A monument to the Victorian age?

Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography 1882–2004

First published in the Journal of Victorian Culture 11.1 (Spring 2006)

I

Lord Rosebery described the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), published between 1885 and 1900, as ‘the greatest literary monument of the Victorian age’.1 That the DNB is a characteristically ‘Victorian’ production has been generally agreed by critics and historians ever since. Indeed, the fact that its coverage was deliberately extended beyond the last day of 1900 to include a memoir of Queen Victoria herself, who died on 22 January 1901, which therefore ‘furnished a better historical landmark’ for its close, would seem to establish its essential Victorian identity beyond dispute. 2 Noel Annan, in his biography of its first editor, Leslie Stephen, called it ‘a monument to the Victorian age’. 3 Iain McCalman has compared it to a ‘great imperial flagship’ sailing ‘through the second half of the nineteenth century unshakeably confident of its values and virtues’. 4 A generation ago David Cannadine referred to it as a ‘great Victorian monument’, ‘one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late nineteenth century self-regard’, ‘an enduring monument to national greatness and national enterprise’ in which, in a very Victorian fashion, ‘moral judgements came thick and fast’. 5 It might be expected that with the publication in 2004 of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), a new and very largely rewritten pantheon of the influential and noteworthy in British history, we could consign the first DNB to the ages as an outmoded product of its time, almost a Victorian curiosity. Yet the DNB was being used with profit by scholars right up to the publication of the ODNB; and as David Amigoni has argued recently in this journal, the DNB may still merit attention and consultation. 6 Other Victorian monuments lost their utility much earlier; the DNB continued to be consulted, and crucially, formed the basis of its successor, ODNB, a century later. This in itself may raise questions about its status as a distinctively Victorian work. But this essay will go further and will question the assumption that the DNB was bound by the supposedly dominant values of the late Victorian generation. It will present the DNB, in conception and often in execution, as a remarkably unideological and timeless production, which actually subverts many of our stereotypes of the Victorian age. And it will argue that precisely because of this independence from the time and place of its creation, it has survived and allowed the new Dictionary, ODNB, to develop organically from it. There may be discontinuities between the first and second Dictionary, but there are many continuities as well. The continuities link us to the DNB, and have been retained in the successor, precisely because the pioneer was, in many respects, ‘out of its due time’.

If we go back to Leslie Stephen's initial conception of the Dictionary of National Biography the first feature that strikes the reader is the absence of any public statement of aims and intent: famously, the DNB had no introduction in which to proclaim its national or celebratory functions, probably because those were not its aims. Stephen's first statement, placed in the The Athenaeum and announcing the inception of the new project, was a sober and factual introduction designed to inform, to attract potential contributors, and encourage the suggestion of subjects for the Dictionary. ‘It was a manifesto of editorial principles and policies’. 7 The approach—Stephen's very ethos for the DNB—is caught in the sentence, ‘We should aim at giving the greatest possible amount of information in a thoroughly business-like form’. 8 If we examine his surviving correspondence (there being no archive for the DNB) the insistent theme is not the celebration of national greatness, nor the recording of individual achievements in a figuration of heroic Victorian values, but that the DNB might be useful to scholars and the public. He described the DNB to his wife, before the publication of the first of its 63 quarterly supplements as ‘really a most useful thing’. 9 ‘If well done, it will be a valuable thing for generations’. 10 He wrote to his American friend Charles Eliot Norton that ‘it will be a good job if done’; ‘if it thrives [it] will be a more useful bit of work than any books of mine are likely to be.’ 11 Much later, at the conclusion of its serial publication, and some years after he had stood down as editor, there was no triumphalism: ‘It cost a slice of my life, but has been a good bit of work’. 12 In Stephen's lecture on ‘National Biography’ he continued the theme, referring directly to ‘the utilitarian aspect of a dictionary’. In a statement that is dear to the hearts and purpose of those who worked on ODNB, the first Dictionary was a ‘contrivance’ for making ‘accessible’ the ‘accumulation of material’ for scholars. It ‘ought to be ... an indispensable guide to persons who would otherwise feel that they were hewing their way through a hopelessly intricate jungle’, a ‘confidential friend constantly at their elbow’. 13 The essence of Stephen's intent was caught in the sober early judgment of the English Historical Review, first issued in the year after the DNB began publication, that ‘there is a high average of methodical and scholarly work’. 14

