Gazing at The Imperial Dictionary

Abstract

Halfway through the nineteenth century, Blackie and Son, a Glasgow publishing firm with branches in Edinburgh and London, produced the first general dictionary of English to rely heavily upon pictorial illustrations integrated with the text. Its title was The Imperial Dictionary, English, Technological, and Scientific, Adapted to the Present State of Literature, Science, and Art; On the Basis of Webster's English Dictionary. A typical page from The Imperial Dictionary (and not all pages are illustrated) is shown in Figure 1. Although the philosopher John Locke had recommended using pictures to explain lexical meaning as early as 1690,' and though Nathan Bailey had made tentative use of the device in the first comprehensive dictionary of English, his Dictionarium Britannicum (1730),2 full implementation was delayed until after the development of a sufficiently fine-grained and economical reproductive technology, the reformed mode of wood engraving that Thomas Bewick popularized at the end of the eighteenth century.3 In the generation after Bewick, the technique of wood engraving became an increasingly precise and mechanical means for printing facsimile images (though the engraving was still done by hand, laboriously). It had special advantages over other reproductive media. Unlike metal engravings, which required expensive special handling (that is, printing on separate sheets), end-grain woodblock engravings could be printed side by side with letterpress type. And this economical arrangement brought an aesthetic and cognitive bonus: image and text could be attractively and relevantly integrated on the page. The best substance for wood engraving was boxwood because of its toughness and close texture. The wood blocks were framed from inch-thick slices cut across the trunk, which would normally be a foot or less in diameter; the surface of a typical block might measure four by six inches. Al-