People, places, and shifting perspectives in the Dictionary of National Biography

First published in The Local Historian, vol 36/2 (May 2006)

The first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, had as its professed aim the commemoration of ‘all men and women of British or Irish origins who have achieved any reasonable measure of distinction in any walk of life’. The same basic purpose informs its succeeding edition, published in 2004 as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The first edition of the Dictionary, together with its twentieth-century supplements, contained a total of 38,607 lives in 36,466 articles, while the second has 54,922 lives in 50,113 articles. The additions reflect developments in historical scholarship and historiographical outlook which cumulatively made it both desirable and possible to correct perceived imbalances in the old DNB, in ways which had repercussions for entire fields of human activity and individual biographies alike. Although it was editorial policy from the outset that nobody who was in any way the subject of an article in the first edition should be dropped from the second, this did not mean that there should be no change in the treatment of existing subjects, all of whose lives were in fact liable to rewriting or revision, in ways which involved re-thinking them, quite as much as re-researching them. The overall result is a reference book similar in structure but significantly different in texture from its predecessor.

The old DNB was financed by the publisher George Smith. It was published in London, and though largely written by authors trained at Oxford and Cambridge, it expressed a cultural ethos that was essentially metropolitan. Its geographical range, where the British Isles were concerned, was remarkably wide, if somewhat uneven in distribution, but in public affairs, in particular, the prevailing view was the one from Westminster and Whitehall. One of the professed aims of the new edition has been to restore to local and regional factors, whether political, economic or cultural, the important part always played by them, not only in the lives of the great majority of the men and women of the past, but also in national affairs. Many of the articles in the Oxford DNB describe the fortunes of people whose importance was mainly restricted to a single town, shire or region. But others illustrate the interpenetration of local and nationwide developments, showing how the people whose actions determined the course of events even at the very heart of government, might themselves have owed their presence there, and the policies they followed, to circumstances prevailing in places far removed from it. Articles of both kinds also remind us that court and capital have never enjoyed a monopoly of authority, wealth, or intellectual achievement.

Early centuries

Chronologically, the earliest discrete period covered by the Oxford DNB is that of Roman Britain, one considerably expanded by comparison with the old Dictionary. It is salutary to observe that in biographical terms, almost the whole island during some five centuries appears as literally provincial, its native rulers having been subjugated and eventually suppressed by generations of foreign-born governors. Then following the collapse of Roman rule, we pass from a situation in which authority was rigidly centralised to one where all government was local government, a development stressed through an innovation to the Oxford DNB, namely the group article. Four of these are devoted respectively to the early kings of *Kent and to the kings of the *East Saxons, the *Hwicce and the *South Saxons. All contain numerous ‘co-subjects’, often full subjects in the Victorian edition but here re-presented with a qualified individuality which underlines their role in the development of regional dynasties and kingdoms. The latter, for instance that of the East Saxons, are shown both as constituting the building blocks from which greater kingdoms were later formed, and as also embracing the territories of lesser subkings.

Mercia, Northumbria and the other components of the so-called Heptarchy succumbed to Viking attack in the ninth century, except for Wessex, which in due course absorbed the territories of the other Old English kingdoms and those of the Vikings as well. But in the ODNB's coverage of the English realm as it emerged in the tenth century, new sources of evidence, and the re-examination of old ones, have allowed far greater attention to be given to local issues than was thought feasible, or any rate desirable, a century earlier. For instance, the lists of witness lists to charters have been used to demonstrate the links between local potentates and royal courts, and it has also become possible to say more about the potentates themselves. The old Dictionary's entry on Byrhtnoth, killed by Vikings in 991, depended almost entirely on two literary sources, one of them the famous poem of the battle of Maldon. A reconstruction of his affiliations and estates now shows that he was a major landowner, with estates in ten different shires, and that ‘Through blood or marriage he was related to most of the men who ruled southern England’. Such were his wealth and connections that he was ‘probably the most important layman in England after the king’ (this and all subsequent quotations are taken from the relevant Oxford DNB article). In such a case, attention to a subject's local and regional interests has the effect of illuminating his wider importance, and in turn explains how Byrhtnoth's death in battle was an event of national significance, as well as a literary landmark. Domesday Book, too, has been thoroughly exploited to shed light on the great landowners of pre-Conquest England, some of them women. *Eadgifu the Fair may have been King Harold's mistress; more certainly, she can be shown to have been ‘one of the richest English magnates at that time’.

The widely distributed power of the landed aristocracy has proved one of the longest-lasting features of British society. Another abiding, and pervasive, presence is that of the Christian church. In theory ecclesiastical authority was centralised in the pope and mediated through a hierarchy of metropolitans and bishops. In reality spiritual power was as fragmented as secular, with religious devotion being for centuries focussed throughout Britain and Ireland upon the often intensely localised cults of saints. Group articles have again been used to demonstrate the point, with most of the early Irish saints being now gathered into five articles covering the provinces of *Connacht, *Leinster, *Meath, *Munster and *Ulster. Even these barely do justice to the distribution of cults. In Munster, for instance, there was ‘a profusion of minor saints and churches ... a bewildering confusion of separate traditions’, and everywhere the cults of saints, greater ones like Brigit of Kildare as well as lesser ones, were made to serve strictly local purposes. The same phenomenon can be seen in Wales. Thus the medieval lives of the sixth-century holy man Cybi, who gave his name to Caergybi (Holyhead), which were used in the original article only to reconstruct the course of Cybi's life, are now also exploited to elucidate the context in which the early cult developed, leading to the conclusion that they ‘offer a narrative connecting most of the churches named after Cybi, whether in Ireland, Gwent, or Anglesey, asserting his status as the principal saint of western Anglesey, and confirming Caergybi's rights of sanctuary.’

