Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge by Seth Rudy (review)

“The difficulty of obtaining knowledge is universally confessed,” Samuel Johnson explains in Idler no. 91:

To fix deeply in the mind the principles of science, to settle their limitations, and deduce the long succession of their consequences; to comprehend the whole compass of complicated systems, with all the arguments, objections, and solutions, and to reposite in the intellectual treasury the numberless facts, experiments, apophthegms, and positions, which must stand single in the memory, and of which none has any perceptible connexion with the rest, is a task which, though undertaken with ardour and pursued with diligence, must at last be left unfinished by the frailty of our nature.

Johnson was struggling with a problem that was becoming ever more acute over the course of the eighteenth century—the impossibility of knowing everything we need to know. A similar discomfort afflicted many of Johnson’s contemporaries, who were feeling what we have come to call “information fatigue.” Developments like the discovery of the New World, the rise of a market economy, the explosion in literacy, the rise of Baconian methods and Lockean epistemology, and the establishment of learned societies and academies all suggested that the volume of learning was already too great ever to be captured in one place or stored in one mind—and, worse, was continuing to expand rapidly. Keeping up was hopeless.

This despair is typical of the later eighteenth century. The ancients dreamed of encompassing all knowledge in one place; they believed it was possible for a polymath to know everything worth knowing. And while nonfiction works like Pliny’s Historia naturalis in the first century CE and Isidore’s Etymologies in the seventh century strove to be comprehensive in their respective fields, the ancients usually assigned the task of summarizing the whole of a culture’s knowledge to a more distinguished genre. In the epics of Homer and Virgil they found comprehensive systems of learning, providing a thorough education in the natural, social, and supernatural worlds, including religion, history, geography, ethics, and military strategy.

The ancient Greeks called for enkyklios paideia, meaning something like “a rounded education.” By the time the early moderns got their hands on the phrase, it had been interpreted as something grander, “the circle of knowledge.” The first reference book to bear the title Encyclopædia was published by Johann Heinrich Alsted early in the seventeenth century, but the true heyday of the form was the eighteenth century. In Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain, Seth Rudy “tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate ‘complete’ knowledge of the world” and “explores the persistent failure of these ambitions” (1). Though he sometimes uses quantitative methods, tracking the frequency of keywords such as “complete” and “universal” on eighteenth-century title pages, he usually delivers a more traditional kind of intellectual history. He is good on the actual encyclopaedias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing especially on those in English: Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica above all, though such projects numbered in the dozens, including Benjamin Martin’s quirky encyclopaedia published in magazine form. These are the works that promised “to co-opt a conventional function of the epics and execute it via new features better aligned with modern standards of knowledge production” (54). Rudy’s book is a useful introduction to the form.

His original contribution to scholarship, though, is his attempt to look at the relationship between this encyclopaedic urge and the more literary genres in eighteenth-century Britain (with the understanding that the elevation of certain genres as “literary” is a later development). The association of comprehensive knowledge with the epic, for instance, was often invoked in the early modern period, but writers in the long eighteenth century never managed to produce an encyclopaedic heroic poem. Milton imitated much about the classical epic, but no one would call...