Everything about Encyclop Dia Britannica Eleventh Edition totally explained
The
Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (
1910–
1911) is a 29-volume reference work that marked the beginning of the
Encyclopædia Britannica's transition from a British to an American publication. 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. This edition of the encyclopedia is now in the
public domain, but some of its out-of-date content makes its use as a source for modern scholarship problematic.
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's 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.
The initials of the encyclopedia's contributors appear at the end of each article (at the end of a section in the case of longer articles, such as that on China) and a key is given in each volume to these initials. Some articles were written by the best-known scholars of the day, such as
Edmund Gosse,
J. B. Bury,
Algernon Charles Swinburne,
John Muir,
Peter Kropotkin,
T. H. Huxley and
William Michael Rossetti. Among the lesser-known contributors were some who would later become distinguished, 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. Most of the work was done by a mix of journalists,
British Museum and other scholars. The 1911 edition for the first time saw a number of female contributors, with thirty-four women contributing 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; even though the overall length of the work was roughly the same as its predecessor, the number 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 the content of the encyclopedia was made up as follows:
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 was the basis of every later version of the
Encyclopædia Britannica until the completely new fifteenth edition, using modern information presentation, was published in
1974.
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." 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.
Many articles are now factually outdated, in particular those on science, technology, international and municipal law, and medicine. For example, the article on the vitamin deficiency disease beriberi speculates that it's caused by a fungus, vitamins not having been discovered at the time. Articles about geographic places mention 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 theory, 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 of Encyclopædia Britannica has become a commonly quoted source, both because of the reputation of the Britannica and because it's now in the public domain and has been made available on the Internet. It has been used as a source by many modern projects including Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Encyclopedia.
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 2007, 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.
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