You Could Look It Up (49 page)

The most influential of the published commonplace books came out of nineteenth-century Cambridge, Massachusetts. John Bartlett, of a distinguished New England family, was an early reader—“he was able to read a Bible verse to his mother at the age of three; by nine he had read the entire Bible aloud”—and he must have been an excellent recorder of commonplaces.
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At the age of sixteen he started working at the Harvard University bookstore, and he eventually bought the shop. He became a fixture in Harvard Square, known for his willingness to chat with customers, and especially for his ability to find apt quotations. “Ask John Bartlett” became proverbial among Harvard students. Eventually the constant questions about quotations gave him the idea of publishing his own little collection of bons mots, a descendant of the Erasmian
Adagia
. With the aid of a Harvard student, Henry W. Haynes, he pieced together his favorite tags from American, English, and world literature. “The object of this work,” Bartlett explained in his preface, “is to show, to some extent, the obligation our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become ‘household words.’ ”
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Bartlett claimed he took all his quotations from their original sources rather than depending on reprints of reprints of reprints. If that is so, his reading was extensive and hit most of the high points recognized by
nineteenth-century America. The book opens with “Holy Scriptures,” arranged by book of the Bible: “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18); “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19); “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9); and so on. All the most memorable passages were included: “He kept him as the apple of his eye” (Deut. 22:10); “A man after his own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14); “How are the mighty fallen” (2 Sam. 1:25); “A still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12); “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18); “Set thine house in order” (Isaiah 38:1); “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matt. 4:4); “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13); “Neither cast ye your pearls before swine” (Matt. 7:6); “For many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14); “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23); “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23); “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2); “I am made all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22); “For now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12); “I have fought the good fight” (2 Tim. 4:7).

Bartlett was especially drawn to the more legalistic parts of the Bible, and he had a particular fascination with judgment: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Gen. 9:6); “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Deut. 19:21); “Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee” (Luke 19:22); “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). Right after the Bible came the
Book of Common Prayer
—together, the Scriptures and the prayer book got twenty-five pages.

Then Bartlett presented the author who, for English speakers, came closest to holy writ: Shakespeare received sixty pages to himself, more than twice as much as the Bible. Of course, these passages are removed from plays and dropped into a collection of quotations; speeches are reproduced without speech prefixes—in other words, it is impossible to tell who said what. The result is that Shakespeare seems to be speaking, not his characters. The Bard authorizes whatever appears under his name, even if he intended it to be understood ironically.

A procession of literary worthies followed, starting with the English and American poets lined up in chronological order. Many of them are predictable—John Milton, for instance, got ten pages—but, as a reminder that the literary canon evolves, John Donne, today one of the most respected poets, earned just two quotations, a total of five lines, and none of his now-famous ones: no “Death be not proud” or “No man is an island.” George Herbert received similar treatment, and John Keats got only four lines. Bartlett was generous, though, with American authors, including William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Foreign writers (Thomas à Kempis, Rabelais, Cervantes) and prose writers (Bacon, Hobbes, Benjamin Franklin) closed out the quotations, making a total of 169 featured authors. A topical index rounded out the volume to aid those who remember keywords: “Abundance, every one that hath”; “Accidents by flood and field”; “Accoutred as I was”; “Aching void”; “Action, suit the, to the word”; “Actions of the just”; “[Actions] like almanacs”; “Acts, little nameless.”

Bartlett went on to have an interesting post-
Quotations
life. In 1862, when the U.S. Civil War was heating up, he sold his bookshop and took a position as a paymaster in the Navy. He returned to Boston the
following year and went to work for Little, Brown and Co., one of the leading publishers in the city. By this time they were interested in Bartlett’s book, which he had self-published through three earlier editions. He did well at Little, Brown, working his way up to senior partner in 1878. After his retirement in 1894, he produced a concordance to the works of Shakespeare. By the time he died in 1905, his
Familiar Quotations
was in its ninth edition, having sold more than three hundred thousand copies, and new editions continue to appear—along with countless imitators.