Medieval and Renaissance

The Norman Conquest of England had weighty repercussions for the whole of the British Isles, but although these included massive changes in landownership, the social order as such remained unshaken. This truth is reflected in the new article on William I, which devotes a whole paragraph to Domesday Book (the original gave it one sentence), which brings out alike the centralised authority which ordered the survey, the workings of local government which carried it out, and the distribution of resources, landed and otherwise, which it disclosed. Its scope has made it an inexhaustible source for, inter alia, English local history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The original purposes of Domesday Book remain controversial, and have been subjected to constant reinterpretation. So, too, have the social structures it records; their eleventh-century workings, and also their subsequent development, have come to be seen in very different ways by historians, a process duly reflected in the DNB.

The twentieth century saw a vast increase in historical knowledge of all kinds, a process led by the Public Record Office/National Archives and reinforced by national and local record-society-publishing organisations. And with it there came a conceptual revolution, associated above all with Sir Lewis Namier and K.B. *McFarlane, which ultimately affected all kinds of historical investigation but particularly the study of the nobility and gentry. From a position encapsulated in the old DNB's comment on King James IV of Scotland, that ‘The nobles were his natural enemies, as of all the Stewarts’, there has been a move to seeing kings, nobles and gentry as constituting a single ruling order, sustained by common interests and a network of patronage. The new article on James IV refers to his kingship as ‘based not only or even primarily on the direct exercise of royal power but also on shrewdness in his appraisal of and dealings with his magnates; pragmatic trade-offs with local and personal interests ... ’ As kings dealt with nobles, so nobles dealt with gentry, in ways which maintained the positions of both. Thus the new article on Richard Beauchamp, thirteenth earl of Warwick, brings out the extent to which his regional importance, ‘his unrivalled hegemony over much of the midlands’, in which ‘Warwick's men monopolised most of the local offices in Warwickshire and Worcestershire’, was essential to his national position as well.

As for those gentry families whose loyalty magnates like Warwick worked to secure and retain, they constitute what is effectively another innovation within the Oxford DNB, in the form of the family article (the first edition did contain a very small number, but they were essentially exercises in antiquarianism). Articles on seventy English, four Welsh and thirty-three Scottish noble and gentry families aim to bring out their significance as abiding presences in local society by detailing their leading members over several generations, with particular stress on the ways their lives advanced or reversed the fortunes of their families. Thus the fortunes of the *Dinham family in Devon are traced from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth, showing how its members prospered through service to the crown, links with the Courtenay earls of Devon, and a series of advantageous marriages. They suffered occasional reverses; one Dinham fell foul of the bishop of Exeter, another was murdered by thieves. But overall the graph of their fortunes inclined steadily upwards, until the last of the lineage, John *Dynham, was made a peer by Edward IV for services which also justified his having an entry of his own in the Oxford DNB.

The family article has also provided a means for the Dictionary to both improve and increase its representation of women, and thereby to illustrate the variety of their roles throughout society. The Oxford DNB's account of Elizabeth de Clare, presented in the first edition as primarily a dynastic pawn, gains immeasurably from the use of estate records to illustrate her activities as a landowner and religious patron, mainly in East Anglia. Although many of the women who have joined her in the Dictionary were members of the aristocracy, several new entries report the activities of women in places far removed from court. Some engaged in politics; Joan *Beaufort, countess of Westmorland, was principally active in north-west England, where her promotion of the interests of her children did much to destabilise the entire region. Others used their energies and resources to less contentious ends; Richeldis de *Favereches founded the celebrated priory and pilgrimage centre at Walsingham in Norfolk, Katherine *Berkeley endowed a grammar school at Wotton under Edge in Gloucestershire. A number of nuns and anchoresses have gained admission, along with the Leatherhead ale seller Eleanor *Romyng, viciously traduced by John Skelton, while a group article presents women traders and artisans in late medieval *York. Medieval trade and finance were themselves also inadequately represented in the old DNB, and most of the merchants whom it included were Londoners who seem to have been chosen above all for their involvement in national politics. Inevitably London continues to predominate in the new edition, though the much greater attention now given to such matters as civic wards, property acquisitions and membership of livery companies shows how in the case of someone like Sir Richard Whittington it is now possible to ‘localise’ a subject even within the larger context of the national capital. But space has also been found for those whose commercial bases lay elsewhere, men like Richard *Embleton of Newcastle, Thomas *Melchbourne of Bishop's Lynn, William *Soper of Southampton, and the two John *Hawleys of Dartmouth, who engaged impartially in trade and piracy.

