Leslie Stephen and the New DNB, pt 2

The full text of the Leslie Stephen Lecture for 1995 is made available here by kind permission of the publisher, Cambridge University Press.

This brief summary of some aspects of the Old DNB shows that it had strength, variety, strong individuality, and provided coverage of occupations such as acting, journalism, pugilists, and jockeys half a century or more before they became the focus of academic study. Indeed, it is important to remember that when Stephen started out in 1882, universities still largely studied the classics and mathematics; there were a few young history departments, but only University College London taught undergraduates English Literature, and there was no printed catalogue of the British Museum, even in the British Museum.

Stephen's dictionary was consequently written mainly in-house by generalists. The number of articles which could be farmed out to a specialist was small; S. R. Gardiner was one such, writing 25 articles. Certain categories of subject went en bloc to out-of-house authorities, such as Alexander Gordon, who wrote 699 memoirs, almost all on Unitarians, and the aforementioned John Laughton; C. H. Firth wrote 228 articles from his house in Oxford and T. F. Tout 237 from Lampeter and later Manchester. Firth and Tout, both pupils of William Stubbs, cut their research teeth on the DNB and became recognised authorities through their work for it. But for the most part an in-house team worked through the alphabet writing the articles as they came up.

Apart from Stephen himself, there were few specialists writing in the DNB office in 14 Waterloo Place, next to Smith, Elder's premises and connected to them by a speaking tube. Most of those working in-house were journeymen 'men of letters' such as the two millenarians, Gordon Goodwin, who wrote 1164 articles, and Thompson Cooper, who wrote 1423. Cooper brought considerable experience to the DNB, having compiled The Register, and magazine of biography (1869), A new biographical dictionary (1873), and Men of Mark (1876-83). The Old DNB exemplified the 'man-of-letters' tradition and it rewarded its practitioners with fulsome coverage of their predecessors. Fifty-seven male contributors wrote at least a hundred articles each in the first A-Z series (Gillian Fenwick, The contributors' index to the Dictionary of National Biography (1989)); they usually worked in the mornings in the British Museum and in the afternoons in the office. Under Stephen's guidance several of these, including Lee in English literature, became authorities through their DNB researches. The dictionary's role as a fountain of research-training has not been recognised; in addition to Firth and Tout, it is best seen in Lee himself and in A. F. Pollard, who went on from the dictionary later to found the Institute of Historical Research.

The sort of academic community which today we take for granted was in the 1880s only just coming into existence, and the DNB played some part in that process, indeed it coincided with the start of large-scale undergradate studies in the modern arts disciplines. Today's scholarly community constitutes a major change from the Old to the New DNB, both in expectation, capacity and expertise, and it necessarily predicates a different way of getting the dictionary written, for on each existing or possible subject, there is likely to be someone, somewhere, who has already worked on her or him.

When I entered the monkish cell which OUP provided me with as my interim office on 1 September 1992 I found a computer with the names of all those in the Concise DNB entered with their coded occupations. This appropriately set the tone of the future. In one sense, I started literally from scratch, to the extent of supplying my own copy of the Dictionary, as the Press was temporarily out of stock.

I took a number of early decisions of importance (subsequently confirmed by the Supervisory Committee). The first was that all subjects in the Old DNB should be retained in the new, and the second was that the text of the Old offered a partial base for the text of the New. That is, I should not do, as the Germans in the 1950s did with their dictionary: set it aside and start again. This was an important decision, but not a difficult one to take. Its rightness in the DNB's case has been confirmed by the replies to the 15,000 questionnaires which have been sent out since November 1992. Almost everyone wanted the New DNB to be an organic development from Stephen and Lee's work and not a replacement of it. The view of George Smith, as expressed by Lee, that the DNB should be seen as 'a living organism', was, in general, the view of its present-day users; and it was certainly my own.