The Dictionary was an extension of Stephen's whole cast of mind. In the central chapter of his biography of his close Cambridge friend, the political economist and Liberal politician Henry Fawcett, Stephen had produced a brilliant sketch of the intellectual life and style of the university in the 1850s and 1860s which had formed them both. The empiricism and dry rationalism of their youth, derived from their reading of John Stuart Mill, endured. 15 As Sidney Lee, his colleague, co-editor and then editor of the DNB in his own right, was to put it later, Stephen ‘was always impatient of rhetoric, of sentimentality, of floridity in life and literature. His virtues as man and writer were somewhat of the Spartan kind’. 16 Such a man, and such a style, did not conduce to the production of nationalistic or imperial bombast: Stephen's approach was always workmanlike, cool, critical, understated, and realistic. As John Gross has put it, ‘in an age of histrionics he kept a cool head’. 17 In the famous words of Alfred Ainger, the tone of the Dictionary was ‘No flowers by request’. 18 As Colin Matthew, the founding editor of the ODNB, observed with his usual acuity, Stephen possessed ‘a sharp, practical modernity as well as disillusionment with the higher flights of Victorian optimism’. 19 A radical don who had championed political reform, the abolition of religious tests, the federal cause in the American Civil War, and who resigned his tutorship at his college on admitting his loss of faith, may have changed his politics as the years passed. But Stephen's scepticism, both religious and secular, remained with him and inflected the DNB. Not least, it ensured that brevity rather than piety and rhetoric would be the style of the Dictionary. Stephen was impatient with traditional two and three-volume Victorian ‘tombstone’ biographies—‘It does not follow that because I want fact, not fiction, I therefore want all the facts, big and small’ 20 - and was already a master of the biographical essay or memoir, the ‘capsule’ biography so-called, even before he established that form for the DNB. In so doing he substantiated an alternative tradition of biographical writing that has thrived in the twentieth century in the DNB article, the short notice in professional or collegiate journals, and in the broadsheet obituary. 21

Some of the confusion in placing the DNB in its age may have originated in the recognition that there were many large-scale national biographical projects in this period. As Keith Thomas has reminded us, the DNB was preceded in the nineteenth century by compilations of Swedish, Dutch, Austrian, Belgian, German, Danish and American biography (the latter in the form of Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography). 22 It has been placed, therefore, in what Colin Matthew, the first editor of ODNB, called ‘the surge of European national historicism whose supremacy had become evident by the 1860s’. 23 Even before then, its ancestor, the Biographia Britannica, published in seven volumes between 1747 and 1766, and the only complete national biographical concordance that the Victorians could use, had sought to advance ‘the reputation of our country’ and ‘the honour of ancestors’. It was ‘a British Temple of Honour, sacred to the piety, learning, valour, public spirit, loyalty and every other glorious virtue of our ancestors’. 24 But the DNB was much more muted, at least under Stephen's initial control, rejecting national triumphalism; it was, as Matthew has observed, ‘tinged more with cultural pessimism than cultural superiority’. 25 Though it was written ‘in the high-noon of tory imperialism, it avoided to a remarkable extent the jingoistic tone and state-worship’ of that age. 26

As all will appreciate, a Dictionary of National Biography, as it was called by Stephen, deliberately left the composition and boundaries of ‘the British’ unclear and undefined. The title was a brilliant fudge, allowing for a much wider variety of lives to be included than would have been the case had Stephen and Lee been working with a necessarily prescriptive definition of nationality. As is often pointed out, a collection of over 29,000 lives which began with Jacques Abbadie, born near Pau, and which ended with Wilhelm Zuylestein, born near Utrecht, is difficult to pigeon-hole as specifically, and limitedly British, and is hardly consistent with the idea of the DNB as an expression of Victorian national pride. 27 The open-ended and flexible approach to nationality and national history has allowed for continuity in a later age when the definition of the nation is much more frequently debated and even less clear. As Colin Matthew wrote in 1997 ‘We will retain and develop Stephen's fluid, practical and inclusive view of nationality’. 28 More then a tenth of all subjects in the Oxford DNB were born outside the British Isles and the new Dictionary has arguably taken inclusivity to the limit, turning many figures—Erasmus, George Washington, Karl Marx—into ‘honorary Britons’ as Keith Thomas has observed. 29 Because the DNB was projected and financed privately by the Victorian publisher George Smith, it was politically independent and free of the influence of state. No ministry, party, commission, or nationally-directed body advised or directed its choice of subjects or approach, as was also the case with the ODNB. 30

