The Encyclopædia Britannica was born in 18th-century Edinburgh amid the great intellectual ferment known as the Scottish Enlightenment. It was there and then that Adam Smith prepared The Wealth of Nations, Sir Walter Scott wrote novels, Robert Burns poetry, David Hume and Adam Ferguson philosophy, and James Boswell grew to manhood and attended the university. According to one chronicler of Britannica history, Edinburgh in the mid-1700s was “a city on the verge of a golden age, a centre of learning and a home of writers, thinkers, and philosophers, wags, wits and teachers.” . It was against this setting that Colin Macfarquhar, a printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver, decided to create an encyclopedia that would serve the new era of scholarship and enlightenment. to publish their new reference work and hired the twenty-eight-year-old scholar William Smellie to edit it. It would be arranged alphabetically, “compiled upon a new plan in which the different Sciences and Arts are digested into distinct Treatises or Systems,” and its chief virtue was to be, in the editor’s word, “utility.”
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 09:11:21 +0000
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