John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester (1614–72), was a founding member of the Royal Society and one of the most influential thinkers of the seventeenth century. His masterpiece, An Essay Towards a Real Character and A Philosophical Language, is a key text in the history of language. Ready for publication in January 1666 but destroyed by the Great Fire, the work finally published in 1668 is Wilkins’s attempt at creating a universal language. Wilkins maintained that because all people’s minds functioned in the same way and had a similar ‘apprehension of things’, it should be possible to cultivate a rational universal language and a character that would also articulate things and notions. Not only would they aid international scientific communication and commerce, but ‘prove the shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real Knowledge, that hath been yet offered to the World’. Although Wilkins’s universal language was never adopted for common use (and he never regarded the work as complete), it was widely considered to be superior to the earlier work by George Dalgarno, Ars signorum (1661).

The first portion of the Essay focuses on an examination of the origins, change, adoption and diffusion of languages and alphabets. The second portion contains his ‘Universal Philosophy’ classification system, with tables of animals, birds, fishes, and plants drawn up by the two great naturalists, Francis Willoughby and John Ray. It was widely considered that the botanical and biological classifications were superior to any yet available, greatly advancing the creation of a scientific nomenclature. The work inspired John Ray to revise his own system. Appended to the Essay is an alphabetical dictionary which lists English words, their symbols in the real character, and references to their proper place in the classification.

Some of the greatest minds of the eighteenth century received Wilkins’s creation enthusiastically: John Locke recommended the Essay over Dalgarno’s work; Newton mentioned the book in his correspondence; Erasmus Darwin admired it; and the anthropologist Lord Monboddo praised it in his Origin and Progress of Language. The Essay continued to attract widespread attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Roget, author of the ever popular Thesaurus, articulated his indebtedness to Wilkins, and based his classifications on Wilkins’s system. Wilkins’s treatment of the alphabet and phonetics were regarded as authoritative for many generations after his death, and in recent times the work has come to the attention of those interested in the development of symbolic logic and semantics. The work, reprinted here in its original size, is an essential text for all scholars concerned with the history of language and science.

• first edition of a classic early work in the history of linguistics
• largest and most complete work on a universal language
• engraved plates and illustrated tables