An intelligence as subtle and unsentimental as Stephen's could never have fallen victim to national or imperial fervour. Nor could a man whose recent ancestors had been dedicated to the eradication of the slave trade and slavery itself, and who had played such a large part in the abolition campaigns of the early nineteenth century, been blind to the moral failings, individual and collective, to which commerce and empire had led. Thus if the DNB had any particular political message it was a reflection—though only a rather indistinct one—of Stephen's Liberal Unionism. While some Liberal Unionists were enthusiastic imperialists, there was no necessary and inevitable relation between the two. Stephen was one of those members of the Victorian intelligentsia who, in the mid-1880s, looked on Irish Home Rule as a betrayal of Liberal principles and a failure of Gladstone's leadership of the nation. 31 Paul Langford reported soon after the inception of the ODNB that the first Dictionary had over-represented Irish subjects of the late-eighteenth century, particularly the Irish rebels of 1798, and Colin Matthew interpreted this as an attempt by Stephen, as a Liberal Unionist, to demonstrate the place of the Irish in British or ‘national’ history. 32

Matthew also suggested that the political confusion and absence of a defined affiliation that Stephen experienced after the Liberal party split in 1886 ‘beneficially aided the political scepticism’ of the DNB. 33 It was an insight that may have owed something to Matthew's own political persona. A loyal supporter of the Labour Party, as a lowland Scot who had grown up in Edinburgh but had been educated and employed all his adult life in Oxford, he was also a unionist - indeed he spoke at the very end of his life of beginning a project on the history of the Union. 34 Matthew had a very strong sense that his Dictionary was being planned and executed at a similarly significant moment in national history to the era of Home Rule as the national identity and constitutional independence of Britain was dissolved into the European Union. 35 Though he had opposed British entry to the EEC in 1973, so far as one could tell from his conversation he was not overtly hostile to the process of national assimilation in the 1980s and 1990s. He recognised, however, that his might be the last major, national historical project to be undertaken while Britain retained her separate identity. As Ross McKibbin has put it, ‘he had a very strong sense of the uniqueness of British institutions, and the unique value of these institutions.’ 36 He thus described the ODNB as ‘a suitable epitaph—some might say a lament—for the 1,500 years of the formation of the autochtonous United Kingdom.’ 37

Beyond the DNB's resemblance to other and more nationalistic biographical projects, two further factors may explain its mistaken assimilation into the era of British imperialism: its reception, and the rather different views of its second editor, Sidney Lee, to those of its first. If the DNB was clear of nationalistic intent, it was the subject of a nationalistic reception. An early and significant review of the Dictionary by Richard Copley Christie, Professor of Modern History at Owen's College, Manchester, concluded, for example, that it ‘will not only be immeasurably superior to any work of the kind which has been produced in Great Britain, but will far surpass the German and Belgian biographical dictionaries now in progress, as these two important undertakings are in advance of the two great French collections, which until lately reigned supreme in the department of Biography’. 38 The Athenaeum claimed that, in starting after the Germans began their biographical dictionary, and finishing before them, the British had administered ‘a handsome beating to their most formidable competitor’. 39 Remarkably, something of this spirit has endured into ‘our age’, as Noel Annan has called it. 40 But it was never of Stephen's making. No trace of chauvinism infects the sources he left behind from which we must piece together the early history of the DNB.

The fault, if that it is, lies with Lee, who surpassed Stephen in the methodical requirements of an editor, but was never his equal in judgement and intellect. 41 Lee's ‘Statistical Account’ of the DNB, the preface to its last volume in 1900, boasted that ‘the number of memoirs in this Dictionary is far in excess of the number of memoirs to be found in national biographies of other countries’. 42 It is hard to believe that Stephen would have written thus had he still filled the editorial chair at the close of the project. And Lee referred at the very end of this essay to the ‘national and beneficial purpose’ of helping present and future generations appreciate ‘the character of their ancestors’ collective achievement‘. 43 His approach to the selection of subjects placed greater weight on the criterion of ‘distinction’ as the ‘claim to the national biographer's attention’, whereas Stephen's choices had been more eclectic, giving prominence to lesser figures interesting in their own right, whether they influenced British History for good or ill, or for what they told of their age. 44 In reply to an early letter in The Athenaeum from H. S. Ashbee enquiring about the principles for inclusion in the Dictionary, Stephen committed the DNB to breadth: ‘I hope to have as many thousands of obscure names as possible.’ 45 The difference may be explained in the origins and temperament of the two men: Stephen, a product of the intellectual aristocracy of the nineteenth century, was the social and intellectual equal of any, and was formed in mid-Victorian Cambridge a generation before the advent of high-imperial self-congratulation. Sidney Lee, born the son of a Jewish merchant in London as Solomon Lazarus, was the more conscious and proud of his acceptance in the higher reaches of British society, and had been educated in Jowett's Balliol where a powerful ethic of imperial service and achievement marked many in this era. 46

