The Harmsworth Self-Educator

The threads of collecting are always intertwined: One invariably leads to another once you get started.    We went to an auction a few weeks ago, at which time we got The Book of Knowledge, a set of Childcraft-like books from Edwardian England.  This morning, as I was shuffling around those partial-encyclopedia-sets that we got, I noticed several gray-spined books with barely readable embossed writing.   I picked one volume up and tipped it towards a window, to get a better look at what it said: The New Self-Educator.  It couldn’t be, could it?   I flipped open to the title page, and sure enough, it is The New Harmsworth Self-Educator, as edited by Arthur Mee, editor of The Book of Knowledge (also known as the Children’s Encyclopedia).

Arthur Mee was born in 1875, second-oldest child and the oldest son of Henry and Mary Mee.    He excelled in literary courses, so for obvious reasons found work at a newspaper, the Nottingham Evening Post. He proved himself an excellent reporter and essayist, and eventually Mee outgrew his Nottingham roots and headed to London in 1896.   Sir Alfred Harmsworth was a difficult character to miss in the journalistic field at that time — he had published a number of successful small periodicals in the 1880s, but in the 1890s he turned to the newspaper business.   About the time Mee made it to London,  Harmsworth had just launched the Daily Mail, the premiere tabloid newspaper to come from Harmsworth’s presses.   Mee was extremely prolific, producing thousands of written words a day, and he kept a huge library of news-clippings that numbered in the hundreds of thousands of indexed references to pull from when researching his works.  Mee’s freelance writing attracted Harmworth’s attention and garnered Mee a position on the Self-Educator’s editorial staff.  At first, like the later Children’s Encyclopedia, the Harmsworth Self-Educator was a periodical, published twice-monthly, providing several educational articles at a time.  When the article-count climbed high enough, and demand had grown to such a degree, the articles from the periodical (along with some pulled from other sources) were compiled into the ten-volume encyclical set.

In the Self-Educator, we can see the origins of the Children’s Encyclopedia.  The Self-Educator is a compilation of topically grouped articles rather an alphabetical organization, but each volume does have a standard list of chapter topics: “Success”, “Civil Service and Professions”, “Languages”, “Clerkship”, etc. Each volume contained those same chapters, with two or three articles contained in each.   Some articles are purely factual textbook-like informational pieces, while other articles on manners, literature, and art often use creative language and dry humor for a more appealing tone.  The tone and type of information is for a significanly older age-set than the Encyclopedia, but that is a condition of its audience.  At the time, “graduation” occurred in the early teenage years — if they could attend school at all — so little more than the very basic education was directly available for the poorer classes.  While the Self-Educator was a significant investment, it gave those people with the barest of educations the chance to continue their learning at their own pace.

D has come to love the Children’s Encyclopedia as well, and her first question as I was researching was, “does it have the same cool illustrations?”   The Self- Educator is a bit more bare- bones and less visually appealing than the Encyclopedia, although it appears to use photographs and diagrams about as much as the Encyclopedia.  Since the Self-Educator has less fairy-tales and nursery rhymes, there are fewer cartoony illustrations, and the Self-Educator lacks the artistic borders and flourishes of the Encyclopedia.  This may make the Self-Educator less appealing to some book collectors because it has a feel more like a textbook than the Encyclopedia.   As with my edition of the Book of Knowledge/Children’s Encyclopedia, my Harmsworth Self-Educator is incomplete.  I believe we’re only missing two volumes, which may make it easier to complete the set.   Arthur Mee put an enormous amount of work into these two encyclopedic sets, it would be an injustice to his efforts to leave these incomplete.