A Brill Calendar: March 29

Chalmers' Dictionary

Few facts characterize scholarship early in the 21st century as strikingly as the mass of digital data containing texts and images on a world-wide electronic web, accessible by search machines.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s Father Brown, Roman-Catholic priest & unorthodox sleuth solving mysterious criminal cases was wont to say that the best place to hide a book is a library, but the universe of Messrs Gates & Jobs makes short shrift with his assumption. Most presuppositions in connection with the power of computers when Microsoft was but a young company were refuted a few decades later. Scholarly work taking a life-time earlier – a sound concordance for a large corpus of texts, a comprehensive dictionary and, of course, numerical calculations and tables for physical sciences - are now at the world’s proverbial ‘finger-tips’.

By the same token the very notion of scholarly ‘work’ changed fundamentally. Words are no envelopes containing an immutable reality. Their flightiness makes them so endlessly fascinating, particularly if they denote abstractions.

The occupation of a Scot, Alexander Chalmers (Aberdeen, March 29 1759 – London, December 10 1834) illustrates this point. In an era even devoid of the productive power of typewriters and copying machines, Chalmers’ industry & zeal was stupendous. His claim to fame – or what is left of it – is his ‘General Biographical Dictionary’. As a young man he must have set eyes on an 11 volume-set with the same title, dating from 1761. Longing for truly vast coverage, Chalmers harnessed his tireless energy and launched a ‘revision’, under the same title: a set of 232 volumes, printed and published as from 1812 until 1817. Yet, this is just the Everest in Chalmers’ Himalaya; his ‘The British Essayists; With Prefaces Historical and Biographical’ boasts 45 volumes.

It is seldom taken into account that the Digital Universe as it exists today was already a Utopia – or Nightmare – when pen & paper were the only means to chart the infinity of scholarly ambition.