Ironically perhaps, the supplements to the DNB, approximately covering each decade of the twentieth century down to 1990, continued Lee's narrow approach to historical distinction and influence even while new approaches to national history were broadening the sense and meaning of historical significance. This may have reflected the establishment ethos of successive editors of the DNB. It was also the unintended product of publishing constraints: supplements were limited in size to a single decennial volume; the overall number of entries was therefore inelastic; the memoirs were often curtailed and focused only on a subject's public career and achievements. In these circumstances, the great and the good predominated. It was the stated purpose of the ODNB to reverse the trend and ‘return to the integrationist approach of the original edition, in which many minor figures were included’. 47 Colin Matthew wanted to reinstate ‘utility and interest’ and downplay ‘worthiness’ at the heart of the new Dictionary. 48 Once again the Victorians would appear to be rather un-Victorian in their approach. Looking forwards to our own valuations of historical interest, Matthew made frequent reference to the thematic breadth of the first Dictionary which had included many categories of person not yet of interest to the historians of that age, ‘particularly sports people, murderers, journalists, actors and actresses, deviant clergymen, transvestites, fat men, old women’. 49 Looking backwards, Keith Thomas has reminded us that the inclusion of ‘pirates, gamblers and highwaymen’ was part of a long pre-Victorian biographical tradition which Stephen continued and endorsed in the DNB. 50 Whether acknowledging the picaresque traditions of eighteenth century literature, or casting forwards towards the thinking of the late-twentieth century, the Dictionary was evidently more than just a reflection of the common thought of its own age.

Moreover, Stephen not only approached the choice of Dictionary subjects in a liberal and humane spirit; he chose his authors in the same way, trying to secure, in the words of his friend and biographer, Frederick Maitland, ‘not only competence but broad-minded tolerance and sympathy, especially in religious matters’. 51 As Lee recognised, this approach ‘admirably fitted him for the direction of an enterprise in which many conflicting points of view are entitled to find expression’. 52 That very entitlement further distanced the DNB from any prescribed style or position of its age. And it answers the claim advanced previously by Amigoni that the DNB ‘projected itself as a monument of official discourse, which resisted forms of fugitive or subversive discourse believed to carry the potential to undermine established institutions’ and was, therefore, ‘a sophisticated bid for cultural power’. 53 It was never so uniform or so orthodox. Maitland's comment that the breadth and eclecticism of the first Dictionary reflected ‘the confusion of the national mind’ is much closer to the truth. 54 And if that was said of a Dictionary written by just over six hundred authors what may be said of the second Dictionary, with its ten thousand contributors? Simply, that its only ideological commitment (if that it may be) is to the historical significance of its subjects, widely understood in the light of current criteria, and the inclusiveness of its choices. As with Stephen's Dictionary, ‘there is no implication that it will make us morally better or more patriotic. The theme of nationality is very muted’. 55 In a work that was never afraid to venture criticism of its subjects, which was often disrespectful and sometimes plain rude, moral uplift was only rarely in evidence in the DNB. This reflected Stephen's approach to life; it was also by design. As Lee was to put it somewhat later when reflecting on the DNB, ‘The aim of biography is not the moral edification which may flow from the survey of either vice or virtue; it is the truthful transmission of personality’. 56

II

It is precisely because the DNB was not a characteristic work of its age but something much more eclectic, broad, independent and ultimately unclassifiable that it has been possible to build upon it and make the ODNB an organic development from it. A truly ‘Victorian’ dictionary, reflecting only its time and place of composition, would have necessitated a more radical attitude to past historiography and a more pronounced break from it. Keith Thomas has reminded us of a long tradition of biographical writing and publishing, much of it unsuccessful and unfinished, that the Victorians were heirs to and conscious of before the inception of the DNB. 57 In the same way, Matthew's first statement of his aims proclaimed on page one that the new Dictionary was to be ‘a development from the present DNB, not a de novo replacement of it’. He sought to provide ‘an edition which maintains the best of the DNB, and develops and expands it to meet the needs of the foreseeable future’. 58 He justified this in terms of his own ‘organic view of scholarship’ and his respect for the judgement of past scholars. 59 As Ross McKibbin has written, ‘The new edition of the dictionary is, therefore, a collective account of the attitudes of two centuries: the nineteenth as well as the twentieth, the one developing organically from the other’. 60 Boyd Hilton has called it ‘evolution by accretion’. 61 To Matthew, a student of Victorian politics who also wrote on the electoral history of the twentieth century Labour Party and who possessed a very strong ‘sense of the continuity between past and present’, we stand on the shoulders of giants. 62 It was also the preferred solution of ‘almost everyone’ who replied to the fifteen thousand questionnaires that Matthew issued at the start of the project to elicit opinions. 63 There was another view, of course, that the cleanest of breaks should be made with the DNB so that the new Dictionary would represent this generation's view of national history unalloyed and uncluttered by the judgments of the past. In this view there would have been an entirely fresh choice of the lives to be included based on the criteria we now apply to designate ‘noteworthiness’; the ejection of many whose claim to national attention had faded over the intervening century; and there would have been no revision of existing articles but a new text for each life even if we know little more now than the Victorian author had known. 64