The case for complete inclusion of existing subjects was partly prudential: one DNB is large enough to have on the shelves; no library is likely to want to have both side by side on open shelves, as is the case with the two German editions. Those left out would be minor figures, with little space gained. But complete inclusion was also the consequence of my organic view of scholarship. That some persons had been thought suitable for inclusion one hundred years ago was a fact not lightly to be set aside. Even the fact that some were now known never to have existed did not in itself diminish their significance and interest or the usefulness of an up-to-date article explaining their metamorphosis from reality into the piquant purgatory of historical error. There is no finality of scholarship, and scholarly interests tend to move in cycles. A good example is that of the clergy: if a completely fresh start and a new list of possible subjects had been made in the 1960s, it is likely that many of the clergy in the Old DNB would have lost their places; in the mid-1990s, however, there is a boom in religious history, to which the social history of the clergy is central. I have always been puzzled by the self-confidence with which some of my contemporaries ridicule the research methods and standards of their predecessors, while assuming that their own are inviolable. Thus my view was that we in our age should add to the corpus of selection; we were unlikely to be any more successful in making a definitive selection than Stephen and Lee had been. Nor should we expect to be. But the two epochs in collaboration might produce something more useful for the future than either epoch on its own.

Organic development also implied using at least some of the existing text. All entries are being assessed for revision or rewriting. I felt that many of the shorter memoirs-and there are about 25,000 articles of 950 words or less-needed only a little revision (indeed, there are many Victorians about whom less is now known than when the article was originally written). This was confirmed by my group of expert readers who, interestingly and without guidance, came up early in 1993 with much the same ratio of revision to rewriting in each case for all centuries except those before 1500 (untested since I was sure that most pre-1500 articles would have to be rewritten). Of course, there is an element of hybridity here, but that necessarily follows from the commonly held view that the Old DNB has much worth retaining but also needs attention. Contributors are instructed that if the revision significantly alters the character of the article, they should inform the Editor. Longer articles will be rewritten, and so will many shorter; for example, it has indeed proved to be the case that almost all pre-1500 articles need rewriting. But the articles which are replaced by a new piece of writing will not, I hope, be lost, for in the electronic version they can be included, to be summoned up when comparison is needed. The reader should thus be able to read Freeman on Alfred the Great on a split screen together with his modern replacement (it is a sound and strictly maintained policy that we do not reveal until publication who has been commissioned for which article).

This process of assessing each of the present articles also allows for harmony of length. Length had from the start been important, though there is some suggestion that contributors wrote what they thought was appropriate within general admonitions to be as brief as possible, rather than to a given word-limit. Length has also proved tricky in the Supplements, for after 1911 these were written within a single volume format, long articles counting directly against inclusion of short ones. Moreover, the brief half-column to which absence of information condemns many in the pre-1900 articles tends to extend to about a column and a half in Supplement articles, whose subjects are almost all well-documented. Thus articles in the Supplements, not surprisingly, show a relative tendency towards the average length, which for the Old DNB as a whole is 874 words (excluding sources).

Stephen's view on length was trenchantly if exaggeratedly expressed: it was the short articles that were important: 'Nobody need look at Addison or Byron or Milton in a dictionary. He can find fuller and better notices in any library'. But Stephen ignored his own advice, and his own articles are mostly on first division characters. The articles on Addison, Byron and Milton are in fact all from his pen, Milton coming in at 14,500 words and that on Addison being used as a model article which was circulated to contributors. Lee was even more aberrant; pathologically anxious about the dictionary becoming over-long, he nonetheless commissioned longer and longer articles as he went down the alphabet. The shortest article reads thus:

Andrew Grant, M.D. (fl. 1809), physician, wrote a 'History of Brazil,' London, 1809, of which a French translation, with additions, appeared at St. Petersburg in 1811.

The longest article, by Sidney Lee, begins: 'Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India (1819­1901) was grand-daughter of George III ...' and continues for a further 93,764 words. There was a reason for this: the articles on Victoria, Gladstone and Shakespeare were also published as books, to claw back some of George Smith's losses. Even so, Lee's elision of book and DNB article was a solecism against two very different styles.

A DNB article is a biographical memoir with a distinctive grammar and format. It is not a biography, and in many cases makes full-scale biography redundant. There is no doubt that Stephen's original judgement on long articles was correct. It is silly to crowd out minor subjects by lavish articles on major figures who have their own publishing industries attached to them. Nonetheless, there is a natural fascination with these major figures in the DNB, and in a dictionary of national biography it is important that those who set the tone of their own times should be adequately assessed. Adequate assessment of a major figure must take account of his or her historiographical position and to that end contributors to the New DNB are encouraged, after the usual paragraph on death and burial, to give an account of the subject's changing reputation and a brief note on the historiography. Articles thus far received suggest that contributors have found this a valuable and sometimes a salutary undertaking.

