General nineteenth century

The area we call VIC, the largest of the dictionary's thirteen areas, covers the whole of the nineteenth century. Even setting aside the people assigned to the literature, art, science, medicine, and business areas the DNB included 8046 people in this area, almost a fifth of its total, and we have now bumped VIC's numbers up to 9798. It was one of the three areas tackled at the beginning of the new project, and my predecessor Professor Colin Matthew was an acknowledged expert. The research editor Dr Kim Reynolds, who first came to the dictionary in 1993, has supplied me with many important details about these early years. Her doctoral thesis was supervised by Colin, and was published in 1998 as Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain; she takes a very broad perspective on the history of women, and has herself written for us articles large and small on many new women subjects. Her colleagues as research editors have included Dr Mark Curthoys, whom I have already mentioned in an earlier message; Dr Rosemary Mitchell, who later worked on the art area of the dictionary and then left in 1999 for a post at Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds; and two research editors who left us last year--Howard Spencer, who came to us from the History of Parliament and had a useful sideline in twentieth-century popular music, and Dr Roger Stearn, who gave expert and dedicated attention to the armed services. Dr Mary Heimann and Dr Claire Creffield also worked on the area as research editors.

Kim points out that because VIC started up before the text of the old DNB was available on our database, the early research editors at first worked with photocopies from the old volumes, and cut and pasted the texts manually for revision; commissioning articles, too, was largely a manual affair, and envelopes were hand-written. 'Procedures were made up as we went along', she writes, 'and they developed "organically" from the experience of those of us actually doing the daily work of commissioning and revising the old dictionary'. E-mail was available from quite early on, but the joys of the 'Google' search are only a recent experience, and the history of the VIC area reveals how continuously and rapidly the technology has changed during the past decade. It has made readily accessible huge amounts of material, especially genealogical information, which simply wasn't available in the early years. So we've needed to do quite a lot of back-tracking over our early research material.

It isn't only the technology that has changed since work on the new dictionary began. Some areas of study were deeply unpopular in the early 1990s when we were commissioning articles but became fashionable later: Victorian music, for example. In 1993 it was widely thought that there was little to be gained from studying nineteenth-century British music because it failed the aesthetic tests applied by most musicologists. Ten years later, those tests are often put aside and the music--and more particularly the musicians--can be studied in terms of their contexts, and the field is flourishing quietly. Perhaps in online updates to the dictionary we will be able to take account of this and similar shifts in fashion. The growth of scholarly interest in nineteenth-century religious history had, however, already begun by 1992 and was a great help in getting new articles. We found that Congregationalists, Tractarians, academic theologians and Scottish religion were well represented, whereas we needed more evangelicals, Quakers, secularists, and people from Ireland generally.

In more traditional areas, however, we had some difficulty. India was a particular problem: of its 189 subjects in VIC, most were Indian civil servants--not a fashionable subject. The trend in historical studies of the sub-continent is rather towards 'subaltern studies', towards 'bottom up' considerations of colonialism. Most narrative accounts are more concerned with the Indians' struggles for independence, not with the machinery of colonial power. The burden thus placed on the small number of specialists in this area who were willing to contribute was considerable. We have, however, aimed to give better coverage to non-European peoples within the empire/Commonwealth, and to commission authors from the areas under discussion. We also brought in more women explorers, civilian travellers and overseas traders.

Some sub-sections within VIC were covered well enough in the old DNB : army officers, classicists, and antiquarians, for example. In so far as we expanded these areas at all, we were looking for new types of person. In the military area, for example, which included military engineers and technologists, we have added notable men from the ranks, medal winners, non-British soldiers, military surveyors, military journalists, and women involved in charity work with soldiers. In these areas we moved away from simply recounting glorious deeds towards filling on the political context and explaining the consequences.

The dictionary has also been able to profit from the growth in women's history. Women constituted only about 4% of VIC's biographical subjects in the old DNB . The pioneers of women's suffrage and women's rights received short shrift from the first editor Leslie Stephen and his successors: Millicent Garrett Fawcett warranted only 1600 words, Josephine Butler fewer than 1000, and many others did not feature at all. Angela Burdett-Coutts represented female philanthropy with one of the longest articles on women (nearly 6000 words), but many others were overlooked. Special blocks were created to build up our coverage of women philanthropists and for women in public life. By looking for women in neglected areas--as political hostesses or in voluntary work for example--we are not at all engaging in 'positive discrimination': we are simply bringing out better than the old DNB the sheer range of women's activity at the time, and we have included as new subjects more than twice the number of women who were included in the old DNB , bringing the total proportion of women in the area to 11%. The nineteenth-century prevalence of the idea that women are for the 'private sphere' and men for the 'public sphere' will always make it difficult to secure anything approaching equal coverage of men and women. It was part of the Victorian feminists' difficulty that so many among their female contemporaries regarded the male achievement as something produced by the sexes in combination, and would have deplored female self-advertisement.

We ended up with half the VIC area being taken up by newly-written articles and half by lightly revised articles. Many of our new subjects have been researched and written for the first time for the dictionary from archival sources, obscure newspapers, and local information. Other possible new subjects had to be excluded because we could not find contributors able or willing to do this kind of primary research. Another time, perhaps! Colin Matthew's decision to build the new dictionary on the old, retaining all the biographical subjects included in the old, has I think made it possible for us to secure a fair and historically sensitive balance within the dictionary as a whole.

Brian Harrison