Open Features: Arthur Mee And Miss Havisham's Table
...In due course, when I'd made it to grammar school, I found that basically education was still a matter of, Learn these chunks of information, Give this sort of answer, Write in this sort of style. But, after a while, it seemed that I was expected to do thinking. Oh dear. I didn't know how to do that.
Some of the other girls could do it. They knew how to study, how to assemble facts, how to ask questions. I didn't wonder how they could do these things. They were just different. They were clever and got right answers and high marks. I got, Explain this! written in my margin or just a straightforward, No! I didn't get the hang of thinking but I learned to get by...
But it’s a fair guess that none of those “conformist’’ girls can now write as entertainingly, as distinctively, as vividly as Jacqueline Finesilver.
For more of Jacqeline's brilliant stories and articles please click on http://www.openwriting.com/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=jacqueline+finesilver
Arthur Mee had an impressively organised mind. In fact he seems to have been unremitting in the acquisition, cataloguing, storing and dissemination of information. Not surprising then, that he should have become famous for his volumes of encyclopaedias and 'self-educators'. As a very young journalist, Mee began accumulating a fund of newspaper clippings, handwritten notes and and so on. These he stored in labelled and categorised envelopes. His collection grew until he had hundreds of thousands of cuttings and thousands of envelopes. Eventually, when he had acquired sufficient money, he had a huge cabinet of many drawers built to house them all. In a sense, Arthur Mee already had a cabinet of knowledge in his mind - the enormous piece of furniture was its outer manifestation – and he drew on its contents to feed into his many many articles and editorials.
As well as his cabinet of the mind, Arthur Mee had a belief in the power of knowledge and a belief in the importance of actively promoting goodness. He believed that individuals, especially children, should have access to wholesome knowledge and that, having got some, they would be inspired to get some more, and so on. They would thus become knowledgeable and empowered to do good in the world, one way or another.
So he was just the man to mastermind a set of encyclopaedias. In 1908 the first issues of the fortnightly 'instalments' of Children's Encyclopaedia appeared in shops; these, collected and bound, eventually became a set of volumes. Later, when the encyclopaedia's commercial success was obvious, sets of eight hardback volumes, plus index were produced. The volumes were to be updated and increased in number through the following decades.
The founders of the Daily Herald newspaper also believed in the power of self-education. Some time in the early 1950s its readers were invited to purchase a set of children's encyclopaedias at sixpence a week. What my father purchased with his sixpences was not the latest edition of the Children's Encyclopaedia but the American version, The Book of Knowledge, but he was quite satisfied with these.
At that time in their lives my parents did not have the time, the energy or any inclination to read books but they had a notion that, if you got some book-learning into your head you moved up in the world. So, now they had got hold of some books with learning in them. Not for themselves. For their eleven year old son. My brother.
The Books of Knowledge were put in my brother's room. They stood, solemn and dark red, ballast at the bottom of his bookcase, while his few skimpier volumes huddled on the upper shelves. There were no other books in our house at the time.
I was not to touch the Books of Knowledge. I was not to touch any of my brother's things or even to think of entering his room. Yes, well... Sometimes I sinned.
I was not driven to disobey by a feeling of defiance - I had learned to, mostly, do as I was told – but by desperate boredom. When you were a child, did you ever experience hours, maybe even whole afternoons, of stifling boredom? When I was six or seven there were times when all the things I was not allowed to do hung down around me like suffocating curtains. There were times when the house was so still and stagnant that tedium drove me to creep up the stairs to my brother's room. Where the books were. . .
. . . Here's Tom Sawyer. He's the sort of boy Mum would call 'a bit of a scruff' and he has got a friend who's even scruffier. You can see that they do interesting things – swimming, running away, exploring caves. Here are a couple of Annuals - more boys in these, some posh ones, all grim or grinning. Don't care about them. Ivanhoe - I can't make much of this but the shiny pictures are nice and here's my favourite, the mad hag Ulrica.
And now ... the forbidden Books of Knowledge. Posh covers, posh paper and better pictures even than in Ivanhoe. But tricky, heavier to handle. If it slips from my hand and a page gets torn? My brother will know. My mother will know. Choose one, ease it out, lower it down until it's lying safely on its back. Read it, elbows on the floor, chin in hands, bottom in air. Turn the pages slowly.
I can only read little bits. But the pictures... I haven't seen pictures like this anywhere else. This might be the book with all the fish in the sea, some so strange; deep down fish have glowing lights on them. Or it might be the book with butterflies or flowers and fruits or costumes of other lands... Even the black and white photos are good. Here's the one of the little brown boy sitting on a giant water lily pad.
Is that Mum coming up the stairs? No.
Ah, now, I like this page - four little paintings all the same except for the colours. They're to show you how pictures are printed in colour. That's a good page.
And here is a favourite, a picture story of kings and soldiers and ships all done in red and yellow and black, like. a comic but not a comic. I can't understand what most of it is about but I almost can.
