The third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1797) was published in 18volumes in quarto by Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, in Edinburgh, Scotland. It represented a continuation of the encyclopedia founded by Bell and Macfarquhar in 1768. By the time of its release, it was the largest general encyclopedia in the English language, and the first one compiled by more than a handful of contributors.
History of the edition The second edition of the Britannica had been finished in 1784. Already in 1788, Bell and Macfarquhar had published a prospectus for a third edition. In part, they feared competition from the revised edition of the Cyclopaedia edited by Abraham Rees, recently published in five volumes in folio. According to the prospectus, the third edition of the Britannica was to be published in 240 weekly numbers costing 1 shilling apiece, to be collected and bound in twelve volumes costing 1 guinea each. It was projected to feature 360 plates. Later in 1788, the publishers announced their intention of expanding the set to fifteen volumes.Kathleen Hardesty Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition (1788-97): The Attainment of Recognition and Eminence,” in The Early Britannica (1768-1803): The Growth of an Outstanding Encyclopedia, ed. Frank A. Kafker and Jeff Loveland (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 157-58. By the time it was completed, the third edition occupied 18 volumes with 14,579 pages and 542 plates.Paul Kruse, "The Story of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1768–1943", PhD thesis (University of Chicago, 1958), 67. In 1801, a two-volume Supplement was added to the set.
As in the second edition of the Britannica, the volumes were published over a long period, from volume 1 in 1788 to volume 18 in 1797. Unlike those in the second edition, however, the title pages of the volumes in the third edition were not printed gradually as the volumes appeared but were printed and sent to subscribers when the set was complete. All volumes of the third edition are thus dated 1797.
The final page of each volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica contains "Directions" to the binder for the correct placement of the copperplates and maps. Nevertheless, some sets have the text and plates bound in separate volumes: the first 18 volumes containing the text, and volumes 19-20 the maps and copperplates.
Editors and contributors
Since Macfarquhar and Bell invited the editor of the first edition, William Smellie, to continue with the second edition, it is likely that they offered James Tytler, the editor of the second edition, to continue with the third. Certainly they retained him as a contributor. If in fact he worked as the third edition's editor, he did not do so for long, for he fled Edinburgh for northern England in 1788.Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 158.
By that point, if not earlier, Macfarquhar had taken over as editor. The preface names him the editor of volumes 1-12, up to "Mysteries." His editorship was cut short by his death at age 48, in 1793. His heirs were then bought out by Bell, who became sole owner of Britannica. Bell hired George Gleig, later the bishop of Brechin (consecrated on 30 October 1808), to carry on as editor for the remainder of the third edition. Gleig was annoyed to find that Macfarquhar had had not left an index of what had been covered and what was forthcoming. Two clergyman, James Thomson and James Walker, helped Gleig with the editing when he could not be in Edinburgh.Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 159-62, 169. Gleig continued as editor for the 1801 Supplement.
All told, we know of thirty-five contributors to the third edition, fewer than the number of contributors to the Encyclopédie (1751–72), but more than the number of contributors to any previous English-language encyclopedia.Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 157, 171. Many of the contributors are named in the anonymous preface, dated 1797 and apparently sent out with the title pages in that same year. In it, the author, undoubtedly Gleig, writes: "AEROLOGY, AEROSTATION, CHEMISTRY, ELECTRICITY, GUNNERY, HYDROSTATICS, MECHANICS, METEOROLOGY, with most of the separate articles in the various branches of natural history, we have reason to believe were compiled by Mr James Tytler chemist; a man who, though his conduct has been marked by almost perpetual imprudence, possesses no common share of science and genius."Encyclopaedia Britannica, third edition, 18 vols. (Edinburgh: Macfarquhar and Bell, 1797), 1: xv. According to the preface, Tytler's treatise on medicine for the second edition "was revised and improved for the present by Andrew Duncan, M.D. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Professor of the Institutes of Physic in the University." Tytler is also given some credit for "Motion," apparently co-written with Gleig.Encyclopaedia Britannica, third edition, 1: xv.
Among the editors of the third edition, Gleig was responsible for recruiting many but not all the contributors. He certainly contributed the most distinguished contributor, John Robison, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Robison, short of money, accepted a salary of a guinea a day for eight to ten hours of work. He ended up contributing more than twenty-five articles, some of them long ones: "Philosophy" (with Gleig), "Physics" (with Gleig), "Pneumatics," "Precession of the Equinoxes," "Projectiles," "Pump," "Resistance," "River," "Roof," "Rope-Making," "Rotation," "Seamanship," "Signals, Naval," "Simson (Dr. Robert)," "Sound," "Specific Gravity," "Statics," "Steam," "Steam-Engine," "Steel-Yard," "Stove," "Strength of Materials," "Telescope," perhaps "Thunder," "Tide," "Trumpet, Articulate," "Variation of the Compass," perhaps "Water," and "Works, Water."Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 163.
