Navigating the Labyrinth of Knowledge: ‘Distantiation’ and Narrative Experiments in the Structuring of Encyclopaedic Knowledge
p. 127-155
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1In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, narratives of exploration were all the rage. John Hawkesworth was paid an advance of £6000 for his 1773 Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere describing the Pacific voyages of John Byron, Samuel Wallis and James Cook’s first journey in the Endeavour. Copies were quickly exhausted and changed hands at black-market prices; new editions and reprints flew from the press, and erstwhile partners in exploration became rivals in the rush to publish first. The public’s enthusiasm was understandable, since the accounts – pretty much literally – promised the world. For example, Johann Reinhold Forster, the naturalist on Cook’s second voyage of 1772–75, promised in his 1778 account to address ‘nature in its greatest extent: the Earth, the Sea, the Air, the Organic and Animated Creation, and more particularly that class of Beings to which we ourselves belong.’1 Meanwhile, Edmund Burke had written to William Robertson in 1777 to congratulate him on his History of America – the first systematic treatment in English of the indigenous groups of that continent – remarking that geographical exploration was now nourishing historical understanding more sophisticated than anything the traditional perusal of ancient texts had ever managed to produce. By penetrating new territories and studying their inhabitants, philosophically-minded explorers had, he wrote, unfurled the ‘great map of mankind’, so that ‘there is no state or gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement, which we have not, at the same instant under our view.’2 But the sorts of minutiae required by philosophically-inclined readers such as Burke did not prevent the same narratives from achieving wide popular appeal. Thus John Hawkesworth, in his general introduction, remarked that ‘[i]t is from little circumstances that the relation of great events derives its power over the mind’, which is why readers ‘feel themselves strongly interested even for Pamela, the imaginary heroine of a novel that is remarkable for the enumeration of particulars in themselves so trifling, that we almost wonder how they could occur to the author’s mind.’3 His Pacific narratives would be just as long and detailed as a Richardson novel – and just as appealing. As a bonus, they also happened to be (more or less) true.
2The particular challenge for writers of narratives of exploration resided in the need to translate slabs of information from journals and logbooks into an assimilable but factually informative narrative. A similar challenge confronted information-rich narratives of all kinds, especially where the information required interpretation. At around the same time that travel narratives were promising to ‘map mankind’, for example, writers of more locally-anchored histories were struggling to find ways to make their chronicles of past events read as national history; that is, as the interpretation of a particular national soul, or spirit, or genius. This ambition created an obvious pragmatic difficulty. How were the narrative and analytical voicings to interact with one another without the latter interrupting the continuity of the former, and undermining its appearance of disembodied neutrality? How could modern History – an emerging discipline – espouse a ‘philosophical’ ambition without being drawn into narrative postures that would undermine its primary function of providing reliable neutral information about past events?
3The simplest solution was that adopted by David Hume in his History of England (5 vol., 1754–1762), where analytical overviews of each period are contained in a series of appendices that stand apart from the main text which can thus continue as an unbroken chronological narrative. Rather than deciding between narrative and discursive treatments of British history, Hume tried to have it both ways and complexified his book’s construction in order to make this dual vision materially possible. Soon other historians were trying even more radical experiments in textual layering. Perhaps the most striking example is provided by Robert Henry’s now largely forgotten twelve-volume History of Great Britain on a New Plan, published between 1771 and 1793. The text of this magnum opus was divided up in two ways: first, in traditional manner, into ten books that sliced chronology into a sequence of ages; and second, more innovatively, each of these books was in turn layered transversally into seven chapters that addressed specific aspects of national life. These were: 1. Civil and military history; 2. Ecclesiastical history; 3. Constitutional and legal history; 4. History of learning; 5. History of the arts; 6. History of commerce; 7. History of manners and customs. ‘By this plan,’ Henry explained in his general preface, ‘the sphere of history will be very much enlarged, and many useful and entertaining subjects introduced into it, which were formerly excluded.’4 That is, his formal experiment would allow the narrowly political and ecclesiastical themes of traditional historical narratives to be completed by the addition of parallel threads dealing with social and cultural themes.
4With Henry’s thematically enriched subject matter, a unilinear narrative treatment was unthinkable: it ‘would have produced nothing but a perfect chaos of confusion.’5 But by formally separating the narrative into seven distinct threads or layers, Henry effectively broke the subject-matter of History down into subdisciplinary categories each of which would have its own internal coherence as well as its particular place within the architecture of the book as a whole. This architecture made multiple pathways through the text possible. For example, a reader might choose to read the fourth chapter of each consecutive book, in which case he would get a complete history of learning in Britain; while a reader who took in the seven chapters of book 1 would get a complete panorama of Roman Britain. Henry was effectively offering several books in one, and inviting the audience to consult it selectively. By thus rationally arranging his material into disciplinary categories, Henry hoped to provide a history of unprecedentedly close-grained texture, without thereby losing in narrative perspicuity in any of the book’s parts or indeed as a whole.
5This writerly attitude has been usefully labelled ‘distantiation’ by Mark Salber Phillips. In this usage, ‘distantiation’ is not the same as the ‘detachment’ that the experimentalist observer of nature might aspire to. It is less about eliminating subjectivity than structuring it. It is the effort to create a certain kind of relationship between the complex phenomena studied and the analytical stance of the knowing mind that organises and shapes that information to give it meaning. It is a certain way of looking at – and interpreting – empirical data, which claims to see all that data in intimate detail, but does so from a distanced viewpoint. It wants to combine two seeing modes, balancing telescopic detail with panoramic overview.6 The attitude can be understood as a response to the challenge of disciplinarity. Distantiation provided a writerly strategy for handling massive quantities of information without thereby losing out in capacity for systemic overview. It promised to make sense of the wealth of new disciplinary information by drawing it into the networks of a highly complex hypothetical model of the natural order of things. Meaning would be sought in the criss-crossing pathways traversing this labyrinth, the navigation of which called for a distinctly modern form of narrative perspicuity.
