Endnotes

1. Alan Bell, ‘Leslie Stephen and the DNB’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 Dec. 1977, 1478.
2. C. H. Firth, ‘Memoir of Sir Sidney Lee’, DNB, Supplement 1912-21 (H. W. C. Davis and J. R. H. Weaver, eds.) (Oxford, 1927), xxi.
3. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen. The Godless Victorian (London, 1984), 87.
4. Ian McCalman, ‘Introduction’ in Ian McCalman (ed.), National Biographies and National Identity. A Critical Approach to Theory and Editorial Practice (Canberra, 1996), iv.
5. David Cannadine, ‘British Worthies’, London Review of Books, iii, 3-16 December 1981, 3-6. But Cannadine is much closer to the argument of this essay when he also recognises that the DNB was ‘an abidingly useful and incomparably wide-ranging work of reference’.
6. D. Amigoni, ‘Distinctively Queer Little Morsels: Imagining Distinction, Groups and Difference in the DNB and ODNB’, Journal of Victorian Culture 10:2 (Spring 2005), 87
7. Gillian Fenwick, ‘The Athenaeum and the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1901’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 23, 4, Winter 1990, 182.
8. Leslie Stephen, ‘A New “Biographia Britannica” ’, The Athenaeum, 2878, 23 Dec. 1883, 850.
9. L. Stephen to Julia Prinsep Stephen, 31 March 1884, in L. Stephen, Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen (ed. John W. Bicknell), (2 vols, Basingstoke and London, 1996), ii, 307-8.
10. Quoted in Bell, ‘Leslie Stephen and the DNB’, 1478
11. L. Stephen to Charles Eliot Norton, 13 April and 16 Oct. 1884, in L. Stephen, Selected Letters, 310, 317.
12. L. Stephen to Mary L. Fisher, 27 May 1900, in L. Stephen, Selected Letters, 507.
13. L. Stephen, ‘National Biography’ in L. Stephen, Studies of a Biographer (London, 1898), 11, 20.
14. English Historical Review, v, 1890,787.
15. L. Stephen, Henry Fawcett (London, 1885), ch. iii, ‘Cambridge’, 73-133.
16. Lee, Principles of Biography (Cambridge, 1911), 5.
17. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800 (1969) (1973 edn., Harmondsworth), 96.
18. Annan, Leslie Stephen, 84.
19. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 36.
20. Annan, Leslie Stephen, 302-3.
21. Brian Harrison, ‘A Slice of Their Lives. Editing the DNB, 1882-1999’, English Historical Review, cxix, Nov.2004, 1191-2.
22. Keith Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography. The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (The Leslie Stephen Special Lecture, 2004) (Cambridge, 2005), 15.
23. Matthew, ‘Dictionaries of National Biography’ in McCalman (ed.), National Biographies and National Identity, 2-3.
24. The Biographia Britannica, or the Lives of the most Eminent Persons who have flourished in Great Britain and Ireland from the Earliest Ages down to the Present Times (7 vols, London, 1747-1766), i, viii, xv, quoted in Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography, 12-13.
25. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 36.
26. Ibid, 12.
27. Matthew, ‘Dictionaries of National Biography’, 17.
28. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 37.
29. Harrison, ‘A Slice of Their Lives’, 6; Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography, 38.
30. Though the Oxford DNB received £3 million from the British government, via the British Academy, towards the costs of research for the new Dictionary, its total cost was some £25 million, and the balance was entirely made up by Oxford University Press, a department of the University of Oxford. The editor was responsible to a Supervisory Committee which included representatives from the British Academy, Royal Society and other learned bodies. But no member of the committee represented a state or political organisation.
31. Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism. University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy (London, 1976), ch. 9, ‘1886 and After’, 218-242. See esp. 223.
32. Colin Matthew, ‘Editor's Report [to the Delegates of Oxford University Press], April 1993’, 5; Matthew, ‘Dictionaries of National Biography’, in McCalman (ed.), National Biographies and National Identity, 8.
33. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 26.
34. Matthew suggested that he write an essay on the history of the Union at a seminar in Oxford on 1st October 1999 in St. Catherine's College where the collection that became Civil Society in British History. Ideas, Identities, Institutions (ed. Jose Harris) (Oxford, 2003) was projected. He died at the end of that month. The last essay he wrote to be published in his lifetime was on Scotland and the future of the Union in the London Review of Books, ‘The British Way’, 5 March 1998, 27, 30-1.