In the New DNB there will be no book-length articles; we are regarding 15,000 words as the most that can be recommended without a special case being made, though there will certainly be some that require more than 20,000. The Old DNB's 1,300 words for Jane Austen, 3,325 for J.M. Keynes and 7,300 for Bertrand Russell as against 50,804 for Edward VII and 93,785 for Queen Victoria, suggests a reappraisal will be beneficial.

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To the 36,000 present articles will be added about 14,000 more, making 50,000 subjects in a text of about 50 million words. But before saying something about the sorts of new subjects that will be included, I would like to discuss a little further Stephen's conception of a DNB memoir. Like his brother, James Fitzjames Stephen, Leslie Stephen was a strong individualist, a secularized version of the evangelical atomism of his father, Sir James Stephen, whose Essays in ecclesiastical biography (1849) points the way to aspects of the DNB. Leslie was one of those liberals who turned against the liberal party in the 1880s for showing dangerous signs of incipient socialism. Quite why such people thought the Unionists would be less étatist than Gladstone's liberal party is a subject for another day. But Stephen felt politically and perhaps socially beleaguered by the mid-1880s-a position which beneficially aided the political scepticism of the DNB. His extreme individualism manifested itself in a dictionary consisting almost entirely of individual lives (there are seven family entries on the medieval gentry); and it has been extremely influential, in that almost all English language dictionaries of national biography follow his format. But there is no reason why such a dictionary should treat people so discretely, especially when much of its content is in fact devoted to explaining an individual's participation in political, social, ideological, cultural, business groups and movements-and indeed pre-Stephen biographical dictionaries were much less individualistic.

While most subjects in the New DNB will be treated individually, some will be treated in group entries on, for example, landed families, family firms, the officials of the Roman Empire in Britain, the kings of Dalriada, etc. In the electronic version, names will be searched at the click of a button, and in the printed edition, cross-referencing will be provided. In addition, there will be short entries of an index sort on groups and families, for, notoriously, the only present guide to the DNB 's contents is the list of names by surnames, with a certain amount of cross-referencing from titles. If a reader wants to find out which Tolpuddle Martyrs or which Fifth Monarchy men or which of the Langham Place group are in the New DNB, or who and what the Noetics were, their collective entries will lead you to them. The only problem with this innovation is that it will be at once complained that it is not extensive enough.

It is intended that a further innovation will be the inclusion of about 10,000 portraits - the largest collection of national portraiture ever published - to be selected in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery. The New DNB will be the first of the major dictionaries to have such illustrations. Reading the old, one can see how near Stephen and Lee were to this, including physical details where known and giving the location of portraits, busts, statues, etc. Research for these will be supervised by Dr. Peter Funnell of the National Portrait Gallery, our Consultant Editor for likenesses.

It was another early and in most respects obvious decision that the function of the in-house team should be editorial and co-ordinatory as well as authorial. That is, the New DNB should not, as at least one DNB still is, be written largely in-house, but should tap the vast area of scholarly expertise which exists for the British past. That does not mean that the New DNB is being written by academics for academics, though many are involved and many will use it. Biographical interest and knowledge is to be found not only in universities, but also among the 'people-of-letters' tradition which maintains itself on a large scale in the English-speaking world, among our many local record offices and local history societies, among the various societies for the study of particular interests and institutions, and among many people who are knowledgeable about some person in whom, for whatever reason, they have become interested. The job of the in-house editors is to tap this expertise, to encourage suggestions for inclusion and offers to contribute, to edit the articles once commissioned and written, and to contribute to that process of suggesting, assessing and writing. It is of great importance that the growth of scholarly expertise should not lead to a dictionary comprehensible only by the scholar. Articles must have a scholarly base, but should also be readable and, when possible, entertaining. They should also locate the subject within the more general context of the popular national memory.