6In what follows we will look at a series of examples tending to show how something like Phillips’ ‘distantiation’ was applied not only to historical and historiographical writing, but to knowledge as a whole. This was notably attempted in the construction of encyclopaedic texts, whose task it was to model the complex structure of the modern empire of knowledge, and by so doing facilitate the capacity of the contemplative mind to oscillate between telescopic detail of any particular part of the system and panoramic overview of its sections or of the whole.7 If modern knowledge was becoming labyrinthine in its complexity, what was needed was a map or a key that would facilitate its navigation. By revealing the hidden underlying structure, such guides tamed the bewildering appearance of the labyrinth and emboldened travellers to explore the maze of pathways linking together all its different sectors and layers. The obvious starting point for texts of this sort is Ephraim Chambers’ 1728 Cyclopaedia; and we will therefore start with a consideration of his general project before moving on to consider two less familiar mid-century attempts to mobilise the format of the periodical publication to a similar end.
Rational modelling: mapping the labyrinth of modern knowledge
7When Ephraim Chambers published his massive Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences in two folio tomes, he was not modest in expressing his estimation of its value. Dedicated to King George II, he pointed out in an elaborate preface just how unique was its construction. ‘The Plan of the work’, readers were told, ‘would answer all the Purposes of a Library, except Parade and Incumbrance; and contribute more to the propagating of useful Knowledge thro’ the Body of a People, than any, I had almost said all, the Books extant.’8 That plan entailed setting out full detail concerning all branches of modern learning (‘No part of the Commonwealth of Learning but has been traffick’d to on this Occasion’), a conventional claim for encyclopaedists, but also more audaciously designing the ‘Œconomy of the Work’ so as to ‘dispose such a Variety of Materials in such manner, as not to make a confused Heap of incongruous Parts, but one consistent Whole.’ Here Chambers claimed to be on new ground, as ‘former Lexicographers have not attempted any thing like structure in their Works; nor seem to have been aware that a Dictionary was in some measure capable of the Advantages of continued Discourse.’ The mobilisation of narrative form was a vital philosophical innovation thanks to which his new-style encyclopaedia would be ‘as different from theirs, as a System is from a Cento’ – a ‘cento’ originally being a poem composed of quotations and then, by extension, a text assembling a patchwork of miscellaneous items.9
8Chambers’ aspiration to systematicity was to be assured by inter-related networks of references capable of situating each article, so to speak, within the sphere of knowledge. The primary network derived articles from a disciplinary matrix, each with its own space or sector within the sphere; the secondary network proposed lateral pathways connecting analogous elements in different disciplinary sectors. The relativising secondary network was supplied by cross-referencing between articles. The more fundamental primary frame of reference had to be set out in detail in the preface in the form of an arborescent diagram showing how ‘knowledge’ might be broken down into forty-seven principle ‘heads’ – which we might now think of as disciplines.
9As can be seen in figure 2 of the previous chapter, these were presented as ranging from the most objective because most independent of human construction at the top, to the most artificial or subjective at the bottom. Thus meteorology, hydrology, minerology, phytology, and zoology, numbered 1 to 5 at the top of the chart, are the most objectively-founded disciplines because they constitute a sense-based group (as opposed to rational) within the ‘natural’ (as opposed to ‘artificial’) subdivision of ‘knowledge’. At the bottom of the chart, grammar, rhetoric, and poetry are numbered 45–47, and are grouped as the most contingent or man-made disciplines since they are based on ‘symbolical’ (as opposed to ‘real’) meaning within an ‘external’ (as opposed to ‘internal’ or self-referential) class of the ‘artificial’ (as opposed to ‘natural’) group of disciplines.
10The chart thus derives all forty-seven disciplines rationally from a single unitary ‘knowledge’, and these forty-seven disciplines in turn act as ‘heads’ under which the articles of the encyclopaedia might be arranged. They thus represent so many gateways into the encyclopaedia for the systematic reader. The ways into the heart of the labyrinth from each disciplinary entry-point are set out in a footnote that extends over four pages in which each branch of the arborescent plan is effectively prolonged into its sub-disciplinary ramifications. Thus the first discipline, ‘Meterology’, is atomised as follows:
METEROLOGY, or the History of AIR and ATMOSPHERE: including, 1°, that of its Contents, Aether, Fire, Vapour, Exhalation, &c. 2°, Meteors form’d therein, as Cloud, Rain, Shower, Drop, Snow, Hail, Dew, Damp, &c. Winds, Mon-soon, Hurricane, and the like.10
11Each capitalised or italicised item in these lists is represented by an article in the Cyclopaedia. The list thus constitutes a sectorial or discipline-specific reading programme. But at all stages of this reading programme multiple cross-references are offered which provide scope for lateral movement into adjacent disciplinary fields. Between ‘vertical’ movement within a sector, and ‘horizontal’ movement between sectors, the reader constructs his own path through the labyrinth. It is thanks to the signposting that he does not get lost.
12Chambers made it quite clear that the Cyclopaedia’s design was intended to promote this kind of joined-up adventurous reading. This is why he insisted in the preface on the relations between the articles, and the capacity of the system thus established to mimic the real or rational relations between the departments of knowledge. All of the articles, Chambers wrote:
are both treated as so many Wholes, and as so many Parts of some greater Whole; their Connexion with which, is pointed out by a Reference. So that by a course of References, from Generals to Particulars; from Premises to Conclusions; from Cause to Effect, and vice versa, i.e. in one word, from more to less complex, and from less to more: a Communication is opened between the several Parts of the Work; and the several Articles are in some measure replaced in their natural Order of Science, out of which the Technical or Alphabetical one had remov’d them. […] By which means a Chain is carried on from one end of an Art to the other […]. Nor is the pursuit dropt here: but as the Elements or Data in one Art, are normally quaesita in some other subordinate one, and are furnished thereby; […] we carry on the View farther, and refer out of one Art or Province into the adjoining ones, and thus lay the whole Land of Knowledge open: It appears indeed with the Face of a Wilderness; but ’tis a Wilderness thro’ which the Reader may pursue his Journey as securely, tho not so expeditiously and easily, as thro’ a regular Parterre.11
13Modern knowledge was a veritable labyrinth, but Chambers’ book was the tool that would enable contemporaries to master the ever-burgeoning disciplinary detail without losing sight of the architecture of the system as a whole. To combine the metaphors used in the passage just cited, the Cyclopaedia provided a complete map of the Land of Knowledge, thus transforming an apparent wilderness into an ordered garden through which the curious mind, when suitably equipped, might safely navigate. It was meant to enable a distantiated view of knowledge, one in which the fine-grained disciplinary detail and the panoramic overview constantly informed and enriched one another.
