Doing some research in autodidacticism during the Victorian age, I came across Chamber’s Encyclopedia of 1860. Although actually at the Internet Archive website, the index is best accessed at the bottom of the Wikipedia page.
I had begun with a passage by H.G. Wells in his autobiography:
“There was one of those compilations for the mentally hungry that have played so important a part in supplementing the deficiencies of formal education in the British communities in the nineteenth century. I cannot trace it now. It may have been Cassell’s Popular Educator—I seem to have named that to Geoffrey West and he has jumped to the conclusion that I bought that in parts as it was issued. That was due to his natural desire for animating detail. I never did. I hadn’t the pocket money to buy anything in parts. On the whole I think that the book I have in mind was more probably some compact encyclopædic production of that sound hardheaded Edinburgh firm, Chambers. It had long summaries of the views of various philosophical schools and of the physical and biological sciences, made I should imagine by competent and conscientious Scots.”
And indeed, I immediately got wrapped up in reading about Archimedes (three entries: himself, his theory, his screw, with illustrations).
In the talk I gave recently on diversions from my Wells’ research, a point came up about how some of us as children used to sit in front of the shelf of encyclopedias, just reading. Today’s web is an encyclopedia, just in its unedited version. When I spend the day looking for evidence, following trails, I’m doing a broader, shallower version of what I did as a child. But when I find it in older works that have been digitized, like this one, the thrill is exactly the same.
