General eighteenth century

'The much-abused eighteenth century has a singular attraction for me', wrote Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1878. 'They were such nice people, with a real society and strong characters'. This was not how the eighteenth century seemed to me as an undergraduate in the 1950s, sunk as it then seemed to be under the dreary dominance of Lewis Namier. But since becoming Editor of the Oxford DNB in January 2000, I have been struck with how lively the eighteenth century has become. The general eighteenth-century area which we refer to as HAN covers 5775 people, of whom nearly a quarter are new arrivals in the dictionary, but more people from the period feature in the specialist areas concerned with art, literature, business, medicine, and science which I do not discuss here.

Under the guidance of Paul Langford, our consultant editor, an array of helpful and scholarly associate editors, and three energetic and imaginative research editors with wide interests, the vitality of eighteenth-century studies has certainly impinged on the dictionary. Philip Carter joined us in 1997 after completing a thesis (published in 2001 as Men and the Emergence of Polite Society ) on eighteenth-century attitudes to manhood; Matthew Kilburn joined us in 1999 after completing a doctorate on the monarchy; and Susan Skedd, who was with us from 1997 till 2002, took a doctorate on women's education. Robert Brown and Dr Kim Reynolds worked on eighteenth-century subjects at an earlier stage, and others within 37A St Giles have helped on specific aspects: Dr Elizabeth Baigent looked after eighteenth-century geographers, and Dr Roger Stearn looked after the army between 1775 and 1800 as well as contributing many articles.

There is room here for me only to single out two of the ways in which the new dictionary's eighteenth-century coverage marks an advance on the old. First, the move away from the DNB 's heavy emphasis on London is particularly important here. The growing emphasis on economic and cultural history compels more attention for regional entrepreneurs and newspaper publishers at some distance from London, just as the more commercial approach to studying the theatre and music alerts us to the importance of provincial actors, musical societies, and musicians. That said, most of our new music subjects are in fact London-based.

The devolution of the dictionary's mind extends beyond England. The research editors, who have amply briefed me for this message, point out that eighteenth-century Wales 'has a few more strings to its harp' than the scholarly or religious leaders who were so prominent among the DNB 's subjects, and in the new dictionary 'an antiquarian and devotional Wales is joined by a commercial Wales which maintained a distinct literary and musical culture.' In Scotland we now give more emphasis to traders and merchants in the lowlands, to the Scottish legal tradition which defined and protected the Scottish identity after the Union, and to the religious and university thinkers who fed into the Scottish enlightenment. And in our Irish coverage we now show a more sophisticated understanding of Irish parliamentary politics.

It may seem odd in this context to mention our improved coverage (300 new entries for 1660-1780) of pre-Independence Americans, but in the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth, the real cultural frontier lay not at the Atlantic but at the Appalachians, and the ocean was more a bridge than a barrier for the trade in ideas, goods, and people. Our new subjects include four early presidents of the USA and several newly-discovered slave immigrants to the United Kingdom; one of the latter has his name commemorated in Bristol's dockside Pero bridge. Where we share subjects with the American National Biography , our articles play up the British dimension of the subject's life.

The second big eighteenth-century innovation stems from the advent of social history, and particularly of women's history--women constituting a fifth of our new subjects. Social history at its best does not insulate itself from history of more traditional kinds, but fertilizes it. The armed services, for example, are now treated less in terms of a narrow professionalism than as interacting with the political and social system, and as playing an important role in scientific and technical advances. The fuller presence of women is one dimension of the growth in court history, with Queen Charlotte (wife of George III) now seen as far more than a purely domestic figure, and the female component of Jacobitism fully brought out. The Namierite approach to politics leads in the same direction, given the importance for it of family connections and of women's indirect political influence. Women also contribute to our wider coverage of crime, and of course to the broadened scope of articles on the entertainment industry. We now do full justice to masters of ceremonies, fencing and dancing masters, club managers, and coffee-house keepers.

It is appropriate, when discussing the eighteenth century, to conclude with a brief word about biographical reference books, which made great strides at that time--Kippis's Biographia Britannica for example. Throughout the Oxford DNB we interact fruitfully with other reference works. Our relations with the History of Parliament have always been close, and I am now more impressed than I was in the 1950s with the importance of the Namierite method's meticulous attention to political correspondence and parliamentary records. Our eighteenth-century Irish coverage gains much from The History of the Irish Parliament: 1692-1800 (2002) and from work in progress on the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography. And our coverage of music has benefited from the work that was done on the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

But no message on this century would be complete without a mention of Dr Johnson, given his central role in the history of British biography. So I conclude by resuming my quotation from Jowett, an enthusiast for Boswell's Life. 'I certainly have had greater pleasure out of that book than out of any other. I take it up anywhere and read it fifty times over. It is so full of wit and life and character.' The same can also now be said about the dictionary's treatment of Dr Johnson's century.

Brian Harrison