35. Peter Ghosh, ‘Colin Matthew’, The Guardian, 2 Nov. 1999, 20.
36. Ross McKibbin, ‘Colin Matthew: A Memoir’, in Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman (eds.), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain. Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), 30.
37. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 36-7.
38. Quarterly Review, 164 (April 1887), 350-81.
39. Robert Faber and Brian Harrison, ‘The Dictionary of National Biography: A Publishing History’ in R. Myers, M. Harris and G. Mandelbrote (eds.) Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century (2002), 172.
40. Annan, Leslie Stephen, 86: ‘Giving its continental competitors a start of as much as twenty-five years in some cases, the British Dictionary outran them all.’
41. Firth, ‘Memoir of Sir Sidney Lee’, DNB Supplement 1912-21, xvi.
42. Lee, ‘Statistical Account’, xi.
43. Ibid, xxii.
44. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography, 30-31;
45. H. S. Ashbee, ‘A New “Biographia Britannica”’, Athenaeum, 2880, 6 Jan. 1883, 17; Leslie Stephen, ‘The New Biographical Dictionary’, Athenaeum 2881, 13 Jan. 1883, 54.
46. Alan Bell and Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Sidney Lee’, ODNB, 33, 113-120.
47. Matthew, ‘Editor's Report’, 17.
48. Ibid, 2.
49. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 13.
50. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography, 22-3.
51. F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London, 1906) (2nd edn., 1907), 368.
52. Sidney Lee, ‘Leslie Stephen’, DNB, Supplement 1901-1911, vol. iii, 402.
53. David Amigoni, ‘Life histories and the cultural politics of historical knowing: the Dictionary of National Biography and the late nineteenth-century political field’ in Shirley Dex (ed.), Life and Work History Analyses: Qualitative and Quantitative Developments (London, 1991), 146, 163.See also David Amigoni, Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (Hemel Hempstead, 1993), 180, n.27 where the DNB is described as ‘a sophisticated bid for, and consolidation of, cultural power, recording the careers of the compilers along with the lives of those whom the compilers celebrated.’ The problems with Amigoni's approach are exemplified in the comparison made in his 1991 article between the DNB and Frederic Harrison's New Calendar of Great Men (1892). It is admitted that Harrison's biographical choices and approach embody the ideals and values of the English Positivist movement, the politico-religious grouping of the followers of Auguste Comte that emerged from Oxford in the 1850s. It is contended that the DNB was also engaged in a ‘subtle struggle aimed at securing cultural power’ (163) though it was written by hundreds of different contributors across the space of a generation and subject to intense and continuous public scrutiny and review. If the argument is that all works of history and biography reflect unspoken ideological assumptions it cannot be said that anything very new or surprising is being advanced. The argument of this essay is that the DNB was simply too diverse in the number and range of its subjects as well as its writers to represent any single outlook.
54. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 368.
55. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography, 37.
56. Lee, Principles of Biography, 25-6.
57. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography, 25. Gilliam Fenwick, The Contributors' Index to the DNB 1885-1901 (Winchester, 1989), x.
58. Matthew, ‘Editor's Report’, 1, 10.
59. On Matthew's instinctive support for continuity, see Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman, ‘A Brief Word on “Politics” and “Culture”’ in idem (eds.), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain, 2.
60. Ross McKibbin, ‘Colin Matthew’, ODNB, 37, 340.
61. Boyd Hilton, ‘Colin Matthew (1941-1999)’ in Ghosh and Goldman (eds.) Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain, 25.
62. H. C. G. Matthew, Ross McKibbin and John Kay, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, 91, 1976, 723-52; Hilton, ‘Colin Matthew (1941-1999)’, 24.
63. Faber and Harrison, ‘The Dictionary of National Biography’, 182.
64. This view was advanced by the current editor of the Oxford DNB at a seminar in St. John's College, Oxford on the new Dictionary given by Colin Matthew to the modern British historians in the Faculty of Modern History in Oxford in October 1993.
65. McCalman, ‘Introduction’, v.
66. McKibbin, ‘Colin Matthew’, 340.
67. See the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1875-1912) and Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin, 1953-). The latest volume, 22, has reached the letter S.
68. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965) in idem, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), 35-91.
69. Lee, ‘Statistical Account’, vii.
70. Faber and Harrison, ‘The Dictionary of National Biography’, 186.
71. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography, 51.
72. Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 97.
73. Stephen, ‘A New “Biographia Britannica”’, 850.
74. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 12.
75. Ibid.
76. Matthew, ‘Dictionaries of National Biography’, 7. Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani (Rome, 1960-). The latest volume, 63, published in 2004, has reached the letter L.
77. Ross McKibbin, ‘Colin Matthew’, ODNB, 37, 337-41.
78. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 12
79. George Smith, Ms. Autobiography, National Library of Scotland, f. 231, quoted in Harrison, ‘A Slice of Their Lives’, 1189.
80. Stephen, ‘National Biography’, 36.
81. [Sidney Lee, ed.] Dictionary of National Biography. Errata (London, 1904).
82. Jane Garnett, ‘Women in the New Dictionary of National Biography: A Preliminary Report’, November 1993, f. 1.
83. I am grateful to Dr. Alex May of the ODNB research staff for this reference, and for stimulating discussion of the coverage of empire and commonwealth in the two Dictionaries.
84. Barbara Harvey, ‘Report of the Consultant Editor for the Pre-1500 Area’, 29 June 1994, ff. 3-4.
85. Felicity Heal, ‘Report of the Consultant Editor for the Sixteenth-Century Area’, 10 September 1998, ff. 3-4.
86. John Morrill, ‘Interim Report A by John Morrill, Consultant Editor for the Seventeenth Century’, 9 Aug. 1998, f. 4.
87. Paul Langford, ‘Report on ‘HAN’—Hanoverian’ (n.d.), f. 1.
88. Neil McKendrick, ‘General Introduction’ in R. J. Overy, William Morris, Viscount Nuffield (London, 1976), vii.
89. Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (Cambridge, 1981), 130.
90. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1884).
91. Martin Daunton, ‘Report on “Business and the World of Labour”’, May 1994, ff. 1-2.
92. Caroline M. Barron ‘Women traders and artisans in London (act. c. 1200-c. 1500)’, ODNB, 60, 54-8; P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Women in trade and industry in York (act. c. 1300-c.1500), ODNB, 60, 52-3.
93. Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1981).
94. Pietro Corsi, ‘Science 1500-2000’ (nd), ff. 1-2.
95. Margaret Pelling, ‘Consultant Editor's Report For Medicine’, 13 Jan. 1997, ff. 1-3.
96. Lee, Principles of Biography, 26-30.
97. Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 98-99. Annan, The Godless Victorian, 113.
98. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols, 1835-40) (New York, 1945 edn.,), ii, 90.
99. Matthew, ‘Editor's Report’, 9-10, 27. The second quotation referred specifically to planned prosopographical articles, which Matthew called ‘navigational articles’, designed to show how individuals in the Dictionary were part of wider historical networks, be they political, economic, artistic or sporting. The ODNB is now commissioning these essays which will be added to the Dictionary and published as a separate companion volume in due course. For further insights into Matthew's thinking on the relations of history and biography, see McKibbin, ‘Colin Matthew’, 340.
100. Robert Young, ‘Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals and the Fragmentation of a Common Context’ in idem, Darwin's Metaphor. Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (London, 1985), 126-63.
101. Stefan Collini, ‘Their Title to Be Heard: Professionalization and its Discontents’ in idem, Public Moralists. Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (Oxford 1991), 199-250.
102. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 20. Gillian Fenwick, Women and the Dictionary of National Biography (Aldershot, 1994), 3.
103. Harrison, ‘A Slice of Their Lives’, 1188; Fenwick, ‘The Athenaeum and the Dictionary of National Biography’, 185.
104. Fenwick, ‘The Athenaeum and the Dictionary of National Biography’, 180.
105. Lee, ‘Statistical Account’, xv, xvii.
106. Fenwick, The Contributors' Index to the Dictionary of National Biography, passim. These figures exclude articles contributed to the 1901 supplements.
107. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 366.
108. Ian Donaldson, ‘Biographical Uncertainty’, Essays in Criticism liv:4 (Oct. 2004), 307.