How to Encyclopediate

In “The Pickwick Papers”  Mr. Pott, the editor of a very partisan and very parochial newspaper, attempts to persuade Mr. Pickwick of the high quality of a series of literary articles lately published in his periodical:








Dickens here serves up a satirical roundhouse. The victims include the provincial intelligentsia, hack writers generally, inept autodidacts, and, not least, the sort of intellectual butchers who would presume to cleave human knowledge into alphabetically convenient chunks, like so many roasts, chops, and steaks. 

Some years before “Pickwick,” the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took it into his head to plan an Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. With a similarly satirical eye on Britannica, Coleridge remarked that 


Coleridge’s plan envisioned a work divided into four great divisions, and to a modern editor it looks only slightly less likely to have been the product of an opium dream than the poem “Kubla Khan.” 

1st Edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica. EB, Inc.What is the proper organization of an encyclopedia? Alphabetical? Topical? Chronological? By (someone’s individual judgment of) importance? By length of articles? By color (apples, tomatoes, fire trucks, W.C. Fields’s nose, all lumped together in Volume 1)? By the supposed connections between ideas? All of these have been tried, except – I believe but am not certain – the color one. 

To some extent the organization problem has disappeared in the age of online encyclopedias. What was alphabetically sequenced in print is simply a swarm of available files when accessed electronically. But there remains a question of what is in them. 

Consider for a moment what should be contained in a single article. The naïve answer is, Everything pertinent to the subject. But you need not be a William Blake, seeing 

…a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower

to grasp quickly that no article could possibly do that. Where does pertinence end in a universe of relations and interconnections and influences? 

Imagine taking a single encyclopedia article and expanding it to fully explain every single reference in it. Very quickly it would become a monster of an article, one in which the original topic might well be lost to view. It might even become an article that treated the entire known universe. 

At one extreme, then, an encyclopedia might be a single vast article covering everything under the sun and over it as well. The title? Perhaps “What Is.” How that article might be organized is a large problem, and a larger one is how anyone would ever find some particular fact in it. At the other extreme, an encyclopedia might consist of thousands, millions, of articles each focused on a single, very narrowly defined topic. How narrow? Suppose instead of an article on “George Washington,” there were one on “George Washington’s teeth” and another on “George Washington’s left knee” and one on “George Washington’s breakfast on May 8, 1797” and so on and on. Supposing the necessary information were available, there might be nigh on to an infinity of articles having to do with George Washington. Suppose there were, and that you read them all. Would you thereby obtain a good understanding of what we mean when we say “George Washington was the father of his country”? Maybe; maybe not. 

Dickens and Coleridge aren’t the only thinkers to have considered the problem, to be sure. That they did, though, ought to suffice to show that it is something to think about. Nowadays it seems that encyclopedia-making is enjoying something of a renaissance. It would be nice if thinking carefully about the job were similarly popular.

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