Victorian Britain had its own proto-Wikipedia: Notes and Queries, the weekly founded in 1849 by William Thoms, a clerk in the House of Lords, as a platform for “enthusiastic amateur scholars” to share antiquarian finds (“notes”) and raise questions (“queries”) — then argue about them across following issues. George Eliot’s Casaubon, the pedantic researcher in Middlemarch who never wrote his “Key to All Mythologies,” would have found his natural home there.
Ross MacFarlane’s PDR essay digs through Choice Notes from Notes and Queries: History (1858), Thoms’ stand-alone selection of the journal’s “more curious articles”:
- Thoms’ stated aims: correct factual errors creeping into the historical record — and entertain readers “in low spirits” or “waiting for company”
- The volume rode the Victorian antiquarian boom, accelerated by fear that industrialization was erasing the countryside’s links to the past
- A taste for the morbid: Mary Queen of Scots’ execution chair and severed head, Anne Boleyn’s grave, James II’s French resting place, and the identity of Charles I’s hooded executioner
- The most-featured figure is Oliver Cromwell — “private amours,” rumored dealings with the devil, and the whereabouts of his skull (one correspondent knew a man in Beckenham, Kent who had it)
- The planned series stalled after one companion volume — on “Folk-Lore,” a term Thoms himself coined
By the 1900s the antiquarian approach looked unscientific to a new generation of professional historians, yet the journal survives today. Scholars argue its collaborative production prefigured big multi-author projects like the Oxford English Dictionary — and the comparison to Wikipedia is hard to resist: anonymous, crowd-sourced, and obsessed with facts and their correction.