Matthew's decision to reject this approach has been explained in terms of a characteristic English national ‘peculiarity’, the ‘Burkean adherence to empirical, constitutionalist and cautionary reformist approaches to political and historical change’. 65 Undoubtedly, Matthew's cultural conservatism (as opposed to his political socialism) predisposed him to respect and conserve Victorian historiography and the architecture of the first Dictionary as a whole. More specifically, he was wary that a new DNB written specifically to illustrate contemporary opinions would be subject to changing academic fashions and date rapidly: ‘he was trying to endow the new edition of the dictionary with a certain timelessness’. 66 But we should also recognise the singular historical experience of the British which makes ‘organic development’ from the DNB to the ODNB not only practical but entirely appropriate. The Germans undertook a new national biographical dictionary in the 1950s in recognition that their history necessitated re-writing in a newly democratic era, and in light of where the strident nationalism, so prominent in their first Dictionary, had led them. 67 But British history is distinctive and exceptional in its continuity and stability in the modern era, and the British experience of the twentieth century holds fewer terrors for those who would recall it. 68 Matthew, indeed, remarked frequently in postgraduate seminars on the qualified success of Britain's retreat from empire and management of national decline since 1945. Organic development in historiography is a luxury few nations can enjoy, the product of a history without radical discontinuities. For this reason the development of the ODNB from the DNB, adopting its fundamental structures, all of its subjects, and many of its conventions, was not only prudent: it demonstrated that continuity, relative to the experience of so many other nations, was at the heart of Britain's recent historical experience.

Continuity between the two Dictionaries manifests itself in many ways, some of which we have already encountered: in their political independence, their reliance on the voluntary efforts of far-sighted publishers acting pro bono; in the consequent losses incurred (Smith lost £70,000 on the DNB, equivalent to £5 million today, and Oxford University Press has no prospect of making a commercial return on the funds it has spent on the project). 69 In the words of the ODNB's second editor and its project director, ‘it was decided at the outset that the new dictionary should, as before, be made up from signed individual memoirs’. 70 The Oxford DNB may include far more information about the personal lives of its subjects, and integrates such things, as well as details of marriage and family, into the text proper, rather than leaving it for sparse comment at the very end of a memoir. But it has rejected the approach of ‘psychobiography’: neither Dictionary delves into, or speculates about, the inner life of its subjects. 71 In Stephen's case, ‘the deeper riddles or contradictions of a personality were liable to strike him as merely irritating and perverse.’ 72 As he wrote in his announcement of the DNB in 1883, ‘elaborate analysis of character or exposition of critical theories is irrelevant’. 73

In respect of the practicalities involved in producing scholarship on such a scale and to time, the two founding editors shared a very similar attitude. Stephen's approach had been workmanlike, sober and practical; in Matthew's words, ‘I favoured getting the job done’. 74 Matthew described his impatience, while editing Gladstone's diaries in 14 volumes, with ‘the pursuit of perfection’ and ‘the definitive philosophies’ of some editors and their editions. 75 He noted in 1995 that the Italian Dictionary of National Biography, published serially, had taken 32 years to reach the letter D and had already issued three volumes of supplements. 76 When Oxford University Press offered him twenty years to produce a new Dictionary published serially, Matthew chose to do it in twelve and to produce it in one go as a completed edition of the whole work in order that it should represent the coherent view of a single generation of scholars working at the end of the twentieth century. He spoke often of his concern that by the time a lengthy project was finished many of those who had written memoirs would themselves have died and be subjects in the Dictionary. By a sad irony this was to be his fate. 77 He reminded his staff that ‘the best was the enemy of the good’—that ‘perfectionism defeats itself’. 78 He was echoing George Smith who had written to Stephen that ‘We can only do the best; we can, and must be content with this, even if it stops short of perfection.’ 79 Matthew often quoted Leslie Stephen's dictum, from the conclusion of his essay on ‘National Biography’, that ‘great as is the difference between a good and a bad work of the kind, even a very defective performance is immensely superior to none at all’. 80 Those who would pick over the inevitable and acknowledged mistakes in the Oxford DNB might think on this before they complain. They might also recall that within four years of the final publication of the DNB a volume of errata, running to 300 pages and approximately 12,000 corrections, had been issued. 81

III

This is not to argue that there are no differences between the two Dictionaries, or that those which exist are insignificant and may be ignored. Rather it is to acknowledge that though the DNB was outdated by the 1990s, its structure, approach and ethos were worthy of conservation and provided a basis for the new Dictionary. In the way that the Oxford DNB was compiled, in its declared intent to update and remedy Victorian deficiencies, and in its attention to the historical context of its subjects, the ODNB is different, but nevertheless comparable.