A greater awareness of local and regional factors has also affected the ODNB's presentation of the church, and especially (though not only) of bishops. Here too the change is source-led. The first edition's dependence on records of central government, and where these failed on passing references in chronicles and literary sources, meant that its accounts of bishops either turned their subjects into civil servants or resulted in entries that were little better than antiquarian rag-bags. A century later, the use of episcopal registers and other diocesan records has made it possible to give far more attention to bishops as pastors, and so to their impact on the laity. It has also considerably expanded the criteria by which the churchmen of the past may be evaluated. Thus Bartholomew, mid-twelfth-century bishop of Exeter, is no longer seen almost entirely in terms of his involvement in the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket, but is also given his due as ‘an assiduous diocesan bishop’, and it becomes appropriate for William de *Blois, bishop of Worcester some fifty years later, to be admitted to the new Dictionary entirely on the strength of ‘an episcopate distinguished by his dedication to reform and by conflict with his cathedral chapter’. A fifteenth-century prelate like Bishop Richard Beauchamp of Salisbury is brought clearly into focus as an excellent diocesan who was occasionally caught up in national politics, instead of one significant only for having been chancellor of the Order of the Garter. Archbishops and bishops can sometimes also be seen dealing with men and women whose religious life took them to the very edges of the church, or even over them. Several are recorded as interviewing the eccentric visionary Margery Kempe as she travelled round England, while others had to combat heretics like Sir Thomas *Latimer, who protected Lollard preachers in Northamptonshire, and John Aston, no longer presented as an Oxford don with unsound opinions, but as an ardent Wycliffite recorded as preaching in Hampshire and at Leicester, Gloucester and Bristol. A group article devoted to *Lollard women illustrates the communication and observance of religious heterodoxy in several parts of southern and central England, notably Norfolk and Kent, while an entry on Quentin *Fulkherd shows it spreading into Scotland.

The emphases developed in the Oxford DNB's articles on medieval figures are maintained and developed for the sixteenth century. Thus the impact of the reformation at a local level can be followed in articles like those on Hugh Latimer and John Bell, successively evangelical and conservative bishops of Worcester between 1535 and 1543, showing how the former worked to implement religious changes which the latter then laboured to reverse. The involvement of the laity is illustrated not only in the lives of protestant martyrs who, thanks ultimately to John Foxe, were present in strength in the old DNB (as were the Catholic martyrs of the succeeding generations), but also in those of protestant patrons like Katherine Bertie, dowager duchess of Suffolk, who is shown using her rights of patronage to install evangelical clerics in Lincolnshire livings. And in the years after 1558 the Elizabethan bishops are shown with a new wealth of detail labouring in their dioceses to secure the foundations of the new religious settlement. Thomas Bentham of Lichfield and Coventry was given a miserable 348 words in the first edition. A new article, more than seven times longer, gives a detailed analysis of the problems he faced in his huge diocese, whether of personal poverty, Catholic recusancy, or lack of qualified ministers, and of the solutions he found to them in his nineteen-year episcopate. Later bishops like Herbert Westfaling of Hereford and Henry Robinson of Carlisle are likewise presented as conscientious and effective diocesans.

A far more extensive use of wills has had wide-ranging repercussions for our knowledge of early modern lives, not only by illuminating individual religious positions, but also by revealing friendships and connections among the spiritually like-minded. Thus the role of the clergyman Thomas Knewstub as ‘one of the dominant figures in the puritan movement in the Stour valley borderland of Suffolk and Essex’ is underlined by his bequests to other godly parsons The impact of the Reformation on society at large can also now be illustrated from several articles on early modern gentry families, ranging from the *Babthorpes of the East Riding of Yorkshire, ruined by their consistent recusancy, to the *Drurys of Suffolk, who having profited from their purchase of monastic estates showed themselves thereafter hostile to recusancy and puritanism alike. At a humbler level, articles on three Yorkshire nuns, Joan *Harkey, Elizabeth *Lorde and Elizabeth *Lutton, illustrate the varied fortunes of women religious in the years on either side of the dissolution of their houses, while group articles on the witches of *Essex, *North Berwick and *Pendle bring out some of the tensions, religious and otherwise, that could develop in village society in the generations that followed the Reformation.

Looking at early modern society in a more overtly secular perspective, the tendency to see its workings in the light of the operations of central government, characteristic of the first edition of the DNB, is now modified, as it is for the middle ages, by greater attention to local developments, at more than one level. Regional magnates as influential as Thomas and William *Dacre, immensely important figures in Cumberland for some eighty years, become subjects of articles for the first time. Others, already in the Dictionary, gain in depth through attention to the way they functioned, or malfunctioned, on their home territory, and to the consequences of this for their relations with the crown. Hence the attention now given to the local disputes of such mighty figures as Henry Percy, fifth earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Grey, second marquess of Dorset, apparently unknown a century ago, as well as to the efforts made later in the century by the courtier-magnate Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, to build and maintain a regional power-base. Local authority, in the midlands and Wales, accompanied and helped to sustain his position as a royal favourite.

The sixteenth century was for England and Wales the first great age both of heraldry and of an essentially secular local history, a development that owed much to the desire of landowners of all ranks to buttress their position by demonstrating the antiquity of their families. The work of heralds and antiquarians culminated in the Britannia of William Camden, a work of synthesis heavily dependent on the local investigations of numerous others, many of whom were linked to Camden through the *Society of Antiquaries. The latter is the subject of a group article which provides a further demonstration of the Oxford DNB's ability to connect London, this time as a centre of intellectual authority, with the rest of the country. Some of the members of the Society are well-known figures, for instance Richard Carew, author of the Survey of Cornwall, and as such one of many beneficiaries of the new edition's policy of analysing the literary productions of its subjects, instead of merely listing them—the Survey is discussed both for its content and for the light it sheds on its author, on his sociability, his wide-ranging curiosity, and his interest in language. Other members were essentially local figures, often living or working in far-flung parts of the country, while alongside these stood yet others who did valuable antiquarian research without having any connection with the Society. Among such men who are new to the ODNB are John *Denton, the first historian of Cumberland, William *Claxton, a Catholic who may have drawn on the recollections of old monks to compile the evocative treatise known as ‘The rites of Durham’, and Jaspar *Gryffyth, who played a key role in the recovery of the history of medieval Wales.

Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss how far the strains and conflicts of the seventeenth century were cause or effect of the period's growing social and economic complexity, whether this be measured in terms of political and constitutional discord, religious variances, intellectual and scientific advances, or even the expansion of literacy. All these factors, and many others, may be observed in articles in both editions of the DNB. That the new one deals with them more fully than its predecessor is doubtless in part due to the fact that a century's further research has accentuated the advantage, in terms of documentary survival, which the seventeenth century already enjoyed over its predecessor, and has done so in more places, not among the national archives alone. In the Oxford DNB that advantage is often an integral part of an article, thanks to the archival detail that may accompany it. Thus the new entry on Sir William Dugdale, who as well as playing a major role in the rediscovery of ‘the great institutions of the middle ages’ also wrote ‘the finest of seventeenth-century county histories’, advances upon its predecessor not only in terms of factual detail and interpretative nuance, but also by providing full information of its subject's documentary remains, extending to nine named repositories, only one of them in London.

But sources ultimately take their value from the questions historians ask of them, and here too the Oxford DNB is the beneficiary of developments during the century since the completion of the first edition. Administrative, social and economic history have become disciplines in their own right, before themselves ramifying, under the influence of fields of study and discourse like archaeology, psychology and feminism, into such areas as the history of women, of finance and industry, of crime, of transport, of leisure and of landscape. Many of these areas were in some sense represented in the old DNB, but by articles all too often shaped by the basically antiquarian and anecdotal outlook of those who wrote them, itself largely the result of a heavy dependence on literary sources. By contrast the new edition, drawing on new sources and new approaches alike, has encouraged a much greater attention to context, geographical as well as intellectual and professional.

All this is not to say that in its treatment of subjects from the seventeenth century and later the Oxford DNB has imposed a sharp break with previous centuries. On the contrary, it is possible to see how existing trends, both secular and religious, continued, but to do so in greater detail and with a wider geographical spread. In the early seventeenth century Katherine *Barnardiston, Lady Barnardiston, is shown to have ‘used her wealth and contacts to promote godly puritanism’, above all in Essex, just as Magdalen *Browne, Viscountess Montagu, protected Catholic priests in Sussex. Further afield, a number of the ministers who established and later maintained Reformed religion in the Channel Islands are included for the first time, men like Nicolas *Baudouin and Jean de la *Marche.

The well-known proliferation of sects in the 1640s and 1650s is more fully represented, not least through greater attention to the role of women in their development. North-west England was from the first receptive to Quakerism. New subjects include Dorothy *Waugh from Westmorland, who preached all over England and also in New England, and whose inflammatory sermons caused such alarm that the mayor of Carlisle had her head placed in a scold's bridle. Anne Camm from Kendal belonged to Waugh's generation but long outlived it, working to consolidate its achievements. Her article in the first edition has next to nothing to say of the last forty years of her life, but its replacement records her years of devoted labour in Westmorland, where ‘Like many Quaker women of the first generation, she settled down to the tasks of establishing women's meetings for administrative purposes’. Continuing research has shed light upon the lives of many dissenters, of all kinds; Bartholomew Ashwood, an Oxford-educated Independent who was ejected from the vicarage of Axminster in Devon in 1660, may stand for many such. The old DNB records the facts of his life and lists his writings, but it has been left to the new edition to show how he earned the reputation of ‘a godly minister and exemplary parent’ in Devon, and to illuminate his thought by discussing his posthumous writings, with their call for lay evangelization and claim that religious faith would beget material prosperity.

The established church has always been amply represented in the DNB, and new subjects are relatively scarce. But again old entries may be transformed by being seen in the different perspectives created by additional knowledge. Seth Bushell, a puritan who (unlike Ashwood) conformed after 1660, and held three consecutive Lancashire livings, is shown to have been remarkable as ‘a strong advocate of religious tolerance’ in the north west. William Binckes, dean of Lichfield, was noted in the first edition only for having preached a controversial sermon before convocation, but now also has justice done him for his concern for pastoral provision in Lichfield diocese. The scholarly interests of the clergy of the Church of England, whether classical, theological or antiquarian, are demonstrated in detail in both editions. But a more unusual concern has brought William *Sampson, rector of Clayworth in Nottinghamshire for thirty years from 1672, into the Oxford DNB—his ‘register’ of parish life has proved a priceless source for local developments of all kinds, including enclosures, religious practice, weather patterns, and population shifts. The data Sampson provides for the last have in turn stimulated more wide-ranging investigations, illustrating perfectly the way that extrapolations from parochial records can form the basis for a wider historiography.

The conventionally good and great of the medieval British Isles were comprehensively covered by the old DNB, and the same is also true for later periods, but as always with differences. Lady Anne Clifford, the last of a great Cumbrian dynasty, in 1887 received the sort of reverential treatment she would doubtless have expected, in an entry which nevertheless gave little or no space to several of the most significant aspects of her life. Not the least of these, as the new article shows, was her recording of her own family's long history, through the gathering of evidence on a scale that entitles her to be regarded not only as a fitting subject of history but also as literally a maker of it, as ‘a family historian of special note’. The value of her compilations is attested by the number of articles on her forebears that cite them in the Oxford DNB. No less significant, in biographical terms, is the space now given to her economic resources and to the way she way she both acquired and augmented them—ultimately through litigation and rack-renting. The first edition of the DNB was notably weak on economic issues, unsurprisingly, perhaps, since late-nineteenth-century historians were ill equipped to discuss them, even had they thought it proper to try, which they may well not have done. Anne Clifford was visibly wealthy, but though her use of her riches could be described, the way that she, and others like her, came by them, and the impact she had on lesser folk in both getting and spending, was very largely passed over. The result was an important imbalance in the way in which lives were presented, factually and interpretatively, one which the new edition has tried to remedy. Thus whereas the old article on Lady Anne's Cumbrian contemporary John Lowther, first earl of Lonsdale, is content to take it for granted that he had the means to rebuild his family home in north Westmorland, the new one outlines his estate policies, his accumulation of property, and the growth of his income, as well as describing his unsuccessful attempts to found a textile factory to give employment to the local poor.

