商品詳細

The 19th century saw an upsurge of interest in encyclopaedias in Great Britain. Following Diderot's "L'Encyclopaedie" and Coleridge's "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana", many publishers tried to cash in on the thirst for knowledge among an increasingly educated public. But knowledge - especially scientific knowledge - was expanding rapidly and encylopaedias were long and expensive to produce; therefore, relatively few of these grand ventures were ever completed. The eight-volume "Oxford Encyclopaedia; or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature" (1833) is not mentioned in the standard work on the subject, Robert Collison's "Encyclopaedias" (1966), nor in Richard Yeo's more recent "Encyclopaedic Visions" (2001), nor even in the exhaustive entries in successive versions of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" itself. This discovery contains more than 7000 pages of information and comment on people, places, theories and things as seen through the eyes of Jane Austen's contemporaries. It offers a window on the state of learning in England between the Napoleonic Wars and the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832. The "Oxford Encyclopaedia" provides a new and very rich source of information for researchers in all kinds of disciplines.