Periodical excursions: a guided tour through the labyrinth of knowledge
14Chambers’ extravagant project was only a partial success. Though his work was influential, its particular narrative ambitions were dropped from later encyclopaedias. Thus, Richard Yeo has noted that the Encyclopaedia Britannica ‘never included a map of knowledge’, and more generally remarked that ‘by the late 1700s…most encyclopaedias had abdicated responsibility for any systematic classification of the subjects they covered.’12 However, modes of publication were coming to prominence in the mid-century that offered new possibilities. Serial periodicals for example had been fashionable since the days of Addison and Steele, and in the 1750s and 1760s some enterprising spirits saw their potential as showcases for the complexities of modern knowledge. The periodical format lent itself naturally enough to episodic and therefore digestible versions of Chambers’ single all-encapsulating book. Where the Cyclopaedia had effectively been the textual representation of the real-world knowledge labyrinth in which readers were left to find their own way around the criss-crossing network of connections, the visits to the world of learning offered by the producers of periodicals were more closely supervised affairs that allowed adepts to choose among a range of sign-posted itineraries and so to traverse the disciplinary landscape without fear of disorientation.
15By their very nature, early journals such as the Spectator had not been subject-specific. Their subject was ‘modern life’ as observed by a representative figure: an inherently universalist attitude. By mid-century, however, the market was large and diversified enough to support other strategies, including a degree of specialisation. For example, the Monthly Review (from 1749) and the Critical Review (from 1756), specialized in reviewing recent publications, making them the first organs of what would come to be called ‘literary criticism’.13 However, though literary reviews focused on a particular sort of content, they would not have been considered ‘specialist’ publications. ‘Literature’ was not a specialized subject since the term continued to apply to writing of all sorts, not just to fiction. Literary reviews addressed polite culture, and polite culture was of course universalist in nature – at least in principle.14
16At around the same time, however, another type of periodical venture was emerging that would offer a more deliberately universalising attempt to encapsulate ‘modern knowledge’ as an overarching system constituted of multiple parts. Such journals were often named ‘magazines’, from the French magasin, or store; the idea being that they contained whole storehouses of interesting or important information. One particularly successful example was The Gentleman’s Magazine, which was launched in 1731 and ran in various forms until 1922. This journal offered what might be called a news digest, the idea being that the fashionable gentleman would find all the information he needed in this one place. So, its claim to completeness was more topical than philosophical or systematic. But other magazine-style periodicals were more ambitious, promising their readers a complete panorama of the state of modern knowledge in all its diversity, and in a structured format that would make such complex subject-matter profitably accessible to the generalist reader. Such magazines claimed to be responding to a perceived need to keep opinion-makers in the public sphere informed about the ever-complexifying state of modern knowledge, both in terms of its ever-diversifying contents, and in terms of attitudes and overviews that might allow the whole to continue to cohere.
17Perhaps the earliest example was the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, which ran from 1747 to 1814. Its full subtitle clearly set out the scope of the editors’ ambitions, both in terms of the array of subjects to be covered and the audiences addressed:
Containing News, Letters, Debates, Poetry, Music, Biography, History, Geography, Voyages, Criticism, Transactions, Philosophy, Mathematics, Husbandry, Gardening, Cookery, Chemistry, Mechanicks, Trade, Navigation, Architecture, and other Arts and Sciences; which may render it Instructive and Entertaining to Gentry, Merchants, Farmers, and Tradesmen. To Which will be added an Impartial Account of Books in several Languages, and of the State of Learning in Europe; also of the Stage, New Operas, Plays, and Oratorios.15
18But like many other comparable titles, this magazine was essentially a compendium of miscellaneous short pieces, whose very eclecticism it was no doubt hoped would ensure the publication a wide circulation. Rarer among these early ‘universalist’ magazines were those that set out with the explicit ambition of fulfilling the claims of their titles in a systematic way. Without being able to claim to have done an exhaustive search, I have so far encountered only two mid-century periodicals that answer closely to this description. The first is The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences produced by Benjamin Martin between 1755 and 1764; and the second is The Library, or Moral and Critical Magazine produced by ‘a Society of Gentlemen’ between 1761 and 1762. They are interesting to compare as they both tried to play to the strengths of the periodical format in pursuance of their ambitious universalising goals, but went about it in very different ways that reflected distinct conceptions of what they took modern knowledge to be, and what sort of overview it might call for.
19The figures responsible for these projects had little in common. Benjamin Martin was a self-taught man of the people (reputedly starting life as a plough-boy), who became a renowned and sought-after maker of scientific instruments, as well as a prolific publisher of works of popular science.16 His mission in The General Magazine – undertaken single-handedly – was to propagate a knowledge of the modern sciences, adopting an approach that stressed its utility. Martin naturally did what he could to prevent his strongly science-oriented schema from cutting his work off from the world of Establishment values by for example dedicating his Magazine to the Prince of Wales, the future George III, and opening the first volume with an ode to the ‘Usefulness of Natural Philosophy’ which exalted Science as a tutelary spirit guiding man towards the best understanding available to him of the divine order of the world.
20For their part, the ‘Society of Gentlemen’ that produced The Library were a group of more genteel status and more conservative tastes. They remained anonymous, but there seem to have been five writers involved under the general editorship of Andrew Kippis, a Presbyterian minister and later the editor of the second edition of the influential Biographia Britannica (1778–1793). This group put religion rather than science at the heart of their project, but it would nevertheless be misleading to present them as hostile to science or to the empirical attitude. Their attitude was more one of moderate Dissent asserting a rightful place in polite society. Their religion was not doctrinaire but part of a humane philosophy that wanted to keep the emergent sciences in their proper place, serving rather than defining Man. Kippis would even become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1779.17
21It was in their material conceptions that the two projects most closely resembled one another. They shared an ambitiously wide-ranging scope and a sense that this sort of universalist overview was both useful and attractive to an aspirant modern audience (in the case of The General Magazine) or a genteel one (in the case of The Library). They also shared the pragmatic notion that the periodical format was ideally suited to the characteristically modern challenge of absorbing vast arrays of new sorts of knowledge without becoming swamped by the detail or losing sight of a grand architecture or a contextualising overview. It facilitated the task of shaping the mass of information. To this end, both The General Magazine and The Library were broken down into a number of sections, each of which was continued from one monthly issue to the next. So several themes were explored in parallel, each in serialised form. Two different reading dynamics were thus offered: readers might follow a favoured theme in linear fashion as it developed from month to month; or else they might prefer to read broadly, picking up on a variety of themes in any given issue. Ideally, of course, they would do both in tandem. The General Magazine actually materialised both of these options, as the distinct articles appearing in the monthly issues were printed and paginated in such a way as to allow them to be separated and rebound as unique volumes once the series was complete. Indeed Benjamin Martin himself in this way produced 14 volumes between 1759 and 1764 which collected together each of the distinct essay series that had appeared in periodical form starting in 1755. The Library, in contrast, was bound by year, resulting in two volumes which simply reconstitute the original monthly format.