Where finance and commerce are concerned, London inevitably takes a central place in the Oxford DNB, both institutionally and in its role as a magnet for talent. But not everyone who became rich in the English capital was born there, nor, if they moved there and prospered, did they always forget their places of origin. Sir Robert Geffery, a native of Cornwall who rose to be lord mayor of London and died there in 1704, nonetheless endowed a school and poor relief at Landrake in his will. The way others sank metropolitan wealth in provincial real estate can be illustrated from many articles, for instance that on the *Webster family, which describes how Sir Thomas Webster in the 1720s invested the gains of trade and marriage in property in East Sussex, after which successive generations of his descendants steadily—and sometimes tumultuously—frittered away their inheritance. At the other end of the social spectrum, London constituted an irresistible lure for criminals and adventurers, for men like the thief-taker Jonathan Wild, born in Wolverhampton, the rake and gambler Francis Charteris, who came from Edinburgh, and the highwayman James Maclaine, a native of Ireland. A generous understanding of the term ‘distinction’ meant that such people were well represented in the old DNB, and the new edition has added to them, not least by increasing its coverage of women, as well as transforming many articles by using judicial records to supplement the literary sources heavily relied upon by Victorian contributors—the new entry on the seventeenth-century Yorkshire highwayman John Nevison illustrates the gains, both factual and interpretative, that can result. The weighting of the sources means that London still predominates, but the ODNB now also includes men and women like Judith *Phillips, a late sixteenth-century confidence trickster described as roaming southern England in pursuit of prey, and the mid-eighteenth-century thief John *Poulter, a member of a gang that operated all over England—it went as far north as Newcastle, while Poulter himself was finally hanged at Ilchester.

It is a far cry from the world of people like Phillips and Poulter to that of the mid-seventeenth-century Herefordshire parson John Beale. Loosely defined as a ‘scientific writer’ in the first edition, Beale is now presented as a man whose promotion of apple trees for cider-making had a striking impact on the economy of his native county and neighbouring shires, where it ‘provided a crucial catalyst to the expansion of orchard cultivation well into the eighteenth century’. A man like Beale foreshadowed greater changes to come, as scientific and technological advances began to generate new occupations, in the process bringing new strains and possibilities alike to the existing social order. The old DNB responded wholeheartedly to the biographical challenge presented by these developments, but did so in ways which, perhaps inevitably, tend to appear deficient a century later. A good example is provided by the entry on Thomas Newcomen, the inventor around 1710 of the atmospheric steam engine. To his late-nineteenth-century biographer the invention was what mattered most about Newcomen, to the extent that the steam engine, rather than the man who made it, often looks like the principal subject of the article. Neither Newcomen's particular background of religious nonconformity and work as an ironmonger in Devon, nor the subsequent development of his invention, especially at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, and the way it was developed for commercial purposes as far away as Whitehaven, received more than passing attention.

Similar shortcomings can be seen in articles on other great inventors of the generations following Newcomen's, for instance on James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Richard Arkwright, Richard Trevithick and Samuel Crompton. Close attention is given to what they made, much less to what was made of their inventions, where, and how. Remedying this deficiency, both through the replacement or revision of existing articles, and by the addition of new subjects in the relevant fields, arguably constitutes one of the Oxford DNB's most significant contributions to local history. It also helps to make up further for the first edition's weaknesses where financial matters were concerned. Thus the career of Richard Arkwright is firmly grounded in his operations in Lancashire and Nottinghamshire, with close attention being now paid to the means whereby his spinning machinery was financed. The disputes which arose in the 1780s over his patents are explained by reference to the competition he faced from rival interests in Lancashire. Details of the profits of his business help to explain his social advancement, not least in terms of the alliances he formed, in the business community and beyond, and also the resentment this aroused in some quarters, notably in response to his great house, Willersley Castle on the Derwent. And through his proto-factories, which further illustrate the way a local development could become a national one, he had a wider impact, one ultimately extending from the midlands to the whole country. Arkwright's London house, Josiah Wedgwood's London showrooms, given one sentence in the first edition, are now shown to have been essential to his success, even though his operating base lay far away, at his factory at Etruria in Staffordshire (whose workings are described in some detail). And Wedgwood's career can also now be used to illustrate another development of the period, the emergence of an intellectual ethos favourable to the promotion of financial, commercial and industrial interests. Significantly, this is best illustrated not from London, or from Oxford or Cambridge, but from Birmingham. Though he may not have been a member, Wedgwood had close links with that town's famous Lunar Club (he was a good friend of Erasmus Darwin), one of whose abiding interests was the application of science to industry. In the late eighteenth century, at least, the provinces could be better equipped than the capital to advance this end.

