The subject of the painting, Millais’s grandson, who later became Admiral Sir William James, did not die until 1973 – and he was always known to his friends as Bubbles.
Like all good advertisers, Barratt was quick to see ways in which the interests of his soap might be made to coincide with those of his country. He believed, and had told the public, that its health, its looks and its soul stood to gain by the use of Pears’ soap; he had not yet found a way of saying that it improved the mind. By the end of the 19th century, there was a large, newly literate section of the British working class eager for self-improvement. There were also, among the wealthier classes, many shrewd philanthropists eager to assist them. When Barratt got the idea of publishing his Shilling Cyclopædia, Pears became the first soap manufacturer to join their ranks. At least, Barratt is said to have had the idea himself, but it is possible that the Cyclopædia was as much the inspiration of its printer – David Bryce, of Glasgow. There was no mention in the book of the editor’s name, and the records of the two firms, Bryce and Pears, have been destroyed, but the present editor has researched the matter, and it seems likely that Bryce compiled the Cyclopædia himself. The work was so consistent in its beliefs and its prejudices, its enthusiasms and its waywardness that it is hard to believe that the anonymous compiler was acting on someone else’s instructions. Many of the ideas that it put forward would scarcely have met with the approval of the directors of A. & F. Pears.
It opened with a short ‘Dictionary’, ‘comprising’ – so the title page boasted – ‘Besides the Ordinary and Newest Words in the Language, Short Explanations of a large number of Scientific, Philosophical, Literary, & Technical Terms’. Among these ‘terms’ one finds the noun ‘deipnosophists’, defined as ‘those who discussed learned subjects at table’. The Cyclopædia was intended at one level as the aspiring deipnosophist’s vade mecum. After the ‘Dictionary’ came a ‘Compendium of General Knowledge Containing a Mass of Curious and Useful Information about Things that every one Ought to Know’. There was plenty to fill an awkward gap at the dinner table: the reason that telegraph wires apparently rise and fall; the origin of flags; the eating methods of barnacles (they are said to kick their food into their mouths). If the conversation turned to bees, a deipnosophist anxious to impress his fellow diners might mention that ‘this was probably the first insect which gained any attention from humanity’; and if the talk was of ancient Egypt he might allude to the curious fact that ‘a cargo of mummy cats was brought to Liverpool from Egypt in 1890, and included 180,000 mummies weighing about 20 tons.’ (Even more curious, these mummified cats ‘sold very briskly. “Heads” went for 4s. 6d. each, and “bodies” – without heads – for 5s. 6d.’) In another section, deipnosophists could acquaint themselves with the meaning of familiar Latin phrases; and if they wished to vary their discourse they could pick up a few tricks from the ‘Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms’. A young man eager to say something meaningful to a person of the opposite sex could consult the chapter on the ‘Language of Flowers’: a simple reference to peaches would apparently convey to his interlocutor that her qualities, like her charms, were unequalled. The Cyclopædia contained a ‘Gazetteer of the World’ and, for the wives and families of deipno sophists, cooking instructions with suggested menus for large dinner parties in every month of the year, and a ‘Dictionary of Medical Information for the Household’.
In 1914, A. & F. Pears, Ltd became a part of Lever Brothers (now Unilever), but Pears’ soap is still known by its old name. Similarly, the Cyclopædia, though it has been published for some years by an independent publisher, is still called Pears’ Cyclopædia. A facsimile of the first edition has recently been issued by Pelham Books. It costs five pounds – a hundred times what it cost in 1897 – but it has become a bestseller all over again. No section of it is without interest.
In the ‘Dictionary’, one sees how certain words, particularly those involving morals and manners, have hardened with age and constant usage. The ‘egoists’ of the 1890s were guilty only in an epistemological sense: in the definition of the ‘Dictionary’, they were certain of nothing but their own existence; ‘genteel’ manners still meant ‘polished’ manners, and not, as now, an excess of manners; and an ‘uncouth’ person was only ‘unusual’ – not today’s lout. People weren’t ‘nice’ in the sense of being amiable, but some exercised ‘tact’, which was a ‘nice perception’, or were ‘nice’ – that is, ‘scrupulous’ – ‘in their actions’. A ‘cartel’ in the halcyon days of free enterprise meant no more than an ‘agreement in relation to exchange of prisoners’; the term ‘quarantine’ applied only to ships, not to children with mumps; and ‘empiricism’ implied not an open mind but a wilful disregard for science.