22Martin’s particular method was a matter of some importance to him, and not just for presentational reasons. It was the nature of the knowledge presented, and its impact, which was at stake. Thus, in the ‘Account of the Plan and Design of this Magazine’, he lamented the lack of systematic rigour that characterised the growing mass of periodical publications, ‘most of them being calculated for amusement only.’ They do not really offer what they seem to promise: ‘if the Words Arts and Sciences are found in their Title Pages, you seek in vain for the Things themselves, in the Body of the work; or if any Thing of that Sort appears, it is only by Peace-meal, in Bits and Scraps, disjointed and mangled, without Order or Connection, and therefore of no Use to any one.’ Wishing to distance himself from this alleged fashion for gossipy miscellanies, Martin clearly set out his stall as the promoter of useful knowledge systematically presented in plain language. As he stated in the very first sentence of this introductory essay, his most fundamental goal was to make ‘the pathways to knowledge as direct and plain, as possible.’18
23To this end, The General Magazine’s contents were broken down into five sections, prominently set out on the title page of the first volume (fig. 1). The first was a methodological overview, given a literary framing as a pedagogical dialogue; the next two sections covered a full array of the non-mechanical disciplines, ranging from ‘natural history’ to the ‘philological sciences’, the fourth covering ‘Mathematical Institutes, or Principles of Science’ addressed the applications of pure science, and the final section was a catch-all miscellany of news and reviews. Each month’s issue would include material relating to each of these sections, and each section would be carried forward by instalment from month to month. It was the structured variety that made the project attractive. Such variety, he wrote:
must have all its Force, since every Half-sheet of our Magazine will be pregnant with new Principles of Knowledge, and every Number will present the Reader with a gradual Progress of the Sciences, proceeding Hand-in-Hand; when he has considered the Subject of one he may apply himself to another, and after that to a third and fourth, all different from each other, and each in particular such, we presume, as will be worthy his Attention, and afford him Pleasure and Instruction at the same Time.19
Fig. 1. The title-page of the first volume of The General Magazine, 1755

24This layered course of reading offered multiple pathways through the labyrinth of modern knowledge. The first essay-series, the imaginary dialogue on Natural Philosophy, was a pathway around the domain as a whole, providing an overview of its structure and logic; the second, third, and fourth were particular pathways through particular parts of the domain. Only the first was really meant to be travelled in its entirety; the others could be visited more selectively. But whatever reading strategy was preferred, the reader gained, in more or less complete form, a distantiated view of modern knowledge with each detailed course of study playing its part in building up a larger architecture of learning and culture as conceived of by Martin.
25As The General Magazine project progressed, it became increasingly clear that the main difficulty for Martin was how to squeeze his universalising ambitions into just three or four narrative strands. The challenge was particularly evident in the third category, the group he had called the ‘Philological sciences’, which covers twelve subject-areas mentioned on the title-page, including domains as distinct as Ethics, Logic, Chemistry, Poetry and Anatomy. Today, such a category seems hopelessly confused. To Martin, it was simply all that was left over once the principal branches – the mathematical and the mechanical – had been addressed: they were ‘philological’ because perceived as constituted by man, not pre-existing in the nature of things. The looseness of the category, however, rendered it incapable of sustaining a coherent constitutive narrative, for there was no conceptual geography it might be built on. In practice it soon became clear that there was no common organising principle – call it ‘philology’ or anything else – capable of furnishing natural connections between the subject matters of Ethics, Logic, Chemistry, Poetry, Anatomy, and the others.
26This tendency would eventually affect large swathes of the publication. For example, issue no 45 of June 1758 (the only monthly instalment available on ECCO) lists on its title page two pieces under the Natural History section – an ongoing piece on the geography of Gloucestershire, and chapters XV and XVI of a piece entitled ‘Of the Christian Religion’ – while the Philological Sciences (though no longer labelled as such) seem to be represented by a piece on ‘The Life of Regimontanus’ under the heading ‘Biographia Philosophica’. The rest is taken up by correspondence, verse, and various notices. The structured disciplinary pathways through the labyrinth planned by Martin had evidently turned out not to be as practicable as anticipated, and as a result the magazine was tending to revert to just the sort of amorphous collection of miscellanea that its author had initially claimed actively to resist.
27By 1764 Martin had simply abandoned his multi-layered publication strategy. The periodical version had ceased attempting to maintain the original categorial divisions, or to continue long essay series over multiple issues. Instead, his production looked much like that of any other periodical review, a miscellaneous collection of occasional pieces. The absence of thematic differentiation in the final year of periodical production presented a problem for Martin’s series of rebound volumes. So the fourteenth and final volume in the series was simply a bound version of that year’s monthly productions. In an attempt to save face, the approach was called ‘an improved plan’ – but the obvious reality was that all semblance of a plan had disappeared. With this renouncement, Martin effectively acknowledged that his elaborate editorial scheme to trace multiple ‘pathways to knowledge as direct and plain as possible’ had failed. According to Rudy, the change may in fact have been imposed by ‘new proprietors’,20 but Martin would have been unlikely to cave in after so long unless he himself also recognised and acknowledged the problem. Whatever other practical considerations may have played their part, Martin’s failure to maintain the overarching architecture that had been so important at the outset suggests that he had come to accept that the knowledge landscape was now too vast, and too fractured, to be readily amenable to universal overview. The strategy of distantiation, as a narrative strategy for containing the complexity of knowledge, was coming under impossible pressure.