The Victorian age and modern times

The effects of industrialisation were increasingly felt throughout British society. At the end of 1834 the son of a man who had made his fortune as a Lancashire calico printer became prime minister. The first Sir Robert Peel was treated by the old DNB primarily as the father of the statesman, but the Oxford DNB, characteristically, gives far more attention to his career in industry, and not least to its profits. In doing so it is being consistent in its treatment of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subjects, while illustrating both the diversification of trade and industry in the Victorian epoch and also their local impact. Sometimes this took an essentially economic shape, as with the terracotta works established by James Coster *Edwards in the 1860s in Denbighshire, which in exploiting the local red marls gave employment to nearly a thousand men and so helped revive the local economy. Others created jobs and also became local benefactors. The new article on the brewer Michael Bass of Burton on Trent shows with a wealth of statistical detail how its subject's personal qualities interlocked with the opportunities of the age, particularly those provided by the railways, to create what was ‘simply Britain's biggest brewery and best known firm’. It also sheds light on Bass's personality by describing the uses he made of his profits, which included giving Derby a library, an art gallery, a recreation ground and swimming baths, as well as spending money on his own house and sporting holidays. Such developments were not without their ironies. The *Hardman family flourished in Birmingham for over a century as makers of ecclesiastical furnishings, in which they made full use of up-to-date mechanical methods; they owed much of their success (which included providing the fittings for the Palace of Westminster) to the inspiration, and designs, of A.W.N. Pugin, who detested the industrial processes of his own time.

The developments whereby wealth was increasingly generated outside the metropolis were matched by no less important developments in regional banking. The new article on Daniel Gurney, in replacing one which treated him principally as an antiquary, does justice to the success of his family in establishing ‘the most important private bank in the provinces’, as well as drawing attention to his position within a flourishing network of Quaker banking families. Family articles on the *Cooksons of Newcastle and the *Stuckeys of Langport illustrate the emergence of banking interests in north-east and south-west England respectively, of a kind able to provide the financial resources, and stability, essential to industrial development. Such families visibly prospered. It is a particular value of the family article that it traces the fortunes of its members over several generations, showing how they changed, sometimes through adaptation, sometimes through outright failure. Thus the *Knights of Birmingham, ironmasters, prospered for over two centuries through a continuous readiness to adapt and modernise. On the other hand the *Walkers of Sheffield, also ironmasters, having flourished in the eighteenth century faded from the industrial scene in the nineteenth, providing ‘a classic example of a family of humble origins who rose rapidly in society through the ingenuity and hard work of the first generation and whose later members gradually withdrew from trade to live as landed gentry’. And the ship-owning family of *White of Sunderland failed altogether, the victim of ‘adverse economic conditions and an over-commitment to social and political activities’.

Those activities are a reminder of the problems that everywhere accompanied industrialisation. A group article on the *Rochdale Pioneers traces the early fortunes of one response to them, the co-operative movement, as it developed in Lancashire (a process continued in individual articles on John *Mitchell and James *Peddie). Others sought a solution through politics. The success of campaigns to widen the parliamentary franchise, themselves largely arising from the redistribution of wealth and population resulting from industrialisation, had a substantial impact on local as well as national politics, indeed, the two often went hand in hand. The new article on Joseph Chamberlain gives far more attention than its predecessor to his achievements in the modernisation of Birmingham, where his creation of ‘municipal socialism’ in turn provided the springboard for his career at Westminster. But such a career would have been impossible had Chamberlain been playing a lone hand; as it was, he enjoyed such success because likeminded people, for instance the scale manufacturer Thomas *Avery, who though Conservatively-inclined enjoyed Chamberlain's support in his own campaigns for civic betterment, and Rowland *Brownhill, who as the inventor of the coin-operated gas meter did as much as anybody to raise levels of domestic comfort in nineteenth-century England, were active in the same cause. The achievements of such men illustrate the richness of the Oxford DNB's coverage of nineteenth-century political life outside Westminster. So do the attempts increasingly made to give a role in its workings to women, who can be seen to have been as active as circumstances permitted all over England. Hence, for instance, the careers of Harriett McIlquham in Gloucestershire and Maud Burnett on Tyneside. Campaigners for women's suffrage, both were also involved in local government as soon this became possible, in the process displaying organising talents that were in every sense formidable—in later life Burnett ‘ruled the women's organisations of Tynemouth village with a rod of iron.’

The lives of the men and women who achieved ‘distinction’ in the Victorian age often began in poverty and obscurity; the new industries, and the professions that developed from them, provided the means for thousands of people to win fame and fortune who in earlier times could have expected to enjoy neither. As far as previous centuries were concerned, the first edition of the DNB recorded the lives of those relatively few people whose exceptional gifts enabled to rise to prominence from very humble backgrounds—Robert Grosseteste, the remarkable thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln, who ‘came from a very poor family in Suffolk’, is a good example—but otherwise normally only found space for peasants and townsfolk either when they intruded themselves upon the existing order as its enemies, as with the rebellious peasants of 1381 and the sectaries of the Civil War period, or as criminals, or when they attracted its attention for being in some way oddities. Centenarians like the seventeenth-century Yorkshire labourer Henry Jenkins, ‘the Modern Methuselah’, and the Shropshire husbandman Thomas Parr, paraded before Charles I's court in 1635, were duly noticed, as was Jedidiah Buxton, a Derbyshire farm labourer who was also an ‘untaught arithmetical genius’, and as such was in 1754 ‘introduced to the Royal Society, before whom he gave some illustrations of his calculating powers’. That the biography of a man like Buxton might be of historiographical interest in its own right does not, however, appear to have occurred to the editors of the Victorian Dictionary.

