Open Writing

Arthur Mee's ten glorious volumes of his Children's Encyclopedia, one of the art treasures of his age that should not be lost, inspired thousands of now eminent people who pored over it as children. Sadly after he died in 1941, later editions into the 1960s were undistinguished and not properly updated. Yet a new version of his Encyclopedia, with the same determination that children should be given 'the very best', would be a marvellous source of organised knowledge, art, literature, history, science, hobbies and thoughtfulness for our bright children—who can never get the same by surfing the Internet for information to paste into projects.

Arthur Mee was born on July 21, 1875, at Stapleford near Nottingham in England. His career was like one of his own heroic stories. One of the ten children of Henry Mee, a Baptist artisan and political radical, Arthur started work at 14 reading copy to the proofreader on the local paper. By the age of 20 he edited the evening edition, and in London at 21 he wrote six large columns weekly, edited a picture magazine and worked on two political biographies— one characteristically titled, England's Mission by England's Statesmen.

Described as 'torrentially productive', Mee himself estimated he wrote a million words a year for fifty years, only outdone by the comics writer Frank Richards. He helped to write Harmsworth's Self-Educator and History of the World, then wrote his own Children's Encyclopedia , My Magazine, The Children's Newspaper, 1000 Heroes, The Little Treasure House, The Children's Bible, Shakespeare, Bunyan and Arthur Mee's 'books about many things'. Mee died in 1941.

Dubbed 'the Happy Wonderer', Mee himself remained childlike in his wonder about everything. He thought and wrote like a grown-up child, and children have loved it. His curiosity, enthusiasm, optimism, energy and innocence were without bounds, and captivated so many young readers who have grown up to eminent achieving, from Nobel Prize winning to cartooning and politics.

Mingy-minded detractor-scan fault Arthur Mee for his assumptions that the English, especially the English boy, were the peak of creation—but he attributed this eminence to fair-mindedness, kindness, and courage, and his universalism was equally strong. In those narrower-minded times, he wrote about the great deeds of girls and women, boys and men, from all nationalities and races, and every country's contributions to humankind.

In Mee's Children's Encyclopedia around sixteen sections repeated in each volume, easier to browse than the common A-Z encyclopedia, included animals, history, science, engineering, biography, 'Great Thoughts', tantalisingly illustrated, so that young readers could be tempted further as they graduated from the stories. The same volume would contain nursery jingles and an inquiry into 'What is Truth?' The setting out in time and space gave young readers a mental framework into which they could assimilate new knowledge, including school learning. The Encyclopedia encouraged them to explore everything, so they could restructure this mental schema as they learnt more—the ideal Piagetian route for intellectual development.

I learned to read in my first week at school because I was desperate to read the wonderful set our family had splashed out on. I am told that when I was six, schoolmates came around for me to read to them, with sometimes curious pronunciation, Fairy Stories of All Countries, and legends and true stories that set the imagination afire—such as The Soul of Countess Cathleen, Sohrab and Rustum, the Boy who Would Not Lie, and Harriet Tubman , the Heroic Black Slave who led her People to Freedom.

Memoirs attest how generations of children were enabled to be self-educators, able to give themselves a grounding in almost every area of human endeavour and knowledge, and discovering the springs for interests, ideals and careers.

It is time that our own children and grandchildren had similar opportunities.