Rees's Cyclopædia, in full The Cyclopædia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature was an important 19th-century British encyclopaedia edited by Rev. Abraham Rees (1743–1825), a Presbyterian minister and scholar who had edited previous editions of Chambers's Cyclopædia.
Background
When Rees was planning his Cyclopædia, Europe was in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and during serialised publication (1802–1820) the Napoleonic Wars and War of 1812 occurred. Britain absorbed into its empire a number of the former French and Dutch colonies around the world; Romanticism came to the fore; evangelical Christianity flourished with the efforts of William Wilberforce; and factory manufacture burgeoned.
With this background, philosophical radicalism was suspect in Britain, and aspects of the Cyclopædia were thought to be distinctly subversive and attracted the hostility of the Loyalist press. Contributors Jeremiah Joyce and Charles Sylvester had attracted the attention of the government and were tried for their views. The editor and authors went to great pains to emphasise their Englishness, to the extent of anglicising many French words: the French Kings Louis appear under the heading "Lewis".
Scientific theorising about the atomic system, geological succession, and earth origins; natural history (botany, entomology, ornithology and zoology); and developments in technology, particularly in textiles manufacture, are all reflected in the Cyclopædia. Other topics include exploration and foreign travel which provide insights into how the world was viewed at that time. Agriculture and rural life also feature greatly.
Format
The Cyclopædia appeared serially between January 1802 and August 1820, and ran to 39 volumes of text and 6 volumes of plates including an atlas. It contains around 39 million words, and around 500 of the articles are of monograph length. The sheets were produced weekly, and issued as half-volume sets several times a year. The dates of these can be seen on table 4.1 below. Only one set of the work in half-volumes (which also has some of the paper wrappers) is known to survive, in the library of the Natural History Museum, London.
Plates
The plates were published in 6 volumes: four covering general articles, one on natural history, and one atlas. They were issued as blocks and so do not appear to have been issued with the texts in the half-volumes. There are 1107 plates, and atlas with 61 folded maps 16" by 10" in size. Bound at the back of Volume 39 are lists of all the plates and an index to them.
Later editions
The American edition was published by Samuel F. Bradford (see :fr:Samuel F. Bradford), of Philadelphia. Bradford was a member of the famous family of American printers. The first volume appeared in May 1806 and the last in December 1820. The work extended to 41 volumes of text and 6 of plates. See section 5 below.
The growth of industrial archaeology led to the reprinting in the 1970s by the British publisher David and Charles of volumes covering manufacturing industry, naval architecture, and horology.
In the 1980s the Swiss publishing house IDC produced a microfiche edition.
Background, reception, scholarship
The first decades of the 19th century saw many encyclopaediae published in Britain. Examples included: The fourth, fifth and sixth editions of Encyclopædia Britannica in 20 volumes, 1801–1810, 1815–1817, and 1823–1824. Encyclopædia Perthensis or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Science and Literature, 23 volumes, Edinburgh 1807. Edinburgh Encyclopædia, 18 volumes, 1808–1830, ed. David Brewster. British Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 6 volumes, 1809, ed. William Nicholson. Pantologia, 12 volumes, 1813, ed. John Mason Good, Olinthus Gregory, Newton Bosworth. Encyclopædia Metropolitana, 28 volumes, 1817–1845, edited initially by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Encyclopaedia Londinensis 24 volumes,1810–1828, including 3 volumes of plates, ed. John Wilkes These sources commonly fed off each other, and writers often contributed to more than one.
The Cyclopædia had comparatively little reception on publication. The Anti-Jacobin Review published hostile reviews of half-volume 1 in 1802, and of volumes 2–4 in 1804-5. These reviews complained about its supposed antireligious aspects and radical standpoints attributed to its editor and contributors, and cited lack of article balance, confusing alphabetisation, and cross-references to then-unpublished volumes. The British Critic less stridently criticised lack of balance and confusion in volume 1. The Panoplist carried a serial review of both editions of Rees by Jedediah Morse in 1807–1810.