Periodical excursions: exploring the labyrinth of sensibility
28Turning next to The Library, we find a project that has many formal similarities to Martin’s General Magazine, though it was designed to serve a markedly different agenda. The full title was The Library, or Moral and Critical Magazine, and the authors were identified on the title page only as ‘a Society of Gentlemen’ – a small group of like-minded men revolving around the Presbyterian minister and biographer, Andrew Kippis. They too presented their production as a compendium of episodic essays offering a panoramic overview of modern knowledge and attendant issues, which they aimed to execute in a mode that would be both instructive and entertaining to the genteel modern reader. But if the construction suggests derivative inspiration, the content and orientation clearly signal an antagonistic stance. This is evident even in the title used. Where Martin’s magazine had announced that it would cover the abstract and material sciences, The Library’s editors placed their rival ‘magazine’ in a very different field: that of the moral sciences treated in critical terms.
29Like Martin’s General Magazine, The Library features a table of contents in the opening pages of the first volume setting out the main headings under which they would present their subject matter (fig. 2). Twelve sections were thus announced – considerably more than Martin’s five – which would remain relatively stable over the nine issues published in 1761, but far less so, as we will see, in 1762. These twelve headings might be gathered into three groups, ranging from those addressing the most central themes, to those of more incidental significance. The core group featured four extended essays, an instalment of each of which appeared at the head of each monthly issue. The titles of these essays were: 1. ‘A General View of the History and Life of Christ’; 2. ‘Morals’; 3. ‘History of Knowledge, Taste, and Learning in Great-Britain’; and 4. ‘Life, by the Observer’. The second group were occasional pieces of two to three instalments each, often dotted rather haphazardly across widely separated issues. One of these addressed a political subject – the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 – but the three others returned to The Library’s favoured theme, the sentient apprehension of the spiritual: ‘On the Word “Mystery”’; ‘On the Knowledge of the World’; and ‘Moral Sentiments and Reflections’. The final group contained miscellaneous items which were not continued from issue to issue. The four sections in this part were identified as ‘Miscellany’, ‘Criticisms and Remarks’ (exclusively limited to commentary on passages of scripture), ‘Literary intelligence’ (containing notices of recent publications), and ‘Poetry’ (containing anonymous poetic performances).
Fig. 2. The table of contents for the first volume of The Library, 1761

The first of three pages
30Focusing on the core group of serialised essays, we can see how The Library’s categories may have been designed as a specific riposte to those used by Martin. Thus the top two essays, on the life of Christ and on ‘Morals’, might be understood together to occupy the equivalent place in The Library project as Martin’s ‘Young Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Philosophy’; and the next essay, ‘History of Knowledge Taste and Learning in Great-Britain’ corresponds fairly closely to Martin’s second and third sections, ‘The Natural History of the World’ and ‘A compleat System of all the Philological Sciences’. The Library’s final title among these key essays is the oddly-titled ‘Life, by an Observer’: the somewhat facetious intention here being brought helpfully to light if seen as constituting a riposte to Martin’s fifth and final section, ‘A Body of Mathematical Institutes, or Principles of Science…[as] applied to the manifold Purposes of Life’. Kippis and his associates wanted to deny Martin’s implied claim that a panorama of empirical disciplines might amount to a summation of ‘the world’ or of knowledge: they were going to present knowledge of the world in the only way they believed would allow it to mean something coherent, which was to make material knowledge subservient to ‘life’, to the spiritual. The periodical’s creators really did believe that knowledge was more reliably built by observers of life than by measurers of phenomena.
31Although the four main essay-series in The Library were written by three different authors,21 they were pretty effective at working up the central theme from different starting points, each deploying its own distinctive content and tone. The central theme – as they acknowledged – was not original in itself. They were effectively devotees of ‘sensibility’, derived from Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy linking happiness to virtue.22 By the 1760s and 1770s, ‘sensibility’ was more a cult than a philosophy, informing the contents of paintings and novels and nourishing much polite conversation in the public domain.23 It is as actors in this world that Kippis and his associates sought to exist. Their goal was not to defend ‘sensibility’ in itself, or the social attitudes of polite cultivation with which it was associated, but to show in practical terms how this attitude might be extended into the world of learning and knowledge. Hence the significance of the composite format, which would enable the editors not just to argue their case, but to demonstrate how it might work.
32The successive sections of The Library can thus be thought of as a series of diverse settings within which the central claim that the moral being is the key to all else can be put to the test and demonstrated in action. The first two sections were abstract, while the third and fourth were practical. The first addressed the life of Jesus as the ideal exemplar of the moral being, but it took as its data the accounts of the man in the gospels and did not engage in theological debates. The second section, on ‘morals’, theorised the sort of moral ideal Jesus was taken to represent, but did so on philosophical not religious grounds. Among the titles of the articles appearing under this heading are ‘Morals intelligible to every mind’, ‘The laws of virtue eternal and unalterable’, ‘Human liberty explained and defined’, ‘An exhortation to practical rectitude’, and so on. Moving from the abstract to the practical essay-series, the third section treated man’s moral condition from a historical perspective, taking as its specific object the growth of ‘knowledge, taste and learning’ in Britain. Finally, the fourth section – ‘Life, by an Observer’, the only section presented as the personal account of a particular narrator – moved to the level of social observation and commentary. The subject here was not the moral being in the abstract, but examples of more or less exemplary specimens of human comportment on display in contemporary society. Titles here included ‘Observations on œconomy in pleasure, and the effects of politeness’, ‘Observations on mental music, or the harmony of sentiments, actions, and characters’, or ‘On the fashionable infidelity of the present age’. In brief, the reader was offered a complete panorama of the modern mind and its moral foundations: the theme was explored systematically at spiritual, philosophical and historical levels, and impressionistically at a social level. Clearly Kippis and his associates were just as ambitious in their rational ordering of modern knowledge as Martin had been, only their conception of modern knowledge placed moral being, not material phenomena, at the heart of that project.
33We do not have the space to treat each of these core essay-series; but it is nevertheless worthwhile to dip briefly into the world of the fourth, ‘Life, by the Observer’, as it is in this most subjective and most playful part of the project that its underlying spirit is most strongly felt. The first two essay-series argued a case; the third applied it to national history; only this fourth one tried to live it. Here alone a first-person voicing emerges, and with it came a surprisingly light-hearted and even self-deprecatory line in humour. The introductory piece in the series opens with a scathing picture of ‘the worshipful company of authors’ who ‘daily multiply’ and flood the world with reams of print which more effectively flatters the vanity of its untalented authors than it informs or improves its readers.