The new Dictionary was written according to a different plan and structure. It was the result of a series of linked research projects, starting at different points during the twelve years of commissioning and composition, each covering a different period (medieval, sixteenth century, seventeenth century etc.) or theme (literature from the renaissance to romanticism 1500-1780, literature since 1780, art, business and labour, and so forth) and under the oversight of a consultant editor. Each major division was subdivided into discrete topics and sub-periods, administered by one of 362 associate editors and known as ‘blocks’ which might each contain as many as two or three hundred lives. As compared with a Dictionary issued according to an alphabetical arrangement and strict timetable, this gave greater scope for research expertise and encouraged reflection on the way the ODNB was covering different subjects and issues during its composition. Because publication was at one time rather than serially, articles could be compared more easily and inconsistencies resolved. In the 1880s and 1890s, in a Dictionary being issued alphabetically and quarterly, later authors had to accept the views of earlier ones, or counter them at their peril.

Early in the project, the consultant editors were encouraged to review the coverage of their areas in the DNB and they set out their ideas on amendment in a series of insightful reports which, as intended, pinpointed the deficiencies of the original dictionary. Given its origins in the late nineteenth-century, the lacunae in the DNB, and also the areas of over-representation are as we might expect. As Jane Garnett, the consultant editor for women across the whole Dictionary observed, the DNB had not only underrepresented women but had been insensitive to matters of gender in general. The complex relationship between public and private lives had been ignored. Thus the DNB had also underestimated women's contributions within the context of marriage and the family. There was a need for ‘a considerable shift of balance in many male entries, where a wife (or mother, sister or daughter) was a collaborator in a common enterprise, or whose work complemented that of a man.’ 82 The number of women subjects increased from 1759 in the DNB and its supplements to 5627, as published in ODNB in 2004. Absent also were non-Europeans: though hundreds of white colonists in the dominions were included in the DNB, very few non-Europeans were judged to have made an impact on British history. Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859), merchant and philanthropist, was the only Indian to be included, for example, no doubt because of his support for the British during the 1857 mutiny. 83 While Stephen excluded national triumphalism from the Dictionary in its early years, many contributors to the DNB shared the assumption of the age nevertheless that white settlers were part of a ‘Britannic’ world which did not encompass ‘lesser’ races.

For the medieval entries as a whole, Barbara Harvey noted that ‘kingship, government, and politics are well-represented’ whereas ‘poetry and other forms of literature tend to be neglected, and the same is true of science, mathematics and astronomy, trade and industry’. Authors focused on the creation of a centralised nation-state; ‘local and regional contexts were of little or no interest’. A DNB article on a fifteenth century merchant was ‘more likely to tell the reader whether he supported Lancaster or York than how he made his money’. 84 Sixteenth century articles showed an expected religious bias: as Felicity Heal observed, ‘Catholic bishops, controversialists or missionaries are rarely omitted completely, but the old text frequently gives them short shrift’. 85 According to John Morrill, in the DNB's coverage of the seventeenth century ‘the intense interest taken by the Victorians in the English Revolution had been reflected in exceptionally full coverage of all “public” areas especially for the middle part of the century’. The balance could be redressed by devoting space to lives opened up by recent social and women's history. 86 In the case of the eighteenth century, Paul Langford observed that it was less a question of interest and more the very proximity of the age to the late nineteenth century which explained its ‘relatively generous treatment’. In addition, the availability of sources influenced coverage of this particular period: ‘the huge expansion of printed materials from the 1690s ensured that many eighteenth-century authors featured in the British Museum (now Library) collections that the first editors drew so heavily on’. In addition, Stephen himself ‘took a keen interest in the intellectual and literary life of the period, as did a number of his colleagues on DNB’. 87

