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Alan Rauch is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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""Useful Knowledge" can stand as a model of informed and scrupulous historicism. The breadth of Rauch's acquaintance with subliterary and paraliterary texts is truly impressive as he clearly lays out what was at stake for nineteenth-century intellectuals and usefully relates their preoccupations with those that concern us now, as we experience another information revolution."--Harriet Ritvo, author of "The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination "

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Useful Knowledge - CL

Duke University Press

Chapter One

Society is now so far advanced, that the people must be supplied with the mental aliment. -Thomas Tegg, preface to the London Encyclopaedia (1826)

It may be easily demonstrated that there is an advantage in learning both for the usefulness and the pleasure of it.-Henry Brougham, Discourse on Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science (1827)

Although it is widely accepted that nineteenth-century England was preoccupied with knowledge, very little attention has, in fact, been directed toward the "knowledge industry." For reasons that are not entirely clear, the rapid growth of periodicals, encyclopedias, and societies promoting knowledge is a phenomenon in English popular culture that has largely been ignored by students of literature and history. Yet the knowledge movement is an important record of a culture's fascination with its own science and technology. The proliferation of books, periodicals, mechanics' institutes, and even lending libraries celebrated the progressive accumulation of even more knowledge, to say nothing of the benefits that could be accrued from "mental improvement." However slighted by history the literature of knowledge has been, the character that it helped produce-the polymath-remains a strong emblem of early Victorian culture. In fact, the term continues to be a title of distinction, if not outright admiration, in nineteenth-century studies. But comprehensive knowledge was not merely an ambition of the intellectual elite; a growing population of readers, from all classes, recognized that some degree of social status could be gained through learning. Publishers and authors were quick to recognize this substantial constituency as an important market; countless books claimed to have in their contents a "thousand" things that a man must know. Knowledge reflected the growing prosperity of the country and was emblematic of England's stature within the scientific community. Still, the political implications of this movement were complex given that many believed that knowledge was foisted by the powerful and the wealthy on the working classes in order to indoctrinate them into a culture where knowledge validated a simple work ethic. Maria Edgeworth's patriarchal General Clarendon, who appears in the novel Helen (1834), reflects a common sentiment. "The march of intellect," we are told of Clarendon, "was not a favourite march with him, unless the steps were perfectly kept, all in good time." Clarendon's concern, that the pursuit of knowledge might not necessarily occur in lockstep, was well founded.

For the individuals who, by means of an increase in knowledge, were able to insinuate themselves into the higher tiers of society-occupied by the General Clarendons of the world-a certain amount of discretion was necessary. While one kind of knowledge might be valuable in the "making" of an individual, a somewhat different kind might be valuable in their unmaking; the Lady Dedlocks of the world live in fear of being exposed by the growing race of Tulkinghorns. Thus, as Dickens understood very well, the many years required to accumulate the knowledge that made one socially acceptable could be turned around in a moment by another kind of knowledge that threatened exposure. A "smart operator," as it were, might profit well by gaining a little piece of knowledge that ultimately had great market value. Whether it involved Lady Dedlock's secret indiscretion in Bleak House or Bounderby's ironically unremarkable life history in Hard Times, the value of knowledge, as Alexander Welsh has pointed out, was very high, particularly across classes. Thus, whether illicit or not, the rewards of mental improvement were many and varied.

If we consider knowledge texts in the spirit of Roger Chartier's recent admonition to understand how texts "can be differently apprehended, manipulated and comprehended," a more complex picture of encyclopedias and their readers emerges. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's notion of the "actualization" of a work in the process of reading, Chartier looks at the spaces of reading in the early modern period as well as the commodification of reading. For the present purpose, the most significant implication is the displacement of knowledge from a public sphere to a private one. In other words, encyclopedias encapsulated knowledge in relatively compact texts for consumption in private. While knowledge was still the mainstay of libraries, museums, and public lecture halls, it could also be absorbed in isolation, away from the gaze of others. The rude and uncultured Heathcliff is, for example, able to return to Wuthering Heights mysteriously transformed into, not merely a man of means, but a man of knowledge. Although this new private space is wonderful for the dissemination of knowledge, it made the interpretation and application of knowledge much more difficult to control. The officers of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), one of the great popularizing societies, recognized this problem and, as we shall see, were unable to do anything to rectify it. By offering a wide range of topics illuminated by substantial text and often profuse illustrations, knowledge texts thus functioned like the center of Bentham's panopticon. At the core is, of course, the unobserved reader, who not only can scan the material around him anonymously but can then interpret, infer, and combine the facts and details with impunity.

The spirit of self-improvement-or mental improvement, as it was commonly called-as well as the promise of scientific innovation held sway as the dominant ethos of the time. In this climate, knowledge, as a cornerstone of progress, improvement, and civilization, answered well as a vehicle for moral growth. "If knowledge were not itself one of the supports of morality," wrote George Craik in his remarkable The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830-31), "it would not have been worthy of the commendations which have universally been bestowed upon it; nor would its diffusion deserve the warm encouragement it has uniformly received from an enlightened philanthropy." Knowledge was clearly something worth acquiring and thus was enthusiastically produced, received, and promulgated by the culture.

In order to provide a brief overview of the status of knowledge in the nineteenth century, I have divided this chapter into three sections that consider the ways in which knowledge was popularized and made available. The sections complement each other and the remainder of the book in that they address the very real question of how ideas operate within a culture. Simply to say that science was influential within the culture does not adequately explain how literary figures with apparently only marginal connections to science and technology (Charlotte Bronte, e.g.) came to address those issues in their work. While broad cultural influences are always difficult to tease out, in the following pages I will suggest something of the modes and the mechanisms, specific to the nineteenth century, behind the influence of the knowledge industry. The first section deals with the phenomenon of encyclopedias as a reflection of the desire to accumulate knowledge as well as to classify and consolidate it. The second looks at the SDUK, one of...