Literature 1500-1779

Literature between 1500 and 1780 was in no danger of neglect from the DNB's first two editors. Leslie Stephen, the first editor, was an enthusiastic expert on eighteenth-century thought. 'I would never abuse the century which loved common sense and freedom of speech, and hated humbug and mystery,' he wrote, 'the century in which first sprang to life most of the social and intellectual movements which are still the best hope of our own'. As for the DNB 's second editor, Sidney Lee, he was a notable scholar of Elizabethan literature, and wrote the DNB's article on Shakespeare. The two editors shared out the literary plums between them, Stephen taking over from Lee after the late seventeenth century.

In the new dictionary, this area has benefited greatly throughout its history from having Professor Ian Donaldson as Consultant Editor, and Dr Eleri Larkum as Research Editor. Dr Larkum came to us from Exeter College, Oxford, and her doctoral thesis is on Walter Ralegh's History of the World (1614). She has taught in English literature 1500-1740 for several years, and will alas be leaving at the end of June for a children's reference publishing post in London. She has been with us since 1998, and we will greatly miss her quiet efficiency and scholarly approach to this entire area. She has also received much help from one of our most versatile research editors, Dr Michael Bevan, about whom you will be hearing more when I compile a website message on our medical subjects.

Dr Larkum and Professor Donaldson have presided over two major contrasts between the old dictionary and the new: in the selection of subjects and in their treatment. I take selection first. Whereas the DNB included 1562 people in this area, we now have 1933. The DNB emerged from the London world of the 'man of letters', and its literary flavour was prominent from the start. In choosing its subjects, the DNB 's first two editors--Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee--were much influenced by the catalogue of what is now the British Library. After the catalogue had been systematically searched, their procedure was simply to ensure that a life was supplied for each name that appeared. We hope that the Oxford DNB too is 'literary', both in the sense of readable and in the sense of thoroughly covering people of literary importance. But it depends much less heavily than its predecessor on a catalogue of published works. We have included all the DNB's subjects, of course, but our editors have shown much more initiative in hunting out new subjects.

By no means all authors before 1780 chose to publish in print. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries manuscript writers (invisible, as such, in the British Library catalogue) were important: much writing was directed only at an élite, and its authors shunned the vulgarity of publishing primarily for sale. Take the brother and sister Herbert Aston and Constance Fowler, both new biographical subjects, as examples: he compiled a collection of popular poetry and his own compositions, and she preserved poetry written largely to and by her circle of predominantly Roman Catholic family and friends. Also among the manuscript authors are diarists and correspondents--which brings me to a second growth-area: women, whose traditional role included holding family and friends together through assiduous correspondence, and who often also had leisure enough to compile valuable diaries and commonplace books.

There were 97 women in the DNB, to whom we've now added 128. Given that we've added only 243 new male subjects, a third of our new subjects in the area are women, and they have been drawn from all periods between 1500 and 1780. We were greatly helped in this by working with the early women's writing project 'Perdita', at Nottingham Trent University, and with individual scholars active on that project, as well as by working with SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing). One other way of boosting the number of women in the area was to extend our definition of 'literary activity'--especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--to include translators, patrons, diarists, and the families of cultivated women. The Seymour sisters provide one example: daughters of Edward Seymour, Lord Protector during Edward VI's minority, they composed a collection of Latin poems for the tomb of Marguerite de Valois. Not only do we have more women in the Oxford DNB , the more distinguished among them have longer articles than before: Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Herbert, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Haywood, Elizabeth Carter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Mary Wroth, Hester Chapone, and Sarah Fielding

Nor are these the only growth-areas. We have many more booksellers, where there has been much major scholarly activity in recent years, not least from Dr Ian Gadd, who we were lucky enough to have with us as Associate Editor for booksellers, and then as Research Editor for a year. The Oxford DNB also has more of the sentimental and popular novelists, and more of the humbler writers about whom the late Victorians knew little. Our articles now include the filecutter and songwriter Joseph Mather, for example, and Agnes Wheeler, the Lancashire housekeeper who wrote a pioneering work on Westmorland dialect.

But there are contrasts, too, in the way the Oxford DNB writes about its subjects. DNB articles on lesser-known figures often took the form of a brief life of the subject followed by a list of the subject's works. While this approach was useful enough at the time, it is much less so now that the ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) lists publication details for all known editions of works in the early period, not to mention the wealth of other information now so readily available online. The DNB 's lists of publications in its articles on literary subjects made them much duller than they now need to be. All too often with the shorter articles, articles began with the confession that the subject was 'of obscure origin' or was 'known only as the author of ...'. Now that we have ready access to parish records of baptisms and marriages, wills, probate registers, civil population records and some census material, we can very often--albeit only with skilled and patient searching--supply a life to complement the works. Sometimes, though, even the most assiduous searcher in such local and national records draws a blank; yet even where nothing else can be discovered, the Oxford DNB at least livens up the life with brief discussions of the works published, spiced with the occasional quotation. With the longer articles it is also now thought both possible and desirable to provide the fullest national and international cultural context. So Peter Holland's article on Shakespeare concludes with a reference to Hamlet cigars and our article on Henry Fielding ends with a bemused Fielding lauded by Marxists of the eastern bloc as an advocate of social reforms, and hailed as the People's Republic of China's favourite eighteenth-century English novelist.

Dr Larkum directs me to two articles on unusual new subjects by way of conclusion. Although the DNB was good on Dr Johnson's friendships, it omitted his servant Francis Barber. Born a slave in Jamaica, he was brought to England, freed, and served Johnson from 1752 until Johnson's death in 1784. He was Johnson's principal legatee, but Barber's extravagance caused him to sink into poverty, and he died in 1801. I end with Dr Larkum's favourite amongst the new 'unknowns to history': the Feathery Scribe (fl. c. 1625-1640). An anonymous copyist, he was so called because of the wispy style of his script. 'By contributing so prominently to the dissention of ms literature', the article concludes, '... in a period when there was such vigorous discussion of new ideas among legal and parliamentary circles ... the Feathery Scribe and his associates helped to fuel the far-reaching intellectual debates leading to the civil war itself. They thus proved to be as significant as any printer or publisher of the seventeenth century.'

Brian Harrison