As social and economic historians like Neil McKendrick 88 and Martin Wiener 89 reminded us in the 1970s and 1980s, Stephen's Dictionary had neglected business and enterprise. Nowhere was the DNB's coverage found more wanting than in relation to economic life and labour. The lives included represented the view of British economic history then current, at the very moment when the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ entered the language in 1884, and the emphasis was therefore on steam, factories, heavy engineering, textiles and railways. 90 According to Martin Daunton, the ‘great names in the domestic system of manufacture, significant figures in turnpikes or coastal shipping, and so on’ were neglected. Meanwhile the twentieth century supplements erred in another way by covering business figures who had held important positions for that reason alone rather than searching for subjects of historic significance. Representatives of the labour movement were treated in an analogous manner: the leaders of large national unions predominated at the expense of more interesting and less institutionalised figures from outside the organised labour movement and the major industries. The distaste for trade manifested itself in the focus of the articles: ‘In many cases, the reason for the inclusion of business and labour subjects in the old DNB arose from their secondary interests, how they spent their money rather than made it, or their later political career rather than their role in trade unions’. 91 In its efforts to include more manufacturers (as opposed to metropolitan bankers, who were relatively well-served), retailers, failed as well as successful entrepreneurs, and even ‘women in trade’ in medieval London and York, the Oxford DNB has tried to make amends. 92

Coverage of scientists in the DNB reflected an older cultural tradition which valued the gentleman-amateur above the professional; the geologist above the mining prospector; the collector of fossils and specimens above the engineer; the clergyman-naturalist above the artisan collector; the moment of genius above the steady accumulation of evidence. Social status and membership of elite scientific societies were almost stronger claims to inclusion than intellectual distinction. But these were not distinctively late-Victorian themes: natural science had always been associated with the leisure of gentlemen savants, and its popularisation in the early Victorian period had established these ‘types’—carriers of the natural scientific tradition—long before the DNB was written. 93 The distinctive stamp of late-Victorian professionalization, however, ensured that a particular conception of natural science—rigorous, empirical and socially respectable—predominated. Thus alchemy, astrology and the occult were excluded from the first Dictionary. Their inclusion in ODNB makes it possible ‘to appreciate the social, intellectual and indeed political role played by astrologers active in Parliamentary and Restoration England’ and ‘the spread and scientific relevance of alchemical practices up to the second half of the eighteenth century’. 94

Yet there were other areas of the DNB which, in various ways, stood up well to modern scrutiny. The treatment of medicine was once such. Largely written by a small group of authors who comprised the first generation of British medical historians, including Joseph Payne, D'Arcy Power, and Norman Moore, the ‘coverage was surprisingly comprehensive, the style was literate and usually precise, and there was an interest in the whole person and not just the medical vocation.’ Their ‘impressive descriptive vocabulary’ outshone the style of late twentieth century medical writers, whose language sometimes lacked the same accuracy. While there tended to be a bias in favour of metropolitan practitioners and physicians in general, as opposed to provincial doctors and surgeons, they were not star-struck: ‘establishment hagiography’ was more a feature of articles on the medical profession written for the twentieth century supplements than by the Victorian pioneers. 95

Sidney Lee developed the dogma, with which few modern scholars could agree, that biography, the study of individual personality, and history, the study of ‘the aggregate movement of men’ should not mix. The very clichés by which he expressed himself in making this case—‘The historian looks at mankind through a field-glass. The biographer puts individual men under a magnifying glass’ or ‘It is the art of the biographer sternly to subordinate his scenery to his actors’—betray the flimsiness and arbitrariness of the argument. 96 Leslie Stephen, in contrast, was no narrow biographer. In the light of books such as English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century John Gross has seen him as a pioneer of the sociological study of literature. 97 Nevertheless, the DNB generally refrained from placing the life in the times, or at least to a degree sufficient to meet more recent scholarly demands and developments.

Tocqueville observed in the second volume of Democracy in America in 1840 that historians writing in aristocratic ages were inclined to ‘refer all occurrences to the particular will and character of certain individuals’, whereas those living in democratic ages discounted the influence of individuals but assigned ‘great general causes to all petty incidents’. 98 Biography has never been out of fashion in Britain, but over the past two scholarly generations—since perhaps the late 1950s—academic history has tended to focus on general causes, whether marxist, structuralist, or some other. Contributors to the ODNB could not escape their formation in this historical culture, and Matthew did not wish them to: as he wrote at the start of the project, ‘much of the interest of biography springs from the tension between individual characteristics and development and the family, social and class background to which such characteristics relate ... the significance of men and women is almost always as part of a group or some form of association, whether familial or public’. 99

In conformity with these views, which, it must be admitted, are so widely held as to be almost universally accepted, many of the lives in the Oxford DNB have been written with the intent of placing the subject in relation to relevant political structures, economic forces, or intellectual contexts. In this way Tocqueville's two distinct approaches to history may be said to have been fused in the new Dictionary. Indeed, in the presentation of many of the most historically significant lives, a final section on reputation and assessment has allowed authors to ‘place’ their subjects in luminous concluding remarks which set out relevant historiography and rival interpretations. Stephen's Dictionary never attempted this, not least because the scholarship on which it depends has largely been the product of the twentieth century. We must admit that we know more than our ancestors, which is not to say that we know better. But it does make the ODNB larger, different, and more useful.

