Over the years, the cachet of the Encyclopaedia Britannica never waned; only its profits did. “The Britannica,” Mr. Boyles writes, “had brought prestige, but not much profit, to every proprietor and publisher who had touched it since its first appearance in 1768.” As Britannica increased in size over the years, selling it became all the more difficult. Horace Everett Hooper had ideas about how to change this. One of the poachers would soon become the gamekeeper.
Among the books Hooper sold in America were various versions of the Ninth Edition of Britannica. He not only sold it but was immensely impressed by it. Much therein was worthy of admiration. The Ninth Edition of Britannica, brought out in 25 volumes between 1875 and 1889, represented a dazzling anthology of English writing. Articles ran to 40,000 words and some to the length of small books. Among its contributors were James Bryce, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, John Stuart Mill, and Robert Louis Stevenson. (Contributors to the Seventh Edition had included William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Walter Scott, and Mill.) The Ninth Edition was one of the splendid achievements of the Victorian Age.
Horace Hooper, Mr. Boyles writes, “understood that his business wasn’t just selling books. It was monetizing authority.” An Anglophile, Hooper took it upon himself to improve the sales of Britannica in England by leashing it to that other grand English editorial institution, the Times. Such was the authoritativeness of the Times that in some foreign countries its correspondents were thought more powerful than the English ambassador. “The Times,” Mr. Boyles writes, “was as imperishable a part of national life as the Church of England, though more widely believed.” Despite its towering prestige, the Times was a financial loser. Hooper intervened with a plan by which the two, newspaper and encyclopedia, could each profit.
On the business side, the fortunes of the Times began to change when a man named Charles Moberly Bell, who had earlier been a cotton merchant and a Times correspondent in Egypt, became the paper’s business manager and began to put its financial house in order. The idea of rescuing the Times through its sponsoring of a revised version of the Ninth Edition was Hooper’s. If the Times would permit him to sell the old Ninth Edition of Britannica under its auspices—in what would be called a Times edition—it would gain serious sums in royalties while Britannica would gain allure and sales leads through its association with the Times.
Britannica soon thereafter moved its editorial offices to the top floor of the Times building at London’s Printing House Square. Hooper brought aboard an advertising adept named Henry R. Haxton, a Hearst journalist of bohemian spirit who counted among his friends Ambrose Bierce, James Whistler, and Stephen Crane and who didn’t mind pushing the pedal all the way down on his advertising copy. In effusive, highly colored prose, Haxton’s ads suggested that people must acquire the Encyclopaedia Britannica or remain forever benighted. As Mr. Boyles puts it, Haxton made it seem “that the Britannica was not just a book, it was a cure.”
In 1903, Hooper and Haxton devised a contest called “The Times Competition,” whereby readers of the newspaper were asked to answer, in essay form, questions on subjects of general information. Prizes amounting to £3,585 were offered, first among them a full four-year scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. Haxton claimed in advertisements that those who entered the competition would acquire “Closer concentration of mind, Practice in ready reasoning, Quickness in finding facts, A new form of recreation, An invaluable fund of general information.” One could not pick up the questions at the Times offices but had to mail in one’s request. Readers wise in the ways of salesmanship will grasp that this provided an astonishing list of leads for selling the Ninth Edition. These were used, in the best full-court-press salesmanship, to inundate possible customers for Britannica with mail and even telegrams. “From my bath, I curse you” was the reply of one such recipient of these sales tactics. But the general public response was, in Mr. Boyles’s words, “immediate and overwhelming.”
Some might view this as commercial genius, but to many Englishmen of the day it was American vulgarity let loose and a besmirching of the dignity of the Times. By such heavy-breathing advertising and promotions, Hooper and Charles Moberly Bell, both victims of English upper-class xenophobia, withstood insults and resistance, but their methods eventually brought the Times out of the red. The Hooper innovation of selling Britannica on the installment plan was no small help. Mr. Boyles estimates that Hooper and a business partner named Walter Montgomery Jackson cleared more than a million dollars between them and the Times—measured by today’s exchange rate, something like £6.5 million.
The editor of the revised Ninth Edition and later of the Eleventh—the edition called the Tenth was actually the Ninth with nine supplemental volumes added—was a literary journalist named Hugh Chisholm. Sharing Hooper’s idealism, Chisholm felt that Britannica was “the best way of democratizing self-education.” He coordinated the gargantuan project of the Ninth Edition, whose immensity entailed 1,507 contributors, a staff of 64 assistant editors, some 40,000 articles and an index of roughly 500,000 entries, the whole weighing in at 250 pounds. Along with being a brilliant editorial manager, Chisholm was a trenchant writer. Mr. Boyles quotes him from his Britannica entry on Lord Acton:
Lord Acton has left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians; his very learning seems to have stood in his way; he knew too much and his literary conscience was too acute for him to write easily, and his copiousness of information overloads his literary style. But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and he will certainly be remembered for his influence on others.
