The editor

This section of the website gives information on the three historians who have held the editorship of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography from 1992: founding editor Colin Matthew, the second editor, Brian Harrison, and the current editor, Lawrence Goldman.

Lawrence Goldman, 2004–

Dr Lawrence Goldman, tutorial fellow in modern history at St Peter's College, Oxford, became editor of the Oxford DNB on 1 October 2004. He combines his editorship with continuing teaching and research in his college and university roles. Born in London, Lawrence read history at Jesus College, Cambridge between 1976 and 1979, and after graduating went to Yale University on a Harkness fellowship to study American history. On his return to Cambridge he began research into Victorian social science and social policy and was elected a junior research fellow of Trinity College in 1982. Three years later his first teaching position was in Oxford's department for continuing education as university lecturer in history and politics. He retains a strong commitment to adult education and teaches adult classes on a regular basis. He is currently president of the Thames and Solent district of the Workers' Educational Association and he participated in the WEA's centenary celebrations this in 2003. In 1990 he took up his post at St Peter's College, Oxford, where he has taught modern British and American history to undergraduates and research students; he has also been the admissions tutor and senior dean of his college. In 2000–01 he was elected university assessor, an administrative position alongside the proctors, with special responsibility for student welfare. Most recently he has chaired the first ever review of the archives of the University of Oxford, which date back to 1214.

Dr Goldman is primarily a historian of modern Britain, but he has also published on American and transatlantic history. In addition to articles and essays in journals and collections, he is the author of Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (OUP, 1995) and Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: the Social Science Association, 1857–1886 (CUP, 2002). He edited a collection of essays on Henry Fawcett, the Victorian politician and political economist, entitled The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism (CUP, 1989). He is also co-editor of a volume of essays in memory of Colin Matthew, first editor of the Oxford DNB, entitled The Political Culture of Victorian Britain. He is now working on a biography of the political thinker and historian R. H. Tawney. He is married and has three teenage children.

Brian Harrison, 2000–2004

Professor Brian Harrison grew up in a London suburb, and went to St John's College, Oxford, in 1958 to read modern history. He has been in Oxford ever since, though with short sabbaticals in American and Australian universities. From 1967 he was a fellow of Corpus Christi College, where he taught history and politics for thirty-three years. He took up the editorship of the Oxford DNB in January 2000.

Brian's doctoral thesis (1966) on the nineteenth-century temperance movement led to his first book, Drink and the Victorians (1971). He has written that 'pressure-group history interest me because it recognizes no barrier between "social" and "political" history, and it has steadily led me chronologically forward'. He published books on aspects of British feminism before 1914 (1978) and between the wars (1987), and by the 1980s he had also published on oral history and on the history of photography.

Brian's current preoccupation with contemporary British history dates from 1985, when he began editing the final volume (1914–1970) in the History of the University of Oxford, published in 1994. He then published a history of British political institutions since the 1860s, The Transformation of British Politics (1996), and is currently working on the history of Britain from 1951 to 1990 for the final volume in the New Oxford History of England.

After the publication of the Oxford DNB in September 2004, Brian Harrison was awarded a knighthood in the new year's honours list (2005) for services to scholarship. He was also made a fellow of the British Academy in 2005.

Colin Matthew—founding editor, 1992–1999

Professor Colin Matthew, the founding editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford, died suddenly of a heart attack in Oxford on 29 October 1999, at the age of fifty-eight. He was a much-loved man, a fine scholar, and an inspiring leader.

Colin Matthew had been editor of the Oxford DNB since the start of the project in 1992. He laid out the detailed intellectual agenda for the new dictionary, and led a growing project team in Oxford and a network of some 10,000 advisers and contributors around the world who were actively engaged in making the Oxford DNB, and who have brought it to completion as he planned.

Colin described his approach to making the dictionary in his 1995 Leslie Stephen lecture, reproduced here by kind permission of Cambridge University Press, and summed up in his preface to our briefing notes for our contributors. His commentary on the development of the project can be seen in his editorials to our annual newsletters, and the short pieces that he wrote for this web site.

A very brief biography

The founding editor of the Oxford DNB, Professor H. C. G. Matthew FBA, was fellow of St Hugh's College and professor of modern history in the University of Oxford. His major biography Gladstone, 1809-1898 was the culmination of work on the 'Grand Old Man' of Victorian politics, for which he was awarded the 1995 Wolfson prize for history; he also completed the landmark fourteen-volume edition of The Gladstone Diaries (1968-1994). After his initial research on The Liberal Imperialists: the Ideas and Politics of a Post-Gladstonian Élite (1973) he wrote widely on aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, in articles and contributions to collective works such as the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain and the Short Oxford History of the British Isles.

Colin Matthew was born in Inverness and educated in Edinburgh, Yorkshire, and Oxford. After teaching for a time in Uganda and Tanzania he returned to teaching and research in Oxford. He was a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society, a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, and a curator of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. He was also vice-president of the British Academy.

Colin Matthew combined his role in the Oxford DNB and his many other interests in the university and elsewhere with a rich and happy family life. He is survived by his wife, Sue, and three children, David, Lucy, and Oliver.