Contents Dedication The third edition began the tradition of dedicating the Britannica to the reigning British monarch, then King George III. Such dedications continued in the Britannica into the twenty-first century, albeit with shared dedications to the reigning British monarch and the reigning American president from the early twentieth-century onward. In the third edition, describing George III as "the Father of Your People, and enlightened Patron of Arts, Sciences and Literature," Gleig expressed his wish
In comparison with Ephraim Chambers' dedication of the Cyclopaedia (1728) to King George II, the dedication in the third edition reflected a growing spirit of nationalism common to encyclopedias' dedications in the second half of the eighteenth century.Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 239-41. The nationalistic rhetoric became much more pronounced in Gleig's dedication of the Supplement to the Third Edition in 1801:
Treatises Like the previous two editions of the Britannica, the third edition was composed of a novel mixture of typographically distinct "treatises" (generally long) and normal articles in a single alphabetical sequence. Although the third edition was almost twice as long as the second edition, the number of treatises barely went up, from 72 to 88. Likewise, the proportion of the Britannica occupied by the treatises continued to decline, from 58% in the first edition to 32% in the second edition and 31% in the third edition. Four of the treatises in the third edition now counted more than 150 pages, setting new records for the Britannica: "Astronomy" (187 pages), "Chemistry" (262 pages), "Medicine" (310 pages), and "Pharmacy" (176 pages).Jeff Loveland, "Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica," Book History 9 (2006): 74.
In the first edition of the Britannica, William Smellie had touted the treatises as favoring self-education.Jeff Loveland, An Alternative Encyclopedia? Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010), 143-46 By the time of the third edition, they were proving useful in attracting eminent contributors to the Britannica. In principle, such contributors could communicate recent discoveries, and they sometimes took advantage of their treatises to drive home their own viewpoints.Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 185-86.
Tytler's ongoing influence Many of the scientific articles in the third edition remained marked by Tytler's idiosyncratic viewpoints. His treatise "Electricity," an updated version of his treatise in the second edition, rejected Benjamin Franklin's conception of electricity as positive or negative. It was not an up-to-date representation of the subject, and it was denounced in one contemporary review: "A system so wild is not congenial to the usual accuracy of the Edinburgh writers." Still, the nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday later claimed to have drawn inspiration from this very treatise.Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 201-02.
In the second half of the alphabet especially, Robison attempted to correct Tytler's articles on scientific subjects, though without stating directly that he was taking aim at a fellow contributor.Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 203. Gleig came the closest to such an admission, writing in the preface that
The treatise "Hydrostatics," of course, had been written by Tytler, while Robison handled corrections in the other articles named in this passage.
Illustrations The prospectus for the third edition had claimed that more than a hundred of the plates for the third edition would be newly engraved. Regardless, since Bell was a practical engraver rather than an artist, many if not all the plates were copied from elsewhere, whether from earlier editions of the Britannica or other sources. True to the prospectus, the third edition had more plates (about 540) than the first edition (160) or the second (340). Although it fell short of the standard set by the Encyclopédie, it was the most amply illustrated English-language encyclopedia to date.Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 171-72.
The third edition of the Britannica was the first one to appear with a frontispiece, though other British encyclopedias had had them since the early eighteenth century. The frontispiece, loosely modeled on Sébastien Le Clerc's engraving "L'Académie es sciences & des beaux arts" (1698), showed men and women engaging in intellectual pursuits in a setting of classical architecture. Unlike the similar frontispiece in Chambers' Cyclopaedia, this one showed a manned balloon floating in the sky - perhaps a salute to Tytler, an avid balloonist, but perhaps merely a sign of scientific and technological progress.Doig et al., “Colin Macfarquhar, George Gleig, and Possibly James Tytler’s Edition," 166-68.
Remarkably, many if not all sets of the third edition included color in one plate, the one illustrating the treatises "Acoustics" and "Aerostation," identified as "2nd plate II."Encyclopaedia Britannica, third edition, 1: 208-09. The plate was undoubtedly printed in black and white and then colored by hand.
Unauthorized editions
In addition to the legitimate sets printed in Edinburgh, unauthorized sets were being printed in Dublin by James Moore and Philadelphia by Thomas Dobson at almost the same time.