In a highly readable style, nicely seasoned with occasional ironic touches, Denis Boyles limns the intricate business negotiations that went into the creation of the Eleventh Edition. He chronicles Britannica’s departure from the Times after Lord Northcliffe acquired the newspaper in 1908; its being taken up by Cambridge University, until that university’s Syndics found its marketing measures too garish; and its sale, in 1920, to Sears, Roebuck in the United States, which sold it chiefly through its catalog.
Mr. Boyles provides excellent portraits of the key figures responsible for the 19th- and early-20th-century editions of Britannica. His last chapter is given over to the Eleventh’s mishandling, owing to its having been a work of its time, of such key, and in our day super-sensitive, subjects as Women, African-Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Arabs, and its difficulties with Catholic and Protestant readers. None of this finally diminishes the overall accomplishment that is Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Eleventh Edition. Mr. Boyles ends by asserting that the ethos of progress that undergirded the Eleventh was put paid to by World War I:
Even the most visionary Edwardians would never have ventured to guess that a deeply held belief in the ideology of Progress would lead eventually to the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme.
The élan of the Eleventh Edition would never be regained. In the United States the set was marketed differently, chiefly by door-to-door salesman, whose pitch was less to self-education than to the guilt of parents concerned about the social mobility of their children. Prestige, though, still clung to the encyclopedia: Well into the 20th century, the person who wrote the Britannica article on any given subject was thought to be the world’s leading authority on that subject.
In 1943, Sears wished to unload the Encyclopaedia Britannica and donated it to the University of Chicago. Robert Hutchins, then president of the university, didn’t see how an intellectual institution could also run and sell such a work, so he offered it for a derisive sum to William Benton, a former advertising man who was then his vice president for public affairs, with the university to receive a handsome royalty. At Benton’s death in 1973, these royalties had amounted to $47.8 million.
Business was carried on as usual until 1968, when Benton hired Sir William Haley as the editor in chief of Britannica. Haley had been a director of the Manchester Guardian, the director-general o
f the BBC and editor-in-chief of the Times—a résumé that could have been completed in its perfection only by his having also been editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I was one of Sir William’s senior editors and held him in the highest esteem. A cultivated man of gravity and wide knowledge, he planned to expand Britannica’s coverage and raise its literary and intellectual quality through his connections with Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and other members of a remarkable generation of English philosophers, historians, and scientists.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica under Sir William Haley figured to be a splendid set of books, a rival, perhaps, to the great Eleventh Edition. Alas, it was not to be. Corporate politics worked against Haley, who departed the company. (When I left not long after, he wrote to me: “I am glad you have departed the Britannica; they worship different gods than we.”) Robert Hutchins, the one man with influence over Benton, contrived to elevate his old sidekick Mortimer Adler to the directorship of a vastly revised Britannica. Once in charge Adler, a man whose high IQ was matched only by his low sensibility, twisted the set into separate volumes of longer and shorter entries, called respectively the Macropaedia and the Micropaedia, with a vast index volume called the Propaedia. The result was an intellectually tidy and not especially readable work. The great day of Britannica’s distinction was done and, after the advent of the Internet, would never return. You can look it up.
Grammar
(2014)
Grammar is not everybody’s idea of a good time. Thanks to the remarkable inefficiencies of the Chicago public school system, I was able to steer happily clear of the subject until college. Until then, the entirety of my grammatical knowledge included beginning a sentence with a capital letter and ending it with a period and never using the word “ain’t.” Commas to me were so many gnats strewn upon sheets of printed paper, a colon was an internal organ, and a dash a synonym for just a touch of ketchup or mustard. As for the semicolon, my understanding of it was equal to my understanding of Mandarin Chinese, in which, for all I knew, it might have passed as a letter.
Part of the problem here is youth, which is often unprepared to receive knowledge that does not immediately excite. How, after all, could a male adolescent, hormones churning, care about a dangling participle when his own participle so seldom dangled? I could scarcely have told you what a split infinitive was because I had no notion of what an infinitive might be. If a sentence wished to run on, hey, that was fine by me. Ask me the meaning of the genitive, the ablative or the gerundive and I would probably reply that it is not nice to mix with Mr. Inbetween. Grammar, fair to say, was not my long suit.
I first learned grammar through instruction in French by a modest man named Philip Kolb, who I subsequently learned was the editor, in French, of the letters of Marcel Proust. Only later, gradually, did I pick up the rudiments of English grammar. When I was a university teacher in a department of English, I corrected my students’ obvious lapses in grammar, but I should certainly never correct anyone else’s grammar, in public or private, nor do I deign to correct that of the contemporary authors whose books I occasionally review. The critic John Simon has made rather a speciality of this. I once met a man who told me that John corrected a toast he gave at a wedding.
I used the word “speciality” in the penultimate sentence of my last paragraph, and not the word “specialty,” and straightaway became a touch nervous. H. W. Fowler, whose magisterial Modern English Usage I keep near my desk, informs me that it is all right to do so. The two words, he reports, seem to call out for differentiation, though little progress has been made in achieving it, and “writers use either form for any of the senses according as they prefer its sound in general or find it suits the rhythm of a sentence.” The wrestle with language, like that with conscience, is unending.
