Boyles - Everything Explained That Is Explainable

H OGARTH, JANET ELIZABETH (18651954), Oxford-educated British editor and writer, first female employee of the Bank of England, former librarian of the Times Book Club, member of the executive board of the Womens National Anti-Suffrage League, and the only female senior editor of the Encyclopdia Britannica, stepped under the huge canopy covering the magnificent Savoy Hotels Embankment entrance, went up to the foyer and into the formal banqueting hall, and quickly greeted a small collection of colleagues. You couldnt have known by looking at hershe was a tall, big-boned, middle-aged, apparently confident Victorian professional woman in a serious gown, except for that sweetheart neckline and the lace insertbut she was very anxious. In fact, she admitted later, I was never so frightened in my life.

It was the night of December 13, 1910. The occasion was a banquet to celebrate the work of the women contributors to the soon-to-be-published Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica, an enterprise so heavily and persistently publicized that the appearance of a new edition alone seemed to be the appropriate climax to a climactic decade, the first of the twentieth century. Of all the great reference works in the English language, the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica is among the most famous. Its now more than a century old, but whether you know it or not, your view of the world has been shaped by the Elevenths insightful and deep comprehension of what has mattered most in the modern world. It wasand for many still is (the forty thousand entries from the Eleventh, now in the public domain, provide an important content backbone to Wikipedia)the encyclopedia that counted, the ultimate authority, the unimpeachable source of highly credible information in a world, then as now, dizzy with change. Janet Hogarth was there to represent and salute those women who helped create it, to give a rousing speech in their honor, and to call attention to the way the new Britannica heralded the birth of a truly modern era for truly modern womenwhich, as a freethinking, employed, unmarried, Oxford-educated woman, she certainly was.

The Cecil and the Savoy, two of the great Edwardian London hotels

Barely ten years after the death of the old empress, and after decades of obsession about social order and transition, modern was becoming less a destination and more a settled state. By 1910, most educated people felt certain that the massive upheaval and change driven by the growth of literacy, democracy, science, and secularism at last had delivered them all to a world that had achieved the dependable stability of a great pyramid, especially to an English-speaking man or woman. For Hogarth and her colleagues, blocks of knowledge had been piled atop one another through all of historyeach layer lifting mankind higher and higher, setting Romans on Greeks, materialism on faith, whites on blacks. Modern life seemed finally to conform to a rational structure, one nourished by commerce, enlightened by charity and good works, governed by order, and devoted to Progress. A Union Jack, representing the global supremacy of the English language, flew confidently from the apex of that pyramid. All the old explanations from all those earlier, dimmer agesabout God, women, science, art, literature, technology, anthropology, and politicsno longer seemed to apply. Now the entire worldall of existence, reallycould be explained, if only one knew where to look.