Only Connect Abhijit Gupta

In an earlier instalment of this column, I had written with approval about a deliberately bogus encyclopedia project known as the Uncyclopedia. Now to show that I am a serious individual, I will write about the more common or garden variety of encyclopedias. This is going to be a sober and scholarly article and those seeking excitement are advised to turn to the comics page.

It was Pliny the Elder who wrote the first encyclopedia in the western world — the Naturalis Historia, in the first century CE. Soon after, he perished while trying to take a closer look at the Vesuvius volcanic eruption of 79 CE. This should have been a dire warning for future encyclopaedists but it went entirely unheeded. Take the case of Photius, compiler of the Myriobibion in the ninth century, who was dismissed and banished by the Byzantine emperor Leo VI, though he had been the emperor’s childhood tutor. One is also moved by the plight of the Chinese emperor Yongle who commissioned a mammoth encyclopedia project called the Yonglè Dàdian in 1403, but died of depression when he failed to chase away a rabble army of Tartars from the Gobi desert.

Then we come to the strange case of Sir Thomas Browne, who employed the word ‘encyclopedia’ as early as in 1646. He died without event in 1682 and it was thought that the encyclopaedists’ curse had finally lifted. But his coffin was accidentally reopened by workmen in 1840 whereupon his skull became a cause for dispute and was not reburied till 1922, when it was registered in the church of Saint Peter Mancroft as aged 316 years! He is followed by the unfortunate John Harris who introduced the alphabetical format in his Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences (1704) and died of poverty “brought on by his own bad management of his affairs”. One also sympathises with the unfortunately named William Smellie who edited the first-ever edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica during 1768-1771.

From the 18th century onwards, encyclopedia-making became a less hazardous profession, with the likes of Ephraim Chambers, Denis Diderot and Charles Joseph Panckoucke dying uneventful deaths. Human knowledge progressed and the Age of Enlightenment took place.

But why is Only Connect, a column on virtual lives and worlds, so obsessed with encyclopedias? The columnist himself is not very sure but would like to pretend that he is — so he claims that it was the encyclopedia projects of the 18th century that first considered the possibility of connectedness. For Diderot, writing famously in the preface of his 28-volume Encyclopedie in 1772, the ideal encyclopedia was not a mindless assemblage of facts but rather an index of connections:

“Distances of time disappear; different places are contiguous; connections are created between all inhabited places in space in time, and all living and thinking beings are in contact with each other.”