Today in 1861, the first edition of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, was published.
Edited by Isabella Beeton, the extensive guide to running a household in Victorian Britain continued to be a best-seller after her death in 1865, with nearly two million copies sold by 1868. By the 1890s, Beeton's name "was adopted as a term for an authority on all things domestic and culinary," says the Oxford English Dictionary.
Five years earlier, in 1856, the first edition of Enquire Within upon Everything was published. It was another best-selling Victorian guide to domestic life. 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."
In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee developed ENQUIRE, a program documenting links between people, computers, and projects at CERN. In Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee recalled: “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 of suggestive magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money.”
Berners-Lee neglected to note that the Victorian Wikipedia also answered a still-burning question: “It would take 27,600 spiders to produce 1 LB. of Web.”
Enquire Within upon Everything has been published continuously in new editions until about 1994. It was probably killed by that new online trove of information, the World Wide Web, which Berners-Lee started to code in October 1990.