Musicians, philosophers, lawyers, form themselves into societies, and devote their monthly labours to the service of their country. Every trivial event is carefully recorded for the satisfaction of the curious; every quarrel in private life, every measure in government, presents us with appeals and addresses to the world. No pensioner loses his place, no lady her character, no officer his rank, but some lover of truth stands forth to vindicate their cause. The appetite of curiosity, more keen from being gratified, demands a perpetual supply of novelty; […] the love of fame calls out an army of literary martyrs, to die in the service of the world. […] Learning and judgement are neither required, nor expected; and, when every other scheme in life has failed, this has been tried with success.24
34Yet the public demand for this poor stuff is apparently insatiable. The opening draws in all sorts of chancers, including our own author. His choice of subject-matter offers further scope for ambiguous self-examination:
The reader will hardly conjecture what pains it cost me, to find out a modest and suitable title to this work; at last, however, after putting my invention to the torture, and consulting many learned philologists, I have hit upon one, which comprehends all my design, and suggests more subjects than I shall ever be able to execute. This grand difficulty being conquered, and flattering myself with the reader’s approbation, I shall chearfully go on.25
35His single-word title, ‘Life’, is then expounded upon as suggestively universal: a claim that can be taken either facetiously or seriously depending upon whether we think that universality is to be explored philosophically for understanding or milked opportunistically for copy. Furthermore, the term might be understood in a debased or worldly sense, perversely serving a haughty desire to limit and exclude:
We hear of persons being acquainted with life; enjoying life; having a taste for life. Misers, lovers, men of pleasure, business and ambition, appropriate it to themselves, and exclude the pretensions of all the world beside. They permit others to breathe, and move, and exist; but to live, is a peculiar privilege of their own.26
36Naturally our author has a different intention, and claims for his own usage of the term a spirit of philosophical openness, and a desire to engage with the essential spirit of thing itself rather than wasting his time and ours in the quantification of its merely material manifestations:
Passion, education, and fancy, determine men to different pursuits, and pride is always ready to vindicate their choice: hence it happens that every station has had its friends and advocates […]. All these various paths and characters of life we ought freely to examine, that we may impartially pronounce upon the advantages belonging to each. We ought not to content ourselves with looking upon the outward appearances of mankind, but enquire into the truth of their several pretensions to wisdom, honour and happiness. We should resolve human actions into their secret springs, pry into the recesses of the heart, and observe what is transacted in the green room; which, as Mr Bays thinks, makes a very considerable part of the plot.27
37The theatrical metaphor of the final sentence usefully situates the outlook of the Library editors. A play is judged by its effect in public performance, but it is what happens backstage, in rehearsal, that makes the difference and brings the piece to life. Similarly, the meaningful study of the ways of the world in its broadest sense should not be preoccupied with the mere spectacle of life, but more particularly with ‘what is transacted in the green room’. Not only the matter of life, that is, but its soul. The point comes across all the more effectively for being made light-heartedly by a writer who – as a writer – is perfectly willing to play the opportunistic man of the world. In a further twist of self-deprecating irony, his defence of the right sort of ‘plot’ is referred to George Villiers’s absurd playwright Mr Bayes, a character who notoriously cared not a fig for plot!28
38The satirical invective used by our authors against the world of journalism was a significant way of setting the project of The Library apart in the eyes of their readers. Mining a satirical vein going back to Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), they derided their own dabbling in novel forms of journalism the better to point up its misuse by peddlers of encyclopaedic information dressed up as meaningful knowledge such as Benjamin Martin. Their authors laughed at themselves as they wrote popular improving journalism which aped the forms – though not the content – of encyclopaedic didacticism, and their genteel readers no doubt enjoyed the gratifyingly elitist joke. But the very fact of taking on the encyclopaedists on their own territory amounted to a tacit acceptance that modern forms of knowledge called for new treatments. The Library’s self-satirising foray into experiments in periodical encyclopaedism thus only drew attention to the genuine difficulties of adequately containing and expressing modern knowledge.
39By early 1762, ten months in, the magazine’s initial architecture was visibly crumbling. One way or another, the original core essay-series were fading. ‘The Life of Christ’ and especially the ‘History of Knowledge Taste, and Learning in Great-Britain’ series were now appearing only intermittently; and even the ‘Morals’ series was occasionally interrupted. ‘Life, by the Observer’ enjoyed an unbroken run, but was transformed into a sort of correspondence column, in which form it tended to lose the marked individual identity that had characterised the earlier instalments. Some short new essay-series were introduced, such as ‘The Philosopher’ (three items) or ‘On Study’ (two items); but it was not clear whether these pieces were meant to replace those that had receded, and if so, how the new architecture was meant to work. The general tendency was for ever less in the way of on-going essays responding to an overarching editorial logic, and ever more in the way of one-off occasional pieces. As the material coherence of the original mission dissipated, so too did the positive programme for knowledge which was replaced by scatter-shot satire directed against the perceived errors and perversities of modernity. It was as if the satirical tone had consumed the serious content, undercutting the authors’ original moral mission by stripping it to its bones.
40The very enthusiasm with which The Library authors had joined battle against scientific systematisers finally undercut the credibility of their own project; and the satire they directed against their opponents felt increasingly as though it might also be directed against their own grandiose initial project. This self-consuming tendency is particularly visible in three occasional pieces appearing in some of the final issues, in February, March and May 1762. They are entitled, respectively, ‘A Sketch of Modern Authorship’, ‘An Enquiry into the Present State of Wit in Great Britain’, and ‘On the Fate of Periodical Productions’. These pieces were all short one-offs, but given the falling away of the essay-series by this stage, they were nevertheless prominent pieces in their respective issues. None of them is directly about culture or learning or the human spirit, but about the trials and tribulations of trying to exist in the world of periodical publication. That world has not changed: it is still being ridiculed as a vast machine for producing print and whose raison d’être is still commercial not philosophical. If anything has changed it is the degree to which the authors seem obsessed with the satirical treatment of what was always meant to be a non-subject.
