Literature 1780–2000

Among the Dictionary's thirteen research areas, its six subject-areas have included two on British literature since 1500, divided at 1780, and I now turn to the later, whose total number of biographical subjects -- 2005 in the DNB and its supplements -- is bumped up in the Oxford DNB by 834 new subjects. Professor John Sutherland, who teaches both at University College London and at Caltech in the USA, and who is known to many in the UK as a regular columnist in The Guardian, expertly guided the growth of this high-profile area throughout as consultant editor. Here at 37A St Giles', Dr Clare Loughlin-Chow as research editor managed the area single-handedly from its inception in 1996 until 2000. An expert on Victorian literature, especially on Dickens, she established a powerful network of relationships with associate editors and contributors. When Dr Loughlin-Chow left to become Junior Year Abroad Director and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, she passed on her network to her two successors as research editors responsible for the area. Dr Jane Potter was in sole command from 2000 to 2001, and before coming to us was lecturer in publishing at Oxford Brookes University. Her doctoral thesis (which she will shortly be publishing) was on women's literary responses to the First World War. Dr Clare Taylor, whose doctoral thesis was published this year as Women, Writing, and Fetishism 1890-1950, joined Jane in 2001. They received much help from two other research editors, Dr Eleri Larkum and Robert Brown, whose areas of specialism I've already discussed.

The DNB was always strong on literary subjects: when any name was suggested for inclusion, the response of its second editor, Sidney Lee, was always 'what did he write?' Literature remains prominent within the Oxford DNB , which includes all the DNB 's biographical subjects and many more. All the major literary figures receive new articles, with substantial sections on their posthumous reputation. Lee's colleague A. F. Pollard, who became the well-known Tudor historian, felt that his literary bias 'led to the inclusion ... of persons who owed their commemoration less to any distinction they possessed or influence they wielded than to the accidental survival of what they wrote. It also extended unduly the space they deserved to occupy'. This is one reason why the DNB included so many minor clergy, eager as they were to publish their sermons. Yet this generosity to minor literary figures made it easier for us to cater for the twentieth century's interest in writers who are not from the purely literary point of view in the top flight.

Writing in 1932 on Fiction and the Reading Public , Q. D. Leavis wanted literary scholars to focus on the widely-read fiction that is not elevated to the status of 'literature' in the textbooks, and her message was reinforced by the brilliant essays of George Orwell on such subjects as boys' magazines and seaside postcards. As Orwell wrote in 1939, 'I believe that most people are influenced more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life'. Such shifts in scholarly interest have fruitfully influenced the Oxford DNB, whose concerns overlap with those of Ross McKibbin in his Classes and Cultures , a book which he says is 'about the mass of the English people and high culture was not their culture'. The Oxford DNB does not ignore or even downgrade the great authors, but broadens the literary and other contexts within which they should be understood.

So the Oxford DNB now does full justice to Mills and Boon, and also to Ruby M.Ayres (1881-1955), who wrote no fewer than 136 novels for Hodder and Stoughton. 'Deaths - often of rivals or other figures who threaten the perfect bliss of the central characters, or who provide useful legacies - occur with remarkable convenience' in her novels, writes our contributor, 'often in car or aeroplane crashes, and without distressing detail or mourning'. Our inclusion of Anna Ross (1860-1939), who wrote under the pen-name Amanda Ros, was guaranteed by her notoriety, for 'her plots were conventional -- orphan heroines and all-conquering love -- but her equivocal fame sprang from the richness of her rhetorical flights and headlong plunges into bathos', so much so, that an Amanda Ros Club was formed 'by those who delighted in her "magnificent incongruities", her apparently uncontrollable use of alliteration, and the ridiculous effects she unwittingly produced'. Nor has the sentimentality of his plots deterred us from including Warwick Deeping (1877-1950); he made his name with Sorrell and Son (1925), which was filmed and sold more than 230,000 copies in Germany, let alone at home. As our contributor writes: 'Deeping may not now be seen as a major literary figure, but he was an extremely popular novelist in his day'.

A second innovation: the Oxford DNB covers woman writers more fully. There were 373 women in this section of DNB, whereas the Oxford DNB has almost twice as many. Q. D. Leavis rightly pointed out that 'a novel pulled up as a unit for inspection clings with its tentacles round so many non-technical matters that it cannot always be safely severed from them'. Nobody was more aware than Virginia Woolf of the debt owed by the greatest woman writers to their lesser-known predecessors: 'masterpieces are not single and solitary births', she wrote in A Room of One's Own (1928); 'they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common'. Many less famous women writers prepared the way for Jane Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot, and we now do justice to more of them, yet even these major figures received what now seems short shrift from the DNB. This was partly because they came early on in the alphabet, at a time when the DNB was nervous about including long articles in volumes that were published quarterly and alphabetically. Our article on Jane Austen is fourteen times as long as its predecessor, which Leslie Stephen himself contributed; and Emily Bronte now receives an article in her own right, whereas the DNB included her only within an article on her family. In Oxford DNB we have also ensured that women benefit from our instinctive sympathy with lexicographers and the like, but readers of Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne will not begrudge our inclusion of William Minor.

In literature, as in other areas, the Oxford DNB opens out in a third respect: regionally. Wales and Scotland make major advances, reflected perhaps in the fact that among our daily intake of newspapers The Scotsman is included. Glaring omissions from the DNB have been corrected with fine articles on (for example) Neil Gunn and James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon), and our notable new entries include the poet William McGonagall and the novelist and poet Helen Craik. Welsh literary coverage in DNB was dominated by academic figures, whereas in the Oxford DNB Dylan Thomas is the sort of Welsh author who is more widely represented. A more contextual account of Welsh literature, in both English and Welsh languages, is now supplied, with much fuller treatment of the Welsh novel's late flowering.

A word about method in literary biography. While a biographical dictionary cannot focus primarily upon critical comment, this has by no means been discouraged in the case of major authors, whose inevitably chronological structure finds space for much qualitative assessment. Nor have we been pursuing a narrowly 'literary' approach to our authors: on the contrary, we aim to emphasize their many other interesting activities, many of them significant even for their writing lives. Our contributor on William Hope Hodgson, for example, does not ignore the fact that he was also a body-builder, was keen on photography, and founded a school of physical culture in Blackburn.

I conclude, however, with three literary 'firsts'. Richard Freeman (1862-1943) in 1912 published 'The Case of Oscar Brodski', the first 'inverted' detective story ever written: that is, one in which the identity of the criminal is known to the reader at the outset and whose plot concerns the efforts of the detective to ascertain his identity. Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) added a new word to the language, the clerihew, 'a short comic or nonsense verse, professedly biographical, of two couplets differing in length'. And in the title of her first novel (1893), the author and suffragist Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936) coined a phrase that I hope does not apply to the relationship between my monthly messages and their potential readers: 'ships that pass in the night'.

Brian Harrison