The DNB was compiled during the late-Victorian ‘fragmentation of the common context’ as Robert Young has characterised British intellectual life after 1870, during a period when a unitary cultural and academic heritage previously shared by an elite readership broke down. 100 Young may have exaggerated the degree and speed of the process of dissociation, but Stefan Collini is surely correct to note that British intellectual life, in common with the organisation of knowledge, and of work in general, underwent a process of specialisation from the late-Victorian era which has continued to the present. 101 The British were relatively slow to professionalize academic life (and it is a pleasing aspect of the Oxford DNB that although over two-thirds of its contributors are or have been professional academics, a significant remaining proportion of its articles have been written by independent scholars without institutional affiliation). Nevertheless the DNB was compiled as the map of late-Victorian and Edwardian knowledge became more complex and differentiated. Stephen and Lee's Dictionary was largely written by gentlemen-scholars, ‘journeyman “men of letters”’ as Matthew referred to them, drawn from the London clubs, the Athenaeum most notably. 102 The quality of their work was variable, and frequently required extensive revision. 103 Contributors, readers, and interested parties were kept informed of progress through The Athenaeum magazine, ‘the most respected critical journal of the period’, which carried announcements and notices about the DNB, and also reviews. 104 Though there were 653 contributors in total, the core of the Dictionary—over half its bulk—was written by 34, and Lee picked out ‘one hundred regular and voluminous contributors’ who ‘have written nearly three-fourths of the whole’. 105 Among the inner circle were figures like R. L Poole, S. R. Gardiner, Mandell Creighton, A. F. Pollard, T. F. Tout, Charles Firth and A. W. Ward who went on to take their places in the first generation of specialised, university-based career scholars. But the sheer number of articles they wrote—Pollard was responsible for 425 articles, Firth for 222, and Tout for 237, for example—is evidence that the age of the gifted generalist had not yet given way to that of the expert. 106

The DNB was produced on the cusp of changes to the organisation of knowledge and the structures of academic life, therefore, which have altered considerably the location, the self-identity, and the procedures of modern scholars. As Maitland could see in 1906, ‘it was an unorganised world to which Stephen issued his first circulars’ in which the universities ‘were but beginning to take seriously the claims of modern history’. 107 But the fact that he could contrast the higher professionalism a generation later with the disorganisation and amateurism of 1882 owed something to the DNB itself: it had provided a brilliant training for a cohort of professional scholars of the future, and developed a model of one way of pursuing historical studies. It deserves its own place in the history of academic professionalization, therefore. A century later, the numbers producing and consuming scholarship in educational institutions around the world have expanded exponentially. The specialised nature of much of today's scholarship is accepted universally. The sheer amount that we know, including what we know about the British past, has grown in consequence. Because the new Dictionary is international in its range, seeking to assess British lives that have been lived across the globe in all periods, it has used the expertise of three thousand authors from abroad, in addition to the seven thousand domiciled in the British Isles. It could not have been otherwise if the Oxford DNB was not to be charged with parochialism and also amateurism, but the statistics, when compared to those of the DNB, tell us that the two Dictionaries are products of different academic cultures. As Ian Donaldson has summarised, the first DNB was metropolitan in focus, privately funded, and drew on independent authors. The Oxford DNB has been publicly subsidised (though to the tune of only about fifteen per cent of its total cost), is located in a university, and is published by a university press. 108

Its publication prompts reflection on the nature and course of British history; on individual agency in history in general; on the advantages and disadvantages of biography as a type of historical writing; on modern British historiography; and on the sociology of knowledge—the way that scholarship is organised and produced. But such reflections, which are to be encouraged, must start from an understanding of why and how the Oxford DNB was produced, and must appreciate the complex relationships, both continuous and discontinuous, with the first Dictionary of National Biography. The argument advanced here is that the DNB, while inevitably marked by some of the attitudes of its age in some of its articles, was surprisingly free from many supposedly quintessential late-Victorian opinions. If further reflection should confirm this, and if we should start to question our presuppositions about things Victorian in general, that, too, is to be encouraged.

Lawrence Goldman, St Peter's College, Oxford

by kind permission of Edinburgh University Press