Connecting people: reference groups in the Oxford DNB

Who lurked in the ‘Cave of Adullam’? How did the ‘glamour boys’ get their name? What distinguished the Hanoverian ‘Wise’ and ‘Nonsense’ clubs? For answers you need look no further than the Themes area of the online Oxford DNB, where since October 2005 we have been publishing sets of essays on noteworthy groups, clubs, cliques, and gangs of people who came together to shape the British past.

Though our project is still relatively new, the dictionary's editors have long appreciated the importance of biographical groups, and their potential contribution to the Oxford DNB. As the dictionary's founding editor Colin Matthew wrote in 1993, ‘biographical research increasingly takes the form of books about groups of people’ (Oxford DNB, 2004, introduction, vii), a theme he developed in his Leslie Stephen lecture in 1995. Colin foresaw that, with the 55,000 lives in place, there would be a need for a set of ancillary essays on established historical groups that enables readers to navigate their way between the dictionary's individual memoirs. The new ‘reference group’ articles published in online updates since 2005 are the manifestation of Colin's wish to see the dictionary complemented, and enhanced, by essays tracing prominent networks in which people included in the Oxford DNB took part.

The aim of these new essays is twofold. First, to offer concise and accessible accounts of groups with which readers may be familiar by name but of which they have relatively little detailed knowledge. Group essays aim to provide start and end dates for a particular association, or for an especially significant period within its life, information on its full membership, intentions, and influence in the period under consideration, and its historical legacy. As befits a biographical dictionary, their focus, where possible, is on the men and women who made up a group—their relations and contributions to an enterprise or organization—rather than on providing an institutional history. A second aim is to chart recorded connections between individuals whose historical significance sometimes derived from their participation in shared activities. Making such connections is, of course, particularly easy in an online publication that allows quick reciprocal links between a group essay and the biographies of its members.

Three instalments of group essays have been published so far, the latest in October 2006. This brings to eighty the number of group essays covering different periods and themes in British history. As with the writing of the main dictionary, the work of commissioning and editing the new groups is done by the Oxford DNB's in-house academic editors and is overseen and reviewed by external experts who recommend specialist authors and groups for inclusion in such fields as politics, literature, science, religious life, art and design, the history of ideas, engineering, medicine, and the armed services. We will continue to publish selections of group essays in our May and October updates over the next couple of years. The end result will be a final selection of some 350 articles that will go some way to providing an original history of British associational life.

In line with the main biographical dictionary, the group articles will seek to reflect the range of activities and ideas that brought people together, typically in networks whose participants were known to one another—hence our focus on clubs, societies, and circles recognized in their own time, rather than on such more diffuse and often retrospective associations as ‘engineers of the industrial revolution’ or ‘thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment’. Chronologically the current selection of groups spans 1400 years: from the sixth-century Gregorian missionaries who sought to convert the English to Christianity, to the Conservative Suez group that came together to defend the British presence in the Middle East in the mid-1950s. In keeping with the dictionary's interest in Britons worldwide, the current list also offers examples of networks overseas, including the Randlords and Milner's Kindergarten in South Africa; the Canterbury Association, which proposed a Church of England settlement in New Zealand; and in British America the Pilgrim Fathers and the trustees who founded the colony of Georgia.

Naturally our current list includes some well-known examples of shared enterprise—alongside the Pilgrim Fathers you'll already find the barons who were the enforcers of Magna Carta, the Restoration Cabal, Dr Johnson's Literary Club, the Clapham Sect, and the Holland House set, with other famous associations, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Bloomsbury, to be added in future updates. At the same time the project is also bringing to light many less familiar but equally influential associations. To its many critics the shadowy coterie of advisers dubbed the ‘King's friends’ threatened political liberties by the nature of its advice to the young George III. A century later those who sought to find John Franklin, the polar explorer who disappeared while attempting to locate the north-west passage, looked to the nine members of the Arctic council who co-ordinated the unsuccessful search.

Groups like these demonstrate the many ways in which networks were formed and gained historical meaning. The King's friends, for example, were in part an invention of their political opponents, with the group gaining greater coherence and resonance as a result of these public criticisms. From other periods one might include the Hotel Cecil—members of Lord Salisbury's ministry of 1900—who were defined and pejoratively labelled by political opponents who criticized the administration's apparent nepotism. Likewise the Arctic council, which never actually met, owes its origin and legacy to a group portrait that depicts its members gathered to co-ordinate the search for Franklin. Another example of this kind of group—externally defined in a creative work—are the Guilty men, the band of 1930s appeasers brought together as dramatis personae in a polemical book of the same name.

Although groups like the Guilty men did not involve ‘active’ members, their historical significance in primary and secondary literature clearly makes them legitimate subjects for a survey of British associational life. More typical are networks composed of a conscious and willing membership whose motivations for assembly are inevitably wide-ranging. Some, like the Rye House plotters of 1683, came together to take part in a relatively short-lived collective action. Others, including the Langham Place group, were motivated by a common aspiration, in its case the advancement of women's rights, while the later Rainbow Circle thrived as a long-running discussion network. A further category includes individuals bonded by particular projects, be they the fifteenth-century composers of the Eton choirbook or the atomic scientists engaged in the Tube Alloys directorate during the Second World War. And finally there are networks, like the eighteenth-century Kit-Cats or the Monks of Medmenham, that gathered together primarily to enjoy themselves in company. Not surprisingly, drink was prominent in both of these assemblies, as it was at gatherings of the literary Inklings, who met from the 1930s at Oxford's Eagle and Child pub, and of the early seventeenth-century writers, centred on Ben Jonson, whose collective identity derived from regular patronage of London's Mermaid tavern. This focus on places and spaces in group formation is another theme emerging from our project. In addition to drinking haunts, therefore, our current selection includes the Castalian band, shaped by its attachment to the Jacobean court, while future updates will feature assemblies defined by association with a particular building, village, or in the case of the Bounty mutineers, a ship.

Last, and certainly not least, the Oxford DNB's growing selection of group essays offers readers an opportunity to browse, discover, and enjoy some of the richness and peculiarity of British associational life in a single publication. To the existing assembly of ‘bands’, ‘congresses’, ‘friends’, ‘girls’, ‘leagues’, ‘rings’, ‘trusts’, ‘unions’, and ‘workshops’, therefore, look out in future updates for—among many others—gatherings of Associated Prigs, Fishponds, Monks of the Screw, Steamboat Ladies, Sunday Tramps, and Tots and Quots.

Subscribers can get access to the full list of group essays from the themes area of the online edition of the Oxford DNB. Our next set of reference groups will be published in the May 2007 update.

Lawrence Goldman, editor

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