A chapter headed ‘Desk Information on Subjects of Daily Reference’ offers rules for spelling, the proportion of Anglo-Saxon – as opposed to foreign – words used by ‘our chief English authors’, guidance on how to guess a person’s age, a table of heights and weights for women (but not for men), and a great deal more practical and statistical information assembled in a friendly, avuncular way, the aim being to assist the upwardly mobile in their dealings with the world at large. For the autodidact, for instance, there were ‘hints as to using books’ – ‘Never handle books unless with clean hands … never drop a book upon the floor,’ and so on. (It’s good to be reminded that books were once so well thought of.) Cads were informed that ‘a mutual promise of marriage is binding in English law,’ so they could not go back on their arrangements with the girl next door, however attractive the mill-owner’s daughter had suddenly become. And readers who happened to catch sight of a passing businessman were warned not to open the window and give him a shout, for ‘except in a case of necessity’ it was a breach of etiquette to ‘stop a businessman in the street’. For hypochondriacs, there was a list of ‘Cautions in Visiting the Sick’. Do not visit the sick, it said, ‘when you are fatigued, or when in a state of perspiration, or with the stomach empty, for in such conditions you are very liable to take the infection’. In other words, you don’t have to visit your ailing aunt if you want to go out to lunch.
From the ‘Dictionary of Cookery and Pastry’ one learns how timidly we cook and eat today. For instance, these are the instructions for making mock turtle soup: ‘Put a well-fed calf’s head on in a large pot … boil … scrape the hair clean off … remove the flesh on both sides from the bone, divide the head; take out the tongue.’ For Albert soup: ‘Take the two points of the hind houghs of an ox.’ And to make a dish of lamb’s head you washed the head, plucked it thoroughly, then put it in a large pot, ‘leaving the windpipe hanging over the outside’. What was offered here was ‘the practice of cookery and pastry adapted to the business of everyday life’, so one has to assume that these were recipes for dishes eaten not at Windsor Castle but in quite ordinary houses. The quantities and variety are stunning. Ten to twelve pounds of the middle part of a brisket was the quantity of meat advised for a beef stew, and for roast beef a sixteen-pound joint. Soups might be made with anything from strawberries to macaroni, duck might be stewed, turkey boiled, ox cheeks made into cutlets, oysters into soufflés (or fried or scalloped or creamed), chicken into custards, fish into sausages, and brown bread into ice cream. There are recipes for nine kinds of scone; for gingerbread, gingerbread (superior), plain gingerbread and very plain gingerbread; and for cakes and puddings whose names now read like an elegy for the England of country-house luncheons and nursery teas.
The ‘Medical Dictionary’ is a salutary reminder of what it was like to live in those days when TB was ‘probably the greatest scourge that ever visited mankind’ and when the suggested treatment for almost every illness, because it was the only available line of action, was ‘free evacuation of the bowels’. ‘The treatment of asthma should in every instance commence by clearing the bowels’: after reading entry upon entry giving the same advice, one begins to see Freud’s discussion of anality in a new light. For the ordinary British
doctor, ‘that commonest of all evils and predisposer of disease’ was constipation; Freud called it anal retention. Hysteria was another condition ripe for a Freudian takeover, because the Cyclopædia makes it abundantly clear that in late Victorian Britain, as in pre-Freudian Vienna, women’s disquiets and discontents were still attributed to indefinable disorders of the womb.
A great many Victorian publications were launched with the purpose of disseminating useful knowledge – a characteristically Victorian concept. What distinguished Pears’ Cyclopædia from the rest was, first, its price – it was a marvellous shilling’s worth – and second, its ‘Compendium of General Knowledge’, which in its two hundred pages exemplified almost every form of Victorian popular literature, with the exception of fiction (though many of its biographies of famous men and women read like tiny novels, some as lurid as any popular melodrama). It is highly entertaining and surprisingly subversive. Although intended to elevate and improve the minds of its readers, its message is not orthodox; there is, to take one example, no evidence of support for the Church of England – a bias that must have endeared it to many working-class readers who distrusted the established church. It is weak on the pure sciences, compared with other improving volumes, but rich in information of a technological kind, and it offers ‘a meal of healthful, useful and agreeable mental instruction’ (the phrase comes from William Chambers, who edited the first venture in high-minded popular journalism, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal). It also offers, in the manner of more vulgar enterprises, a wide stock of amusing anecdotes, amazing facts and generally useless knowledge.
