Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia

Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia was a book series of 133 volumes, edited by Dionysius Lardner.

During the first quarter of the 19th century, self-improvement literature became an important portion of the book market: "it was the age of the 'Family Library' edition". In his article on the Cabinet Cyclopaedia, Morse Peckham writes that this "revolution in literacy, [was] partly the result of the spread of liberal ideas by the French Revolution, [and] partly of the desire to combat those ideas by teaching the poor to read the Bible and religious tracts [... It] was to have an effect on modern society almost as profound as the industrial and agricultural revolutions".Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, published between 1829 and 1846, was one of the most successful of these enterprises, which also included John Murray's Family Library and the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Although intended for the "general reader", the series was aimed specifically at the middle class rather than the masses: each volume cost six shillings, prohibiting purchase by the poor. The advertisements for the Cyclopaedia describe the expected audience as "merchants, captains, families, [and] new-married couples". The prospectus assured its readers that "nothing will be admitted into the pages of the 'CABINET CYCLOPAEDIA' which can have the most remote tendency to offend public or private morals. To enforce the cultivation of religion and the practice of virtue should be a principal object with all who undertake to inform the public mind."

The series was divided into five "Cabinets": Arts and Manufactures, Biography, History, Natural History, and Natural Philosophy. The advertisement claimed these covered "all the usual divisions of knowledge that are not of a technical and professional kind". Unlike other encyclopedias of the time, Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia arranged its articles topically rather than alphabetically. The series eventually contained 61 titles in 133 volumes and customers could purchase a single volume, a single cabinet, or the entire set. The first volume was published in December 1829 by Longman, Reese, Orme, Browne, Greene, and John Taylor. Thirty-eight identified authors contributed (others are unidentified);Mary Shelley was the only female contributor and the eighth most productive.

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