Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf

Sunday, November 8th, 2015

Harvard president Charles William Eliot’s five-foot shelf of books marked the end of an era:

“On or about December, 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “human character changed.” Woolf was not referring to a specific event so much as to a new cultural climate, a new way of looking at the world, that would become known as modernism. When he finished his introduction to the Harvard Classics in March of that same year, Charles William Eliot could hardly have guessed that such a change was just over the horizon. Yet it is tempting to think that his “five-foot shelf” of books, chosen as a record of the “progress of man…from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century,” was meant as a time capsule from that era just about to end. In 50 volumes we have a record of what President Eliot’s America, and his Harvard, thought best in their own heritage — a monument from a more humane and confident time. It is surprisingly easy, even today, to find a complete set of the Harvard Classics in good condition. At least one is usually for sale on eBay, the Internet auction site, for $300 or so, a bargain at $6 a book. The supply, from attics or private libraries around the country, seems endless — a tribute to the success of the publisher, P.F. Collier, who sold some 350,000 sets within 20 years of the series’ initial publication.

In fact, though the series bears the Harvard name, it was a commercial enterprise from the beginning. In February 1909, Eliot was preparing to retire from the presidency of Harvard after 40 years. Two editors from Collier, Norman Hapgood and William Patten, had read a speech Eliot delivered to an audience of working men, in which he declared that a five-foot shelf of books could provide “a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.” Now they approached Eliot with a proposition: he would pick the titles to fill up that shelf, and Collier would publish them as a series.

At their very first interview, Hapgood and Patten convinced Eliot to say yes. He enlisted professor of English William A. Neilson, later the president of Smith College, to act as his assistant, and secured the approval of the Board of Overseers for the series’ name. Eliot and Neilson worked for a year, the former deciding “what should be included, and what should be excluded,” while the latter was responsible for “introductions and notes” and the “choice among different editions of the same work.” By the time publication began, in 1910, Eliot’s celebrity had turned the series into a media event, and earned Collier valuable free publicity. The question of what the series should include and exclude called forth articles and letters to the editor across the country.

In his introduction to the series, dated March 10, 1910, Eliot made it clear that the Harvard Classics were intended not as a museum display-case of the “world’s best books,” but as a portable university. While the volumes are numbered in no particular order, he suggested that they could be approached as a set of six courses: “The History of Civilization,” “Religion and Philosophy,” “Education,” “Science,” “Politics,” and “Criticism of Literature and the Fine Arts.” But in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is “Progress” — progress in each of these departments and in the moral quality of the human race as a whole. Eliot’s introduction expresses complete faith in the “intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization,” “the upward tendency of the human race.”

Eliot’s life was spent in the cultivation of that tendency. He built up Harvard into one of the world’s great universities, vastly expanded its student body, course offerings, and faculty, and became a sort of public oracle on questions of education. He was one of the most effective evangelists for what the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold called “sweetness and light.” Samuel Eliot Morison, in Three Centuries of Harvard, describes Eliot as a representative of “the best of his age — that forward-looking half-century before the World War, when democracy seemed capable of putting all crooked ways straight — the age of reason and of action, of accomplishment and of hope.”

Behold the true progress since then:

But already in 1936, when Morison wrote, Eliot’s variety of optimism seemed sadly obsolete. Today we are proudly alert to the blind spots in Victorian notions of culture and progress. Three thinkers whose names appear nowhere in the Harvard Classics — Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — have taught us a new, more suspicious kind of reading, in which an author’s motives are to be questioned, probed, overturned.

The Classics, in particular, cry out for such questioning. The series is authorless — there is only an editor, conducting his chorus of texts. Yet the way those texts are selected and arranged speaks volumes — literally. To take an obvious example, the total exclusion of female authors would be impossible today; at the time, it would hardly have been noticed. But the series’ more profound limitations can be found in its treatment of science, philosophy, and literature — the most interesting and substantial of Eliot’s six “courses.” In these areas, the Harvard Classics serve as an index to just how much the world really has changed since 1910.

Comments

  1. Bomag says:

    All I read is the Koran; the rest of that $&@! just needs to burn.

    How about a five-foot shelf of video games?

  2. Isegoria says:

    Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf has its own Project Gutenberg page, which I just stumbled across.

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