Enquire Within upon Everything is a how-to book, akin to a short encyclopedia for domestic life, first published in 1856 by Houlston and Sons of Paternoster Square in London. The editor was Robert Kemp Philp. [1] It was then continuously reprinted in many new and updated editions as additional information and articles were added (and obsolete material sometimes removed).
The book was created with the intention of providing encyclopedic information on topics as diverse as etiquette, parlour games, cake recipes, laundry tips, holiday preparation, and first aid: [2] To quote from the editor's introduction:
Whether You Wish to Model a Flower in Wax;
to Study the Rules of Etiquette;
to Serve a Relish for Breakfast or Supper;
to Plan a Dinner for a Large Party or a Small One;
to Cure a Headache;
to Make a Will;
to Get Married;
to Bury a Relative;
Whatever You May Wish to Do, Make, or to Enjoy,
Provided Your Desire has Relation to the Necessities of Domestic Life,
I Hope You will not Fail to "Enquire Within."
Though not rich in such material, Enquire Within also provided the basics of an English-usage style guide, 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, a somewhat croquet-like form of ground billiards. 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.
The early editions of this book contained 3,000 short pithy descriptions and was one of a set of 20 books. [3] The book was a popular addition to the Victorian (and later post-Victorian) home. By 1862, the book was sold 196,000 times; [3] 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. [4] Modernised versions were still in print as late as 1994. [5] [6] 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 used Enquire Within upon Everything as an important clue in the Hercule Poirot detective novel, Hallowe'en Party .
In 1980 Tim Berners-Lee named his precursor of the World Wide Web ENQUIRE after this work. [7] [8] A Forbes article quoted Berners-Lee as saying: [9]
When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for "Enquire Within upon Everything", a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents' house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989, then implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November.
Etiquette is the set of conventional rules of personal behaviour in polite society, usually in the form of an ethical code that delineates the expected and accepted social behaviours that accord with the conventions and norms observed by a society, a social class, or a social group. In modern English usage, the French word étiquette dates from the year 1750.
William Wymark Jacobs was an English author of short fiction and drama. His best remembered story is "The Monkey's Paw". He was born in Wapping, London, on 8 September 1863, the son of William Gage Jacobs and his wife Sophia, née Wymark. His father ran the South Devon wharf at Lower East. William and his siblings were still young when their mother died. Their father then married his housekeeper and had seven more children. Jacobs attended a private London school before Birkbeck College, where he befriended William Pett Ridgcap.
Francis Hindes Groome, son of Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, was a writer and foremost commentator of his time on the Romani people, their language, life, history, customs, beliefs, and lore.
Abhijnanashakuntalam, also known as Shakuntala, The Recognition of Shakuntala, The Sign of Shakuntala, and many other variants, is a Sanskrit play by the ancient Indian poet Kālidāsa, dramatizing the story of Śakuntalā told in the epic Mahābhārata and regarded as best of Kālidāsa's works. Its exact date is uncertain, but Kālidāsa is often placed in the 4th century CE.
Debrett's is a British professional coaching company, publisher and authority on etiquette and behaviour, founded in 1769 with the publication of the first edition of The New Peerage. The company takes its name from its founder, John Debrett.
Agnes Giberne was a prolific British novelist and scientific writer. Her fiction was typical of Victorian evangelical fiction with moral or religious themes for children. She also wrote books on science for young people, a handful of historical novels, and one well-regarded biography.
Mary Elizabeth Mann, née Rackham, was a celebrated English novelist in the 1890s and early 1900s. She also wrote short stories, primarily on themes of poverty and rural English life. As an author she was commonly known as Mary E. Mann.
Trucco is an Italian and later English lawn game, a form of ground billiards played with heavy balls, large-headed cues sometimes called tacks, a ring, and sometimes an upright pin. The game was popular from at least the 17th century to the early 20th century, and was a forerunner of croquet, surviving for a few generations after the introduction of the latter.
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 several important ways.
Gustave Chouquet was a French music historian, music critic, and teacher of French.
Robert Kemp Philp (1819–1882) was an English journalist, author, and Chartist.
Joseph Timothy Haydn, compiler of dictionaries, was well known as the author of the "Dictionary of Dates", 1841, and of the "Book of Dignities", 1851.
Florence Hartley was a Victorian-era writer whose work was meant for women of the era, covering topics of etiquette and needlework. She was also an advocate for women's health.
Walter Stanley Paget was an English illustrator of the late 19th and early 20th century, who signed his work as "Wal Paget". Paget held a gold medal from the Royal Academy of Arts, and was the youngest of three brothers, Henry M. Paget (eldest) and Sidney Paget, all illustrators.
James Henry Nixon (1802-1857) was an illustrator and painter during the Victorian period, who worked in the firm Ward and Nixon painting stained glass windows. James Henry Nixon was a protégé of Charles Winston, who praised Nixon's work at Westminster Abbey and Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury. The company Ward and Nixon was followed by Ward and Hughes.
Francesca Maria Steele was an English novelist, historian, and biographer, who began writing to support her family. She began her writing career with juvenile fiction; she later moved into adult fiction, using the pseudonym Darley Dale for her fiction writing. Intensely religious, she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1887 and later wrote several books on sacred topics.
Lillian Eichler Watson was an American advertising copywriter and author of bestselling books of etiquette. Her first Book of Etiquette, published in 1921 and for which she created the advertising campaign Again She Orders..."A Chicken Salad, Please", was an immediate bestseller and was followed by several updated volumes and numerous other books.
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Enquire Within upon Everything public domain audiobook at LibriVox