The general memory of the British past is markedly different from that of the professional historians, and is more nurtured by novels, plays, films, and television, than by monographs. Sometimes, as with Robin Hood, the two come together. But more usually they do not. Our best-known medieval figures, in England, are probably Arthur, Alfred, Robin Hood, and Dick Whittington; Arthur and his legend is as potent in the nineteenth and even in the twentieth century as it was in the fifteenth. It is important that New DNB's articles relate their subjects to their popular reputations and how they came to have them. This comes naturally to contributors when discussing certain sorts of subjects, for example saints. But the point is much more widely taken than that. For example, the article on Sir John Fastolf concludes with his metamorphosis into Shakespeare's Falstaff, and ends with a mention of Orson Welles's portrayal of him in Chimes at Midnight. Jack the Ripper has a larger bibliography than almost any nineteenth figure; his article is an interesting reminder that the problem of identity in a major figure is not confined to the medieval period.

Stephen's selection of subjects was done by him and his in-house team. Each month the Athenæum carried a list of proposed names and its readers suggested more and demoted some, and I have attempted the same exercise on a much larger scale and by several routes. First, extra names have been asked for via a questionnaire (available from New DNB, Freepost, OUP, Oxford, OX2 6BR). We are still looking for contributors and for suggestions for new subjects on all periods of the British past, and will continue to consider new subjects for inclusion even after the chief work on their area has been finished. Second, the expertise of the world-wide scholarly community has been tapped by dividing the New DNB into twelve Consultant Editorships. These are partly chronological, with one for each century since 1500, and partly thematic, with one for each of science, medicine, literature to 1779 and since 1780, art and architecture, business and the world of labour. The twentieth century will include those dying up to 31 December 2000 (there being no supplement planned for 1991-2000). Consultant Editors subdivide their areas into Associate Editorships. Associate Editors are chosen for their authority over their area of expertise, their networking, their common sense, and their expeditiousness. The Associate Editors assess each existing article for revision or rewriting, nominate contributors, recommend new subjects and their contributors, and read and approve the finished articles. The Consultants monitor progress and quality in their areas, and read and approve certain of the articles.

The Consultant and Associate Editors are supported and co-ordinated in assessing articles and commissioning contributors by in-house Research Editors, who are authoritative on the area for which they have been recruited and who also contribute some articles. Research Editors are also Associate Editors for their own speciality. They are immediately responsible to the Research Director, Dr. Elizabeth Baigent. Once an article has been worked up by the Research Editor and approved by the Associate and in appropriate cases the Consultant Editor, it is given final editorial approval by myself or Dr. Baigent. This is marked by a green tick and initials on the article - the only instance where the colour green is used - and a post card to the contributor. At present, we approve over 500 articles a month, or 1500 articles a quarter: the Old DNB average was about 460 a quarter.

In-house work is done in 37A St. Giles, Oxford, an elegant eighteenth-century building owned by OUP and previously the home of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Photographs of Stephen and Lee greet the visitor in the hall. The inside of the building probably differs little in essentials from 14 Waterloo Place, except for the changes caused by computers and the absence of tobacco. Waterloo Place had, C. H. Firth recalled, 'several large tables, many inkpots, piles of proofs and manuscript on chairs and tables, a little pyramid of Stephen's pipes at one end of the chimney piece, a little pyramid of Lee's pipes at the other end'; there was 'a fine assortment of reference books, sets of the Gentleman's Magazine and of Notes and Queries, Wood, Le Neuve, and other biographical collections'. New DNB has at St. Giles an excellent biographical and bibliographical reference library (put together by loans and purchases), telephone and computer access to the Bodleian, and on-line access to the world's bibliographical databases; but we have not yet managed to acquire Notes and Queries.

The various Editors - in-house and around the world - together build up the DNB organically, and with respect to their own area of interest. They do not try to compare for inclusion a twentieth-century scientist as against the claims of an Anglo-Saxon saint. It is Garry Runciman's principle of relative deprivation applied to DNB selection: we can each tell whether on our own territory A should be preferred to B and tenacious battles are fought for an extra 150 words for C, but we are indifferent to whether X or Y in a different century is in or out, or whether he or she has 500 or 5000 words.