41The second piece is the most useful for our purposes. It is written in the first-person and seems to offer an engaged opinion on the theme announced in the title, the present state of wit in Great Britain. The author expounds upon the subject in learned terms, arguing that ‘Wit, like science, hath its rise and fall, its crisis and revolutions. There are certain periods when a nation hath never any wits; presently they begin to appear and flourish, and, in another period, it seems absolutely to have lost them.’ A potted history follows, whimsically diverting the apparently learned theme towards satirical allegory, as he tells how ‘the anagram and acrostic, the quibble, conundrum, and rebus’ were born under James I, then flourished until routed by Addison, when Pun ‘in a fright fled, without stopping, to the land of metaphysics…Conundrum retired to the university…: and Rebus, after several wanderings and peregrinations, at length obtained peaceable settlement in the Magazines and the Ladies Diary.’29 In more recent times, the ‘revolutions’ in wit have accelerated to the extent that ‘what hath been sheer wit in March, hath been downright nonsense by the beginning of April.’30
42Our author is particularly pleased with the latest development which sees ‘a great deal of wit in a blank page’. ‘I have’, he tells us,
used all my influence with the proprietors of the present Magazine, to comply a little with the taste of the times in this respect, and give us two or three blank leaves, according as they shall see occasion, for a gazette of wit and humour, to be continued monthly, and take in all the publications of that kind. … But if there is so much merit in a single white leaf, bless me! What would a volume be, all in the same taste! It would not only be the best history of man unborn that ever was or will be published, but contain, likewise, a complete list of the benefactions of ___ , ___ , of the wise sayings of ___ , ___ , and many more of our nobility and gentry; a full account of the reformations in the church, and of the proceedings in both houses of the convocation; all that can be said in defence of a late resignation; and, for the benefit of the gentlemen of the faculty, an authentic narrative of the cures performed by hemlock: withall, a correct map of Terra Incognita, according to the latest discoveries, very necessary for travellers into those parts; and many other useful particulars; which will make it highly deserving of a place in the closets of the curious.31
43The immediate source for this extended joke must certainly have been the publication, also in 1762, of volume 6 of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, in chapter 38 of which Sterne had left a blank page where the reader might ‘paint’ a female character ‘to your own mind – as like your mistress as you can – as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you – ’tis all one to me – please but put your own fancy in it.’32 At one level, our author was simply mocking the modish affectation that dressed up skittish editorial pranks as witty and philosophical; but his picture of an entire book made up of blank pages – ludicrously enough the only way to fulfil the absurd pretension to cover everything – looks distressingly like a satire of the magazine of universal knowledge. It is rather as though the effort at distantiation has ended up being so extreme as to cause the object of study to disappear from view. The blank page was not just a joke; it was becoming the reality of the writer attempting to engage with universal meaning.
Distantiation naturalised
44After The Library ceased publication in May 1762, Kippis would find his way out of the impasse by heading in the direction of biography. The choice worked well for him. It provided the means of pursuing his guiding idea – that material knowledge needs a human underpinning – without having to explain or account for what ‘knowledge’ thus understood actually is, how it works, or how its furtherance might best be promoted. In the biographical setting, the nature of the relationship between the knowing mind and the world to be known could be allowed to remain mysterious: it was even what gave the genre its particular frisson. In his preface to the second edition of the Biographica Britannica, for which he produced five volumes between 1778 and 1793, Kippis described biography as first and foremost ‘agreeable and useful’, but also ‘capable of a still nobler application’. Thus,
[w]hen Biographical knowledge is employed in enlarging our acquaintance with Human Nature, in exciting an honourable emulation, in correcting our prejudices, in refining our sentiments, and in regulating our conduct, it then attains its true excellence…[I]t rises to the dignity of SCIENCE; and of such science as must ever be esteemed of peculiar importance, because it hath MAN for its object.33
45There is actually nothing in this catalogue of positive qualities that would normally merit – then or now – the title of ‘science’. The anecdotal treatment of human nature, encouraging emulation, correcting prejudice, refining sentiment, regulating conduct: all that Kippis really meant by this flourish was that reading biography in the right spirit would give you a fully rounded educational experience. You would not just learn facts about the world, but also acquire the human values of manly virtue and cultivated sentiment. The Biographia Britannica was The Library transformed into a more straightforwardly practical project.
46Ten years later, Kippis published a life of James Cook – the only book-length biography he produced. In it Cook was of course held up as a model. The man of modest origins learned quickly, acquiring a ‘large extent of knowledge’ thanks to ‘the ardour of his mind’. By his application, he gained enough skill in astronomy to take on the role of chief observer of celestial phenomena in his second and third voyages. Just as significantly, he achieved ‘such a degree of proficiency in general learning, and the art of composition, as to be able to express himself with a manly clearness and propriety, and to become respectable as the narrator, as well as the performer, of great actions.’34 The intrepid explorer faced the rigours and dangers of the Antarctic ocean with commendable fortitude: ‘He pushed forward into unknown seas, and penetrated through innumerable mountains and islands of ice, in the search of a southern continent. It was like launching into chaos: all was obscurity, all was darkness before him’.35 Undaunted by such material and mental challenges, Cook resolutely pursued the route to discovery, and, beyond that, to knowledge. Kippis continued to distinguish the two: ‘Captain Cook’s discoveries, among other effects, have opened new scenes for a poetical fancy to range in, and presented new images to the selection of genius and taste.’36 It was rather as if Cook had taken over editorship of the defunct Library.
47A real journey mapping a real wilderness could thus replace a virtual journey around an abstract labyrinth, performing essentially the same heuristic tasks. The experience was suitably multifarious, entailing the mapping of territory, observing natural phenomena, identifying and classifying species of living things, and studying the manners of the human inhabitants: a pretty complete tableau of the modern disciplines. Best of all, the whole of this exotic new world could be channelled and expressed through the unique gaze of the suitably-qualified exploring mind. The heroic traveller could thus be at once the gatherer and the interpreter of information. The real voyage through material space was reiterated as an imaginary voyage through the symbolic space of abstract knowledge. The explorer turned author could thus appear to redeem modern knowledge from disciplinary fragmentation more effectively than any of the other contemporary schemes we have considered. Cook’s voyage, as interpreted by Kippis, was more transparent as a meaning-making text than Chambers’ Cyclopaedia or Martin’s General Magazine, and more successful in demonstrating the centrality of human sensibility to the modern knowledge-schema than his own Library project could ever have hoped to be.