Take the first page. After ‘Abbas Pasha’, ‘Abolitionists’, ‘Absinthe’, ‘Achilles’ and ‘Acoustics’ comes this sequence:
ACTORS AS SWORDSMEN. Sir Henry Irving is said to be the most expert …
ACTORS, LONG-LIVED. Mr Underhill, the famous comedian of the Stuart period, performed in the reigns of Charles II, James II, William III, and Queen Anne …
ACTORS PLAYING EVERY MALE PART IN A PLAY. The veteran actor, Mr Henry Howe, played every male part in The Lady of Lyons.
ACTORS’ STATURE. Mr Fritz Reinma, Sergeant Caramel in The Old Guard, stands about 6ft 4in …
ACTORS WITH OFFICIAL ROBES …
ACTRESS WHO HAS PERFORMED MOST OFTEN BEFORE THE QUEEN …
ACTRESS WHO HAS PLAYED GREATEST NUMBER OF PARTS …
The compiler, it seems, was eager to assure his readers that they would find in the ‘Compendium’ answers not only to questions they had long been asking but to questions they would never have thought to ask.
There is enough bizarre material to satisfy the most idle curiosity. Catastrophe and misfortune are particularly well covered. An entry on banking commemorates history’s most spectacular bankruptcies. (‘The worst bankruptcy on record was that of Overend, Gurney & Co. … whose failure entailed the failure of other firms to the awful amount of £100,000,000.’) Other entries catalogue the most devastating shipwrecks, the biggest fires, the worst famines, the most ghastly earthquakes. Statistics of every sort abound. The author with the longest index; the novel with the shortest title (‘A novel has been published in the USA under the title “?”’); the theatre with the largest seating capacity; the cost of building Solomon’s Temple; the physical dimensions of heaven:
A cube of 12,000 furlongs is 496,793,088,000,000,000,000 cubic feet. [The initial figure derives from the Book of Revelation.] If half of that is reserved for the Throne of God and the Court of Heaven, and a quarter of it for the streets of the city, there is still left enough space to provide 30,321,843,750,000,000 ordinary-sized rooms. That would give one room apiece to all the inhabitants of a million worlds as thickly peopled as the earth is now.
Meanwhile, Sarah Bernhardt’s is the largest bed in the world; and the most expensive feathers are those that form the tuft in the Prince of Wales’s crown – they ‘took twenty years to collect, are valued at £10,000, and are known to have caused the death of least twenty hunters’.
The number of pins manufactured each day (‘50 to 60 million … in England alone’), the occupations of suicides (soldiers head the list, followed by butchers), the odds against a woman’s getting married after the age of sixty – there is no limit to the diversity of topics. Some of the entries under the letter ‘T’ are ‘Trades Injurious to Teeth’, ‘Tourists Killed in the Alps’ (24 a year), ‘Tight Rope across Niagara’, ‘Tea Drinkers, the Greatest’ (Australians), ‘Tree’s Height from Its Shadow’, ‘Tips in Country Houses’ and ‘Thirteen at Table’:
If the average age of the company is 72½ years, then there is a scientific probability that one of them will die within a year; if the average age is less than 72½ years, there is no scientific probability at all. If the average age is 20 years, there must be 129 people at dinner before there is any scientific probability of one of them dying within a year. At 30 years there must be 119, at 40 years 103, at 50 years 73, at 60 years 35, and at 70 years 17.