But this system of devolved responsibility can only work within a more general pattern, whose construction is my responsibility. Each Consultant Editor is given a quota of new subjects, the result of a strategic mapping of the New DNB which was the last of my initial decisions, made after considerable study of the occupational profile of subjects in the Old DNB. The Consultant breaks down that quota into smaller numbers of new subjects for each Associate Editor. Both Consultant and Associate can appeal for more new subjects, and a reserve is held to meet this need. The Associate Editors are given criteria which should-when appropriate-apply to their selection-as well as the inclusion of subjects who have simply been accidentally omitted (and there is no shortage of the latter). These, it should be noted, are only guide lines for new subjects beyond those who occur to the Associate Editor as obviously missing. They are not exclusive.

I especially encourage suggestions for more female subjects, for people in business and the world of labour (where we are almost doubling the number of memoirs), for non-metropolitan figures of note (including rather more representation of post-1921 Ireland). People who were born abroad but spent a significant part of their lives in Britain are fairly well covered already, but more are sought. A small but interesting category, largely but not wholly new, is that of foreign observers of Britain, whose visits may have been short but whose observations have been influential: for example Mosei Ostrogorski, Elie Halévy, Jean Louis de Lolme. Britons who lived in Europe and and played a significant role in their new country are neglected in the Old DNB as compared to their imperial counterparts; John Hughes, the founder of the colliery city of Hughesovka in Russia, is a good example. Pre-1776 'Americans' will be included according to Stephen's original but unfulfilled intention. We also seek suggestions for twentieth-century subjects generally.

This system of devolved but guided recommendation is on the whole working very well. We have already over one hundred and fifty Associate Editors and about 20,000 articles under their charge. Hardly anyone has declined to help. This structure is related to another important decision. As will have become apparent, we are not starting at A and working through to Z, but starting on certain periods and areas of occupation: the New DNB is being made by a series of mini-projects within the main project. We are making, in effect, a medieval DNB, a science DNB, and so on. To have worked alphabetically would have meant assembling and keeping in existence Associate Editors and researchers to cover the whole of the British past simultaneously. A person's place in the alphabet is wholly accidental, irrelevant to his or her historical position. Much better to work as a scholar would and focus expertise and interest. Consequently we will not be publishing serially.

We began in 1993 by working on three Consultant Editorship areas: the general nineteenth-century, much the largest of all the areas, with myself as Consultant; business and the world of labour, which spans 1500 to the present, with Martin Daunton as Consultant; and all pre-1500 articles, with Barbara Harvey as Consultant; these three areas were chosen so that the range of difficulties we were like to encounter would be exposed as early as possible. In 1994 science and medicine began with Pietro Corsi and Margaret Pelling as their respective Consultants. In 1996 literature since 1780 will start, with John Sutherland as Consultant. In 1997, a second phase begins, with the start of work on three areas: art and architecture under Christopher Lloyd and the general eighteenth and twentieth centuries under Paul Langford and myself respectively. In 1998 the final three areas will start: the general sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under Felicity Heal and John Morrill respectively, and literature 1500-1779 with Ian Donaldson as its Consultant. We intend to finish the research and writing phase, if the contributors will permit us, in 2002 and we hope to publish in 2004.

Our ability to distribute articles to Associate Editors quickly, to monitor numbers and to commission contributors easily depends heavily on our computer. Part of Stephen's nightmare of his DNB was the paperwork. The New DNB has been fully computerized from the start, a necessary and sensible decision, however much it has needed the re-tooling of a middle-aged editor. All our records and copyedited text are stored on an integrated computing system, which enables us to move instantaneously from information about contributors to details about DNB subjects and the text of their articles. This part of the edition is supervised by Mr. Robert Faber, the Project Manager, working with Rosemary Roberts, our Copy-Chief. The basic edition is therefore an electronic edition. We began by 'capturing' the text of the Old DNB. This was done with quite exceptional accuracy in Pondicherry, India, by Alliance Photosetting Company. The first published spin-off of the New DNB 's work is the publication by OUP of a CD-ROM of the whole of the Old DNB, in itself a spectacular scholarly advance, and the first dictionary of its type to be electronically published. The time taken by the Delegates before committing the Press to a New DNB turned out to be well-judged. To have started earlier would have almost certainly meant starting before a fully-integrated computer system was possible; other similar large projects have found such a half-way house to be frustrating and wasteful.

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