48In his own minor way, Andrew Kippis worked out by trial and error that the challenge of finding a distantiated perspective on modern knowledge would finally be more adequately met by the means available to the writer of heroic narrative than by those of encyclopaedic modelling. This is largely because the ground of the debate itself was shifting. Under the pressure of increasing disciplinary specialisation, the taxonomic conception of knowledge as a complex of static relations could not hold, and shifted instead towards a logic of immanence and emergence. In the following century, contests around the construction of knowledge would accordingly move away from issues relating to the mapping of relations and towards the interpretation of natural processes. The problem of universal knowledge seemed to change shape, and from impenetrable labyrinth it became untraceable narrative arc. The changing context required new forms of expertise, and the encyclopaedist would be replaced by the shaper of naturalistic narratives. It would be the age of the realist author and the myth of progress. In this setting, distantiation and meaning-making were to become virtually synonymous.
Notes de bas de page
1 John Reinold Forster, Observations made During a Voyage Round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy (London: G. Robinson, 1778), ii.
2 Cited in P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1982), 1.
3 John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 3 vol. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773), vol. I, vii.
4 Robert Henry, History of Great Britain on a New Plan, 12 vol. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1771–1793), vol. I, xxxiii–xxxiv.
5 Henry, History of Great Britain, vol. I, xxxvi.
6 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 60–62.
7 On the innovative efforts of Enlightenment encyclopaedists to marry the distinct existing traditions of alphabetically-structured dictionaries and the synthesising exposé of the humanistic encyclopaedia, see Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 22–32; and Seth Rudy, Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: the Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp. 18–44. Rudy’s study focuses on the challenges of completeness, pitting the comprehensiveness of the knowledge offered against the cohesiveness of its presentation. This focus is complementary to my own. Rudy’s analysis of the challenges of completeness treats of the encyclopaedic project in structural terms, and its characteristic issues are those of the model-builder. Rudy’s chapter in this volume pushes this approach further, using computer-aided modelling to map the conceptual structures of Chamber’s Cyclopaedia as suggested by his network of cross-references. My own focus on ‘distantiation’ approaches the same structural issues in narratological terms. A multi-layered narrative capable of building mutually-enhancing relations between comprehensive detail and cohesive overview can hold out the promise of taming the material problem of information overload. Much as the naturalist needs to learn how to look at the complexity of nature before he can hope to ‘place’ each species, so too must the reader of the universalising text learn how to navigate its labyrinthine structures. Seen this way, reading universalising texts becomes itself a form of learning, requiring sensibility and discernment. It is not just a passive process of information acquisition but also an active process of interpretation and acculturation.
8 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vol., (London: printed by subscription, 1728), vol. I, ii.
9 Chambers, Cyclopaedia, vol. I, i. A notable example of the cento form is Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627), a miscellaneous collection of proposed ‘experiments’ in ‘Natural History’ grouped in ten ‘centuries’. My thanks to Sorana Corneanu for her help here.
10 Chambers, Cyclopaedia, vol. I, iii.
11 Chambers, Cyclopaedia, vol. I, i.
12 Richard Yeo, ‘Encyclopedism,’ in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 6 vol., ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Detroit: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 2005), vol. II, 671. In his preface to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1773), William Smellie criticised the ‘folly of attempting to communicate science under the various technical terms arranged in alphabetical order’ after the manner of Chambers or Diderot. He preferred to combine short definitions of technical terms with extended essays on key subjects, corresponding to disciplines: the first three were ‘Agriculture’, ‘Botany’ and ‘Chemistry’ ([William Smellie], Encyclopaedia Britannica; or a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled Upon a New Plan, 3 vol. (London: John Donaldson, 1773), vol. I, v). The strategy was spelled out in the encyclopaedia’s subtitle: ‘A dictionary of arts and sciences compiled upon a new plan, in which the different sciences and arts are digested into distinct treatises and systems, and the various technical terms &c. are explained as they occur in the order of the alphabet.’ These core essays stood out because of their length. But the disciplines thus treated were arbitrarily selected, no attempt being made in the manner of Chambers or Diderot to derive them epistemologically from rationally-structured categories of thought or knowledge. As Richard Yeo remarks, ‘Now the emphasis was on coherence at the level of disciplines.’ (Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 180.) The Britannica’s approach thus contained the germ of the coming politicisation of knowledge construction, with conflicts over disciplinary status replacing debates about epistemological relationships.
13 On the founding of these reviews, see Frank Donoghue, ‘Colonizing Readers. Review Criticism and the formation of a reading public,’ in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 54–74.
14 See Johnathan Brody Kramnick, ‘Literary Criticism among the Disciplines,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no 3 (Spring 2002): 343–360; and Robin Valenza, Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 96–102.
15 Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (vol. I, 1747), title-page.
16 On Martin’s background and career, see John Milburn’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18175.
17 On Kippis’ background and career, see Alan Ruston’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15642.
18 Benjamin Martin, The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, 14 vol. (London: W. Owen, 1755–1764), vol. I, iii.
19 The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, vol. I, v.
20 Rudy, Literature and Encyclopedism, 116.
21 Patterns of authorship, but not names, were revealed in the final issue of May 1762. See The Library: or, Moral and Critical Magazine, by a Society of Gentlemen, 2 vol. (London: R. Griffiths, 1761–1762), vol. II, 277.
22 On this theme, see Janet Todd, Sensibility: an Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 23–28.
23 On this theme, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 56–71.
24 The Library, vol. I, 25.
25 The Library, vol. I, 27–28.
26 The Library, vol. I, 28.
27 The Library, vol. I, 28.
28 Mr Bayes (spelt ‘Bays’ by the Library author) is the absurd comic protagonist of George Villiers’s 1671 play, The Rehearsal. He is a faddish playwright more interested in making a splash than telling a story that makes sense. See for example Act II, Scene iii for his dismissive attitude towards plot.
29 The Library, vol. II, 122.
30 The Library, vol. II, 123.
31 The Library, vol. II, 124.
32 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 450.
33 Andrew Kippis, ed., Biographia Britannica, 2nd ed., vol. I–V (London: W. and A. Strahan, 1778–1793), xxi.
34 Andrew Kippis, A Narrative of the Voyages Round the World Performed by Captain James Cook (London: Scott, Webster, and Geary, 1788), 386.
35 Kippis, A Narrative of the Voyages Round the World, 387.
36 Kippis, A Narrative of the Voyages Round the World, 408.
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