The Case of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia

Heroes and villains: the case of Arthur Mee’s Children’s encyclopedia ROGER PAULIN Trinity College, Cambridge In choosing Arthur Mee’s Children’s encylopedia as a subject fitting for the keynote of this occasion, I am also making a foray into David’s area of expertise, and not my own: children’s literature. I do this in tribute to his work, which has extended our vision beyond the confines of traditional literary appreciation. His work stands for the awareness that the early processes of learning and assimilation are the most influential; that the facts and moral attitudes necessary for later life are inculcated through processes of transfer that often subvert curricula and learning institutions. They are usually eclectic and often multicultural. Indeed the study of children’s literature in a given cultural segment — and David has worked mainly, but not exclusively, on the nineteenth century — may provide information that reflects, but also contradicts, accepted notions of literary movements or periodizations, reading taste, and the formation of criteria or canons. My subject is, however, the children’s literature that most influenced me as a child, and I will attempt to relate it to wider concerns of the subject which I have professed as an adult. My choice of a work so antiquated, so passé, so politically incorrect, as Arthur Mee’s Children’s encyclopedia,1 may be surprising to some. I grew up with the ten-volume bound set of the Children’s encylopedia (one which became progressively more battered as five children read it). I cannot begin to quantify my debt to this work, which I believe is still worthy of our attention today, even if we cannot now subscribe to much of which it contains. Forgotten this work may be today, but in its time the Children’s encyclopedia sold one and a half million sets in the British Empire. As the Book of knowledge it sold three and a half million sets in the 1 The Children’s encyclopedia, ed. Arthur Mee, 10 vols (London: The Educational Book Co., n.d. [1922–25]) (continuous pagination: references in text to pages, not to vols). 161 162 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY USA. In due course, it was translated and adapted into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. It began as a fifty-part series in 1908–10, and was reissued in augmented form in 1922–25 in the ten volumes familiar to some of us. These went through, respectively, twenty-six and fourteen editions up to 1940.2 (I have no details of the post-war adaptation.) Such figures speak of a considerable publishing enterprise and of dissemination on a worldwide scale. Who was the editor-author, Arthur Mee? Most of what I have to say relies on the accuracy of the only biography I could find, John Hammerton’s of 1946. In this case, however, the work is more important than the man. Arthur Mee represents in a symbolic way what we today call ‘Middle England’, but he also diverges from that appellation in an equally crucial fashion. He was born in 1875 in Stapleton, Notts — fairly central in geographical terms — the son of an engineer. He came from nonconformist, Baptist background, where the virtues of abstinence from alcohol were preached and practised. His subsequent journalistic career led him from Nottingham to London, to the Morning Herald and then to the Harmsworth-Northcliffe Daily Mail. Thus the Children’s encylopedia is ultimately a Harmsworth product. But it is also fair to say that Arthur Mee represented Northcliffe’s nonconformist conscience, and the newspaper magnate, once recognizing Arthur Mee’s special talent, was prepared to give him his head. He may not have shared Arthur Mee’s campaign against alcohol, waged in pamphlets, but also in the pages of the Children’s encyclopedia, or his distaste for blood sports. He may, however, have supported those of Arthur Mee’s passionate convictions that underlay his position as editor of the Children’s encyclopedia. These are: an unchanging belief in the Christian way of life, a deep love of his native land, the conviction that the British Empire had been a source of great good for humanity, an anxious concern for the welfare of the rising generation, a hero worship, and a deep inner joy in the task he set himself.3 Even then, Arthur Mee’s imperialism and hero worship (as in his Hero book of 1921)4 need qualifying. Already a manifesto of 1903 states: ‘The true patriot is he who would knit the world together, not by the brute force of war, but by the common interests of humanity’.5 That is one year after the end of the Boer War. I quote further, from the 1908–10 edition of the Children’s encyclopaedia: 2 See information in Sir John Hammerton, Child of wonder.An intimate biography of Arthur Mee (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1946), 122–36. 3 See Hammerton, Child of wonder, 139. 4 Arthur Mee’s hero book. A companion volume to little treasure island. By the editor of the children’s newspaper (London: Hodder & Stoughton, n.d. [1921]). 5 Mee quoted in Hammerton, Child of wonder (note 2), 66..

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