There are no pages like this in Mum's 'Woman's Weekly'. I flick through the pages of that sometimes and it's mostly grey - woman's week is grey – grey cardigans to knit, grey food to cook, grey people looking worried or soppy. Mum gets it because it is cheap, she says. Why doesn't she read a Book of Knowledge instead? She never does.
Better not stay much longer. Songs and rhymes? Or one of the stories? The Blue Bird, The Willow Pattern, William Tell, Robin Hood....
Time to go. Back downstairs, before Mum asks what I've been up to all this time. . .
When boredom drove me to invade my brother's territory and touch his stuff, I was rewarded by Arthur Mee. Rewarded in pictures.
By the time I was eight or nine it had become permissible for me to read the encyclopaedias openly and I suppose I could have explored them then. But, for one reason and another, I didn't. I still truffled for pictures, I read some of the stories. Nothing else.
All Arthur Mee's encyclopaedias contained 'Wonder' sections – question and answer pages where the sort of queries which, supposedly, bright-eyed boys and girls might put to their wise adults were dealt with. Those pages might as well not have existed for all the notice I had taken of them. To benefit from those pages and all the other pages of ideas and information, I would have had to be a child with an enquiring mind, one in whom the question-asking spark was alive. Or else I'd have had to be a child who found satisfaction simply in acquiring chunks of information.
In the top class at primary school our highly efficient teacher rigorously taught and drilled us in all the information and skills we needed to pass the 11+ examination. I did what I was told. I did no more than I was told. I did not go gathering extra information. When I was allowed to go to the public library I headed for adventure; it never occurred to me to even glance at the non-fiction shelves. At home I spent a lot of time in Narnia or in the Fourth Form of various boarding schools where life was never dull.
In due course, when I'd made it to grammar school, I found that basically education was still a matter of, Learn these chunks of information, Give this sort of answer, Write in this sort of style. But, after a while, it seemed that I was expected to do thinking. Oh dear. I didn't know how to do that.
Some of the other girls could do it. They knew how to study, how to assemble facts, how to ask questions. I didn't wonder how they could do these things. They were just different. They were clever and got right answers and high marks. I got, Explain this! written in my margin or just a straightforward, No! I didn't get the hang of thinking but I learned to get by.
What I had then, and what I still have got, for a mind, is my own version of Miss Havisham's dining table - and maybe her dressing table also – a jumble of items, veiled by dust and cobwebs, nibbled by mice, lying around in the gloom, fitfully lit by guttering candles. Unlike Mr Mee's cabinet, the dining table has little organisation. Objects sort of roll around and bump together, pictures are strewn around or piled in messy heaps.
When required to come up with some thinking, what I do is cast a glance over Miss Havisham's table muttering, There must be something here somewhere.... Oh, look, that's interesting. I'd forgotten all about that.... Would this bit fit ?... Where on Earth did that come from?....
There was a time when I imitated the people who can think efficiently. But I was only pretending and I couldn't keep it up for long.
I know someone who keeps fireflies in her mind; they sparkle and breed and don't follow orders. But she can let her fireflies flit freely about over a certain period of history, say the eighteenth century, where they light up tiny details of custom and behaviour. It's way of working that seems to bring unexpected insights. And that firefly net of sparks can be thrown over other times and places.
I know someone whose mind is draped with skeins and skeins of theories, some made of gossamer, some with numbers and symbols caught up in the threads. He twists them about and around and one day he may well come up with the Fabric of the Cosmos.
I admire the way people like these can think. 'Out of the box', 'out of the cabinet'.
Naturally, the variety of minds is wonderful, although I suspect there are people out there, ones with unseen faces and a great deal of power and money, whose minds are full of mangrove swamps and alligators.
'Brainists' try to show me in great detail how minds work. On the premise that thoughts are products of the workings of brain cells, they show me pictures of the cerebral cortex in pulsing colours, perhaps with whizzing lines connecting the parts. I like the pictures. A lot of hard work and hardware and software and grant-money goes into making them. They're very pretty. But I don't believe them. That's not how it works.
I don't know exactly when our set of encyclopaedias disappeared. We moved house and they didn't come with us. (The Daily Herald had disappeared too.) But I didn't care. I was fourteen and trying to get along with Jack Kerouac. Yet pictures from the Book of Knowledge have, over the years, flashed into view, (lit up by those guttering candles – there and then gone.
And then, recently, I came across an Internet site, childrensencyclopedia.blogspot.com which has Volume One of the Children's Encyclopaedia from the 1930s. The whole lot is there to browse and dip into. Best of all, for me, there's a gallery of all the colour plates to be found in that volume: the Bayeux Tapestry, the story illustrations, the pages from illuminated manuscripts. They glow on the computer screen, making as much impact as they did on me all those years ago. (This site exists because of the generous donation of a woman who feels that the Children's Encyclopaedia is a treasure which should continue to be available. Which is indeed the case.)
Arthur Mee's great achievement, his offer of structured knowledge plus browsability, was largely wasted on me. But here's to you, anyway, Mr Mee. Thanks for all the pictures.
