''Enquire Within upon Everything'' is a how-to book, akin to a short

encyclopedia An encyclopedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, in a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into article (publishing), articles or entries that are arranged Alp ...

for domestic life, first published in 1856 by Houlston and Sons of

Paternoster Square Paternoster Square is a former historic square, renamed from Newgate Market c. 1872, and now a post-war urban redevelopment, owned by the Mitsubishi Estate, next to St Paul's Cathedral in the City of London. The area was previously named Patern ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. The editor was Robert Kemp Philp. It was then continuously reprinted in many new and updated editions as additional information and articles were added (and obsolete material sometimes removed).

Topics

The book was created with the intention of providing

encyclopedic An encyclopedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, in a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries that are arranged alphabetically by artic ...

information on topics as diverse as

etiquette Etiquette ( /ˈɛtikɛt, -kɪt/) can be defined as a set of norms of personal behavior in polite society, usually occurring in the form of an ethical code of the expected and accepted social behaviors that accord with the conventions and ...

, parlour games,

cake Cake is a flour confection usually made from flour, sugar, and other ingredients and is usually baked. In their oldest forms, cakes were modifications of bread, but cakes now cover a wide range of preparations that can be simple or elabor ...

recipes,

laundry Laundry is the washing of clothing and other textiles, and, more broadly, their drying and ironing as well. Laundry has been part of history since humans began to wear clothes, so the methods by which different cultures have dealt with this u ...

tips,

holiday A holiday is a day or other period of time set aside for festivals or recreation. ''Public holidays'' are set by public authorities and vary by state or region. Religious holidays are set by religious organisations for their members and are often ...

preparation, and

first aid First aid is the first and immediate assistance given to any person with a medical emergency, with care provided to preserve life, prevent the condition from worsening, or to promote recovery until medical services arrive. First aid is gener ...

: To quote from the editor's introduction: Though not rich in such material, ''Enquire Within'' also provided the basics of an English-usage

style guide A style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. A book-length style guide is often called a style manual or a manual of style. A short style guide, typically ranging from several to several dozen page ...

, and also preserved examples of regional dialect usage (which it tended to mock as faulty). Several editions between the 1880s and 1910s provide one of the only surviving records of the rules of the English version of

trucco Trucco (also called trucks, troco,''Oxford English Dictionary''; see "troco" and "trucks" entries. or lawn billiards) is an Italian and later English lawn game, a form of ground billiards played with heavy balls, large-headed cues sometimes cal ...

, a somewhat

croquet Croquet ( or ) is a sport which involves hitting wooden, plastic, or composite balls with a mallet through hoops (often called Wicket, "wickets" in the United States) embedded in a grass playing court. Variations In all forms of croquet, in ...

-like form of

ground billiards Ground billiards is a modern term for a family of medieval European lawn games, the original names of which are mostly unknown, played with a long-handled mallet (the '), wooden balls, a hoop (the ''pass''), and an upright skittle or pin (the ' ...

. Though some attempt was made to group related topics, in general the organization was chaotic, and required looking up topics in an index, then finding their numbered sections in the main text.

History

The early editions of this book contained 3,000 short pithy descriptions and was one of a set of 20 books. The book was a popular addition to the

Victorian Victorian or Victorians may refer to: 19th century * Victorian era, British history during Queen Victoria's 19th-century reign ** Victorian architecture ** Victorian house ** Victorian decorative arts ** Victorian fashion ** Victorian literatur ...

(and later post-Victorian) home. By 1862, the book was sold 196,000 times; by the 89th edition, some 1,180,000 copies had been published. With the release of the 113th edition, this number had risen to over 1,500,000 and by 1976 was in its 126th edition. Modernised versions were still in print as late as 1994. Unauthorized reproductions of the first and some subsequent editions, without credit to the original editor and publisher, were made in United States by the New York publisher Garret, Dick & Fitzgerald, under the title ''Inquire Within for Anything You Want to Know''. Later official editions (some time after 1894) were published by Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton Kent & Co., also of London.

Agatha Christie Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English people, English author known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving ...

used ''Enquire Within upon Everything'' as an important clue in the

Hercule Poirot Hercule Poirot (, ) is a fictional Belgian detective created by the English writer Agatha Christie. Poirot is Christie's most famous and longest-running character, appearing in 33 novels, two plays (''Black Coffee (play), Black Coffee'' and '' ...

detective novel, '' Hallowe'en Party''. In 1980

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

named his precursor of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

ENQUIRE ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in s ...

after this work. A ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' article quoted Berners-Lee as saying:

References

External links

*
Enquire Within Upon Everything
' at ''

The Online Books Page The Online Books Page is an index of e-text books available on the Internet. It is edited by John Mark Ockerbloom and is hosted by the library of the University of Pennsylvania. The Online Books Page lists over 2 million books and has several fe ...

'' database, University of Pennsylvania Library *
1856, 1st edition
via

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

1856, 1st edition
scan of 1978 facsimile reprint, via

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

1856, 1st edition
US ''Inquire Within'' version, via Google Books
1858, 9th edition
via Internet Archive
1863, 19th edition
via Internet Archive
1865, 26th edition
via Internet Archive
1865, 27th edition
via Google Books
1870, 37th edition
via Internet Archive
1871, 41st edition
via Hathi Trust (only downloadable one page at a time, and access may be limited to US IP addresses)
1872, 44th edition
via Internet Archive
1884, 69th edition
via Internet Archive
1886, 74th edition
via Internet Archive
1894, 89th edition
via

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...

(only the HTML copy is complete, the e-book versions are just the first 1/3)
1903, 100th edition
via Google Books
1916, 110th edition
via Hathi Trust (only downloadable one page at a time, and access may be limited to US IP addresses) {{Authority control 1856 non-fiction books English-language encyclopedias Style guides for British English Single-volume general reference works Publications established in 1856 Annual publications