Bartlett has had some high-profile supporters. “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations,” advised Winston Churchill. “Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations
is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations, when engraved upon the memory, give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”
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Browsing Bartlett’s, in its dozens of editions since 1855, remains one of the best ways to get insight into our culture’s collective psychology. As James Gleick put it in a review of a recent edition, “Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley have become ancient sages; to capture the words now on our lips and pens, the new edition has felt obliged to canonize less venerable authors like the Doors (‘Come on, baby, light my fire’), Sesame Street (‘Me want cookie!’) and Monty Python’s Flying Circus (‘This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot’).”
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The nineteenth-century concern with practicality gave reference books an almost missionary purpose. Eminent Victorians hoped to offer their social inferiors a path to betterment by becoming learned, giving the proletarians the information once available only to gentlemen.

One of the nineteenth century’s most enduring and beloved reference books is one of its quirkiest, born out of “the need to make the fruits of nineteenth century scholarship accessible to an ever widening range of readers.”
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The Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer had nobly
paternalistic intentions, perfectly in keeping with his upbringing: to provide the working classes with access to high culture. Those who had been denied a good education might still turn to his guide to proverbs, idioms, folklore, history, and mythology. If idioms and mythology seem an odd combination, it is characteristic of the book as a whole; all of Brewer’s diverse and eccentric interests and hobbyhorses are expressed in it.

Brewer, born into a large family, was privately educated by his schoolmaster father in Norfolk. In 1832 he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he won prizes for Latin, English, and mathematics. But he ended up studying none of these, and instead took first-class honors in civil law. Meanwhile he was ordained a deacon in 1834 and a priest in 1838. Still, he neither practiced law nor held a position in the church. Instead, he taught in his father’s school and wrote widely—books on education, translations, a
Poetical Chronicle
, and a bestselling
Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar
—making good use of an excellent reference library in his chambers. For six years in the 1850s he relocated to Paris, where he traveled in fashionable and aristocratic circles. After marrying he returned to England, settling first in Bloomsbury, then in Paddington, and finally in Sussex.

There he worked on his most famous book. His nephew recalled his study: “The walls of this room were papered with a plain white paper, upon which he used to write in pencil stray memoranda and the names of any particularly interesting visitors and the dates on which they came to see him. These names included that of the Duchess of Portland, then one of the most beautiful women in the country. She insisted on going upstairs to my grandfather’s own room and carried on a long conversation with him, sitting on his bed, a highly informal proceeding in those days, which particularly pleased the old gentleman!” Brewer was a devoted note taker, recollecting the old commonplace habit that Bartlett made use of. But Brewer carried it further, sorting his notes into categories. His nephew again described his workspace: “In the middle of the room … there was a long wooden box arrangement. The front was open and divided into pigeon-holes, lettered from A to Z, in which were the slips of paper on which were written the notes and references he made and continued to make daily.”
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Describing the
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
is notoriously challenging, and Brewer himself admitted “it will be difficult to furnish an answer in a sentence.” He introduced it by saying, “We call it a ‘Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,’ a title wide enough, no doubt, to satisfy a very lofty ambition, yet not sufficiently wide to describe the miscellaneous contents of this ‘alms-basket of words,’ ” but that was not a description. Coming closer to an answer, he claimed, “It draws in curious or novel etymologies, pseudonyms and popular titles, local traditions and literary blunders, biographical and historical trifles too insignificant to find a place in books of higher pretension, but not too worthless to be worth knowing.”
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Whatever it was, it had some antecedents: William Hone’s
Every-Day Book
(1825–26) and John Timbs’s
Things Not Generally Known
(1856) both collected miscellanea that might be some approximation of useful. Brewer’s book contains elements of an encyclopedia, with many entries covering real-world subjects, especially mythology. It also is dictionary-like in its attention to word origins: etymology “forms a staple of the book, which professes to give ‘the derivation, source, or origin of words that have a tale to tell.’ ”
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And it is also partly a dictionary of proverbs.

Once Brewer settled on the kind of book he wanted to write, he sought a publisher. He turned to an editor he knew well, but, in Brewer’s own words, “it was his opinion that the book would have no sale as it would be wholly impossible to exhaust the subject.” It is hard to blame the editor. At length Cassell hesitantly agreed to take the book, though they were “doubtful whether the book would pay the expense of printing.”
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Cassell had to exert some influence on Brewer. The manuscript he submitted was far too long to publish; the editors demanded he cut it severely, down to one third of the length he wanted. Charged with tossing out two of every three curious facts he had collected, he was still left with about twenty thousand entries.