The compiler introduces the ‘Compendium’ with a prefatory note that makes no mention of these odd facts. The subjects treated, he says, are those to which he has had his attention drawn in the ordinary course of conversation or reading. He doesn’t say that in discussing them he has expressed his own opinions with the boldness of Dr Johnson compiling his famous dictionary a hundred and fifty years earlier. Like Dr Johnson, he clearly relished his task. His enjoyment is everywhere apparent. In facetious distortions: Darwin’s book is called ‘Origin of Species by Natural Solution’, and Keats’s most famous ode is ‘Ode to a Grecian Inn’. In joky asides: describing the fashionable belief in Theosophy, he observes that ‘the chief agents in founding the present “boom” were Madame H.P. Blavatsky, Colonel H.S. Olcott and Mr W.Q. Judge’ and adds, ‘With such initials it was impossible to fail!’ In provocative fabrications: judges, he says, ‘were not allowed to wear gloves on the English bench for fear of bribes being dropped into them’. In whims ical formulations: ‘Monkeys are dear little things, and so like men.’ In artful paradoxes: Dieu et mon droit ‘was first adopted on the arms of England by Richard I; but Elizabeth, the most notorious flirt of her century – which also saw Mary Stuart – displaced it for Semper eadem, “Always the same”.’ In extravagant denunciations: ‘the one danger’ of Froebel’s system of education was a ‘tendency to teach by implication, that the maximum results can be obtained with the minimum effort – a most pestilential heresy’. In heartfelt commendations: Simon de Montfort was ‘the best swordsman in Europe and a really good man’, Pericles ‘the finest of the ancient Greeks’. And in heartless dismissals:
Werner Friedrich, the German poet … was the founder of the branch of the Romantic School of Poets that dealt with the extravagant mysteries of ‘fate-tragedies’. His own fate was tragic enough, as he married three times, and was three times divorced, and then entered the Romish Church as a priest.
Poor Werner: remembered for three inauspicious marriages that drove him to celibacy.
Modern encyclopedias are uniform and poker-faced. The compiler of the ‘Compendium of General Knowledge’ praised as he pleased, jeered as he pleased, condemned as he pleased. Take contemporary British writers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was ‘one of the greatest poetesses that have ever lived’; Kipling ‘is probably the most brilliant writer of short stories that the world has ever seen’, Carlyle ‘one of the Greatest English writers of this century’, Thackeray ‘one of the most lovable of English writers’. Tennyson ‘had a morbid dislike to adverse criticism’ but ‘never failed to profit by it when revising his work’; Dickens ‘strained far too much after “effect”’; George Meredith’s ‘difficult style is unnecessarily irritating, and has deservedly prevented him from ever becoming popular’; while Mrs Henry Wood’s work is ‘rather vulgar’. The compiler could also, of course, ignore as he pleased: Tolstoy is ‘the Russian novelist’, but Dostoevsky has no entry at all. In modern Italian literature, incidentally, ‘there is no name of outstanding importance.’ Yet there is nothing ec
centric or perverse in these observations; the compiler was telling his readers which books he thought they would benefit from reading. Not Mrs Henry Wood’s ‘essentially commonplace melodrama’. Nor, on the other hand, Meredith’s rebarbative novels. Dickens was to be approached with care, because, although a ‘great artist’, he was sometimes – it’s inferred – more interested in ‘effect’ than in telling the truth, whereas Thackeray, a less popular writer, had a more acute sense of the dangers of social aspiration. The compiler writes about Thackeray with personal affection:
Widely as he was and is read and admired, the superficial stricture upon him, that he was ‘a cynic’, is often repeated. So far as it rests on any basis, the criticism is due to his intense and even morbid sensitiveness to ‘snobbishness’, against which he is always raising his protest. But he did not really think meanly of human nature, and he was himself a man of most tender heart.
None of these were necessarily fashionable opinions, and those writers who read what the Cyclopædia had to say about them would not have attached much importance to it. But the compiler was unsympathetic to fashion, and favoured writers such as Carlyle and Tolstoy (‘the only real prophet of the present age’), who denounced it from a great height.
Like most of his contemporaries (though not Carlyle), the compiler of the Cyclopædia earnestly believed in the possibility of progress. All that was needed were improvements in knowledge. Not simply more knowledge but the right sort of knowledge, which would lead inevitably to the right sort of society. He called this knowledge ‘scientific’, meaning that it could be fitted into a rational system, and the subjects that interested him were those, like education, moral philosophy and politics, that pertained to deep issues of social organisation. A few great men had done well and many had done badly, but this was largely a matter of accident or whim and therefore relatively unimportant. Hence his nonchalant treatment of kings and queens and politicians.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 4