The development of history ‘from below’, informed as it was by the belief that lives that did not achieve ‘distinction’ were nevertheless worthy of investigation, was a largely twentieth-century phenomenon, stimulated by the growth of social and economic history, and by political and sociological change. Rather than being seen as the story of the deeds of the conventionally good and great, history increasingly involved the analysis of changes over time within the whole of society, which correspondingly needed to be understood in totality, from top to bottom socially, and with the widest possible geographical distribution. This broadening of the acceptable range of history has had immensely fruitful consequences for every aspect of local history, not least in its biographical dimension. The very fact that records survive for the life of a shopkeeper, an artisan or a labourer may justify its reconstruction, if only as a paradigm for the countless other men and women whose lives have passed beyond recall. The same consideration has enriched the Oxford DNB, by bringing within its purview subjects who would once have been regarded as unworthy of notice. A number of the resulting entries are based upon diaries and autobiographies. Some of them are works of high literary quality, like Flora Thompson's account of her childhood in north Oxfordshire, or the story of his own life by Benjamin *Shaw, a Yorkshireman who became a mill mechanic in Lancashire in the 1790s, which ‘provides a real insight into the life not only of Benjamin Shaw, but also of the English working class in that crucial period.’ Others are no less valuable for being either essentially documentary in character, like the memoirs of the midlands poacher James *Hawker, or composed for purposes of religious edification, like the vagrant Mary *Saxby's account of her wanderings in the south midlands and home counties in the second half of the eighteenth century, one giving ‘a unique perspective on the experience of the eighteenth-century poor.’

Although Saxby's life story was published in 1806, the criteria which determined notability at the end of the nineteenth century caused her to be passed over for inclusion in the first edition of the DNB. Similarly overlooked was the Lancashire shopkeeper Roger *Lowe—his diary, extracts from which were first published in 1877, was clearly not appreciated then, as it is now, as ‘a primary document in the history of social attitudes and popular Presbyterianism in seventeenth-century England.’ Other shopkeepers have now become known through their ledgers, for instance Thomas *Dickenson, a grocer in mid-eighteenth-century Worcester, and Abraham *Dent of Kirkby Stephen in Westmorland, whose account-books for the period 1756-1780 shed a wealth of light on the activities of a relatively small-scale tradesman in Georgian England. During the nineteenth century the written record of the humbler levels of provincial life was increasingly supplemented by a visual one, through the medium of photography. Several practitioners now have entries in the Oxford DNB, professionals like Francis *Sutcliffe, whose pictures of Whitby constitute ‘the most complete and revealing photographic record of a late Victorian town and the people who lived there’, and amateurs like William *Wickham, whose photographs from the early 1890s in Wigan, where he was a vicar, ‘convey graphically the cramped, dirty, and arduous conditions faced daily by the miners.’ And finally in the twentieth century the historical record of the socially excluded, or at any rate ignored, was extended again through the development of oral history. In its early stages this was essentially musical, hence the articles on men and women like Joseph *Taylor in Lincolnshire and Emma *Overd in Somerset, whose performances of folk-songs, as recorded by Percy Grainger and Cecil Sharp respectively, led to the preservation, just in time, of a fundamental element in England's traditional rural culture. The subsequent extension of oral history to people's spoken memories is commemorated in ODNB articles on such pioneering practitioners as George Ewart *Evans and Raphael *Samuel; it has also opened the way for a further widening of the biographical spectrum. There seems to be no reason why the story of the long and hard life of Mary *Hewins, a working woman of Stratford-upon-Avon, which was sensitively elicited and recorded from her own reminiscences, should remain unparalleled within the Oxford DNB.

Just as the life of Mary Hewins had its consolations, so throughout the Victorian age and afterwards men and women exploited technological advances in order to enjoy themselves, wherever they lived. Although the predominance of London was in many spheres maintained, the development of railways still made it easier for people to reach the capital, and also to leave it. Growing numbers of ODNB subjects are recorded as making their careers there but retiring elsewhere in later life. Indeed, the improvement of communications was such as to enable some people to add a national, or even international, dimension to their careers while seldom leaving home. Thus the Cornish ichthyologist Jonathan Couch ‘was in correspondence with many of the leading scientists of the day both in Britain and Europe’, while hardly ever leaving Polperro. Others came to Cornwall who would previously have found it inaccessible. The very existence of the *Newlyn school of artists at the beginning of the twentieth century was only possible because artists could now easily reach this west Cornish fishing village, drawn there for ‘companionship, a mild climate, and the opportunity to paint en plein air using local people as models’. Other forms of leisure occupation and entertainment are well represented in the Oxford DNB, again shedding light on the cultural richness of provincial life. From the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century members of the *Valentine family gave regular concerts of classical music in Leicester. Sarah *Baker at the end of the eighteenth century provides a good example of those theatre managers who built ‘permanent theatres in the major towns on their circuits’, in her case in Kent and Sussex. Her successors included James *Chute, who ‘substantially overhauled’ the theatres of Bath and Bristol in the early 1850s, and Thomas *Barrasford, who opened the Liverpool Hippodrome in 1903. Popular taste was catered for by music hall artists like Dan Leno, who like his later successors worked the northern halls before moving to London, and circuses like that of *Pablo Fanque, which ‘travelled throughout the country, especially in Lancashire and the north’, thereby providing a model for the circuses of William ‘Billy’ Smart in the twentieth century. The holiday camps which Sir William Butlin opened at Skegness and Clacton in the 1930s were promoted with the support of the London and North-East Railway. By then the advent of the internal combustion engine had created still further opportunities for leisure, as the success of the coach tour operator Evan *Evans demonstrates.

