Sismondi wrote on the Italian Republics. And he wrote seven volumes on science. Morse Peckham places an importance on the project, calling the revolution in literacy as having an “effect on modern society almost as profound as the industrial and agricultural revolutions” (38). In 1840 Lardner gained notoriety when he eloped with Mrs. Heaviside, the wife of a cavalry officer, and after a lucrative lecture tour of the United States and Cuba, the couple settled in exile in Paris where he wrote on the use steam power for the railway and for sea travel (see Hays and Rigg). If he is a figure who is little known today, J. N. Hays aptly sums up his reputation: “As an important mediator of the culture of the new technologies of his time, his influence should not be underestimated, and his writings are a key source for understanding nineteenth-century popular ideas about progress and its relation to technological development” (Oxford DNB).
It is important to recognise the discomfort popular knowledge caused contemporary cultural commentators and literary reviewers. Along with the rise of the University of London and Mechanics’ Institutes, the Cyclopaedia was one of many contemporary publishing ventures to convey useful knowledge at a time Ian Jack cites a reference to the spectacle of “a whole army of Lilliputians, headed by Dr. Lardner, was making glorious progress in the Republic of Literature. Science, History and Art, each and all contributed to render such progress instrumental to the best interests of the body politic” (430). The Athenaeum lamented, “Many are the hands which are feeding and stuffing that great lubberly brat, the Public” (Jack 430). If Larder’s encyclopaedia is immersed in the corruptions of trade, it participates in a project to extend the boundaries of public knowledge so as to include a greater number of people. A pamphlet of 1825 written in response to the advent of Dr. George Birkbeck’s London Mechanics’ Institution (founded 1823 and later Birkbeck College) is more optimistic about “the spectacle of hundreds of industrious individuals, who have finished the labours of the day, congregating together in a spacious apartment, listening with mute admiration to the sublime truths of philosophy, is worthy of a great and enlightened people” (Jack 431). Thomas Love Peacock contributed his satirical perspective in Crotchet Castle (1831) where Doctor Folliott protests, “I am out of all patience with this march of mind. Here has my house been nearly burned down, by my cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics in a six-penny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world’s business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge” (Chapter 2). And William Cobbett did not withhold voicing his hostility to such projects because he was certain that access to knowledge would be controlled by the middle class (Jack 433). However much one suspects Cobbett’s critique was inspired by his own desire to control things, he was right, and the middle class character of projects like that of Lardner needs to be considered to understand the nature of the audience Mary Shelley would inform and influence.
Works Cited
Einbinder, Harvey. The Myth of the Britannica. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Hays, J. N. “Lardner, Dionysius (1793–1859).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Oct 2007
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16068, accessed 27 Jan 2009].
Jack, Ian. English Literature: 1815-1832. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963.
McCalman, Ian et al. Eds. Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. Oxford: Oxford UP,
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Peckham, Morse. “Dr. Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 45 (1951): 37-58.
Rigg, J. M. “Lardner, Dionysius.” Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder, 1892.
Saunders, J.W. The Profession of English Letters. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.