Encyclopædia Metropolitana

[1] Initially the project was part of transitional arrangements in 1817 under which Samuel Taylor Coleridge moved publisher, from John Mathew Gutch to Rest Fenner, working with the Rev.

[2] The Encyclopædia Metropolitana was revived in 1820 by the intervention of Bishop William Howley, concerned also to compete with the Britannica, in this case to counter its secular tendency.

[5] A rival production was the London Encyclopædia (22 volumes beginning in 1825 and completed within a few years) of the publisher Thomas Tegg.

As he explained in the 1829 preface to his work, Tegg had been obstructed by legal moves from the side of the Metropolitana, but went ahead anyway, pleading that compilations such as encyclopedias needed different rules of copyright.

To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone they are discoverable, is to teach the science of method.Later critics said of the actual plan that, being the proposal of Coleridge, it had at least enough of a poetical character to be eminently impractical (Quarterly Review, cxiii, 379); but the treatises by Archbishop Richard Whately, Sir John Herschel, Professors Peter Barlow, George Peacock, Augustus De Morgan, and others, were considered excellent.