The easy linking of the regions of Britain which the railways began has been taken much further by the motor car. A number of articles in the Oxford DNB commemorate the civil engineers who created the nation's motorways, men like Sir Frederick *Cook, whose advocacy did much to make motorway building acceptable in the 1940s and 1950s, and Owen Tudor *Williams, whose firm was responsible for about a fifth of the first 1000 miles of British motorways, including ‘spaghetti junction’. However, not everyone welcomed an apparently unstoppable proliferation of traffic and roads, and the ODNB accordingly also gives space to those who opposed their spread, and tried to limit or reverse the damage they inflicted. Some are principally in the Dictionary for other reasons, like the Oxford philosopher John *Mabbott, who played an important part in resisting plans to extend the M40 across Otmoor, and the artist Patrick *Heron, who having retired to Cornwall was no less successful in fending off the Admiralty's attempts to turn the Zennor headland and moors into a military exercise area.

But others are included essentially for the part they have played in the protection, recovery or understanding of aspects of the national past, some or all of which may be covered by the broad umbrella of local history. Needless to say they varied widely in both personality and achievement. W.G. *Hoskins, who from the basis of his work on Leicestershire and Devon, in particular, became famous as a pioneering historian of the English landscape as a whole, was a man possessed of ‘some strong prejudices against trends in the modern world’. Yet Sir Nikolaus *Pevsner, who through his Buildings of England series did in detail for English architecture what Hoskins had done with a broader brush for the landscape, providing ‘a revelation even to those who knew and loved English towns and villages’, was an enthusiast for modernism. While James Lees-*Milne, who through the National Trust did much to preserve many of England's finest country houses, ‘defied the modern age’, Arthur *Raistrick became a pioneer industrial archaeologist, his appreciation of the landscapes of Yorkshire extending to the remains of the intrusive modernity that Hoskins and Lees-Milne detested. As well as Cecil Sharp, collector of folk songs and dances, and his collaborator the Oxfordshire morris dancer William Kimber (who trained a morris team of Oxford policemen), the Dictionary also includes Lawrence *Hills, whose concern with ‘the wholesale loss of traditional vegetable varieties’ helped to make him, first in Essex and then in Warwickshire, a leading advocate of organic farming. For people like Sophia *Morrison and Henry *Jenner, languages, too, merited conservation, and they laboured accordingly for the recovery of Manx and Cornish respectively.

Jenner, who did important work in the British Museum, and was an enthusiastic Jacobite, so much so that he was reportedly snubbed by Queen Victoria, in 1903 delivered to a Breton audience what was ‘probably the first set speech in Cornish for two centuries’. His personal idiosyncrasies serve to remind us that any survey of the riches of the ODNB, now as in the past, has to include the evidence it provides for the sheer variety of human capacity for self-expression, one that can manifest itself anywhere. The point can be made for Scotland with reference to Clementina Graham, who ‘often successfully mystified her acquaintance by presenting herself to them disguised as somebody else’, or for Wales through William *Price, ‘physician, self-styled archdruid, and advocate of cremation’, who ‘refused to treat smokers, insisted on the washing of coins, and refused to wear socks’ (the extraordinary photograph of Price in full druidical gear which accompanies his entry also illustrates the extra dimension which a policy of adding likenesses to articles has brought to the Oxford DNB). In England it is possible to refer to John Gott, bishop of Truro, whose absent-mindedness became such that he was commonly referred to as ‘Dr Forgot’ or even ‘Clean Forgot’, to the Cumberland biscuit manufacturer Jonathan Dodgson *Carr, whose delight at the repeal of the corn laws was such that he ‘presented every inmate in Carlisle gaol with a fruit loaf, and had a silk waistcoat made, decorated with ears of corn marked ‘FREE’, and to Ralph *Tollemache, a Lincolnshire clergyman notable for the ‘naming frenzy’ which led to his bestowing up to sixteen eccentric Christian names on each of his children—in 1908 his fifth son ‘ungratefully renounced by deed poll the names of Quintus Tollemache Tollemache Plantagenet.’ The local history of which such men and women form part is also one that attests the common humanity, as well as the common Britishness, uniting all the subjects in the Oxford DNB.

Envoi

Every person named in this article is the subject of an article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B.H. Harrison (Oxford, 2004). Those asterisked do not appear either in the Dictionary of National Biography, ed. L.Stephen and S.L. Lee, originally published 1885-1900, and reissued in a consolidated edition in 1908-9 (the text used here), or in the various supplements which appeared between 1912 and 1996, and the volume of Missing Persons published in 1993.

The Oxford DNB is published online as well as in print, and in either format is becoming increasingly widely available through public libraries - a very recent agreement reached between Oxford University Press and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council means that from no later than 1 April 2006 142 out of the 149 English public library authorities will be able to provide online access. A full list of the subscribing public libraries is available. Readers who consult the Dictionary in a central or branch library are also able to gain remote access, via a library card, to their home computer. Consequently, anyone interested in local history who wants to find out more about which Oxford DNB subjects were born, educated, lived or died in any area, can use the Dictionary's online edition to perform a series of place searches, at any level, whether of county, town, village or even street. Such searches can also be combined with searches by date, occupation, religion, and gender.

It is not only because we want members of the public to use and enjoy the Dictionary that we hope they will consult it. The text of the 2004 edition contains over sixty million words, and we admit without complacency that in a publication on such a scale errors and omissions are inevitable. We should therefore like to take this opportunity to invite readers of The Local Historian to make available to us any specialised knowledge they have that may help the staff of the Oxford DNB, which is a continuing project, to enhance the quality of its articles—we can be contacted either through the website www.oxforddnb.com or by telephone, 01865 556767. However small the detail, we would rather get it right than not. As Samuel Johnson observed, ‘There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man.’ Or, for that matter, for so great an undertaking as the Oxford DNB.

Henry Summerson, Oxford DNB