Not the least notable thing about Gwynne’s Grammar, the work of Neville Martin Gwynne, an English businessman and earlier an Etonian who went on to Oxford, is that it spent some time on best-seller lists in Britain. What makes this all the more extraordinary is that the book is a textbook, one with no pictures—“pictures in textbooks,” Mr. Gwynne writes, “actually interfere with the learning process”—and with not the least wisp of dumbing-down in its composition.
Mr. Gwynne does not deny that grammar can be hellishly complicated. “Rather,” he writes,
the encouragement that I offer is that whatever work is involved is overwhelmingly worth it and also that this work gradually becomes progressively easier as the skills involved become more habitual and indeed as making the necessary effort becomes more habitual.
If any criticism might be made of Gwynne’s Grammar, it might be about the extravagance of its author’s promises. Mr. Gwynne holds that grammar is crucial to clear thinking, which may well be right. He also claims that “the rules [of grammar] always have a logic underpinning them,” which, alas, isn’t always the case. In a five-step syllogism, he contends that “grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which—as both common sense and experience show—happiness is impossible.” Improvement in grammar, he also argues, unfailingly affects “both mind and character.” All of which, as the English say, sounds like overegging the pudding.
On the underegging side, Mr. Gwynne writes that there is “virtually nothing original in [his book] except its manner of presentation.” This manner is simple enough. Mr. Gwynne defines the parts of speech, the elements of punctuation, and the grammar of writing verse (once considered a standard practice of the cultivated). He then follows up in each instance with examples of these things both properly and improperly used. His definitions—terse, logical, precise—are among the best things in the book. He defines a definition—not an easy thing to do—as “a statement of the exact meaning of a word or phrase that sufficiently distinguishes it from any other word or phrase, preferably in the fewest possible words.” A sentence “is most comprehensively defined as a word or group of words expressing a complete statement, wish, command or question, whether as a thought or in speech or in writing.” He defines grammar as “being simply the correct use of words.”
As Mr. Gwynne moves into the subtler elements of grammar, he sets out the range and use of verbs and their tenses, the basic rules of syntax, the mechanics of punctuation. With his customary precision, he guides his readers through the arcana of the subjunctive and introduces the notion of modal verbs. He makes the clean distinction between a clause and phrase by noting that a clause is a phrase with a verb in it, a phrase a clause without a verb. He takes up the active and passive and those troublesome fraternal twins, transitive and intransitive.
Something quite new to me is Mr. Gwynne’s dictum on the placement of multiple adjectives, according to which adjectives of opinion come before those of size, which come before those of age, which come before those of shape, which come before those of color, which come before those of origin, which come before those of material purpose. His illustrative sentence on this point runs: “The book you are holding is therefore a nice little just-published oblong-shaped attractively colored much needed hardcover grammar textbook.”
Memorization is a strong element in the Gwynne pedagogical method. He insists on the importance of readers memorizing his definitions and rules. He believes the rote method of learning, currently much despised, essential to acquiring grammar. Returning to that ordering of adjectives, I had myself thought to memorize it but found I could not. But, then, my little gray cells, unlike those of Inspector Poirot, may not be in top condition.
The personality of its author is not the least attraction of Gwynne’s Grammar. Mr. Gwynne is unflinchingly, unapologetically rear-guard. Straight out of the gate he announces that “the word to indicate whether anyone is male or female is ‘sex,’ not ‘gender,’ which is purely a grammatical term,” an assertion that, if taken up, would wipe out every Gender Studies program in American universities. Excepting the need for new
words for new things, he is against any changes in language that “are not in the direction of greater richness, clarity, and precision.” His position on splitting infinitives is to note that “Shakespeare never needed to split an infinitive,” with the implication that therefore neither should we. Case closed.
Mr. Gwynne’s literary opinions are no less firmly held. He attacks Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot for setting verse free. Late in the book he remarks, though by this point he need scarcely do so, “I am not an innovator. On the contrary, my position throughout this book is that of defender and promoter of what has been shown to work over long periods of time and what is real.”
N. M. Gwynne and Steven Pinker, the author of The Sense of Style, would not, fair to say, be ideal cabin mates on a lengthy cruise along the Mediterranean. For Mr. Pinker, Mr. Gwynne would qualify supremely for what in his book he calls a “language grump,” or “pedant,” or “anal retentive,” or “Miss Thistlebottom,” his term for the type of old-fashioned school marm. For Mr. Gwynne, Mr. Pinker would be written off as a man with no literary standard, a mere psycholinguist and cognitive scientist, which at Harvard is what Mr. Pinker is. As teachers, Mr. Gwynne is a suit-and-tie man, Mr. Pinker, I should imagine, an open-collar guy. Mr. Gwynne makes no effort to charm; Mr. Pinker perhaps overestimates his own charm. Mr. Pinker is at ease using such words and phrases as “feedback,” “fun facts,” “case-selection circuitry”; he advises his readers to think of grammar as “the original sharing app.” Mr. Pinker is a man who goes with the flow, Mr. Gwynne a man who wishes to stop that flow, dead, in midstream.
The Ideal of Culture Page 36
