Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Collective Biography as Monument? The Dictionary of National Biography

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain

  • 73 Accesses

Abstract

One of the most high-profile compilation publishing projects of the late nineteenth century was the British Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901), known as the DNB. It only represented deceased people, but included a surprising and disproportionate number of very recent Victorians, whose contemporaries were still alive.

This chapter examines the challenges that DNB editors and contributors faced in achieving a definitive overview: who to include, how to keep it to a manageable scale, the office politics, and how they dealt with personal materials, both auto/biography and surviving memories.

While the DNB is now often seen as a stereotypically Victorian “monument”, its editors and contributors were very conscious of its temporary nature, and of the vagaries of collaborative production. This is a powerful case-study of what happens if you try to produce definitive accounts of lives still present in living memory.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, Chapter 3.

  2. 2.

    On one Victorian hall of fame, Leeds’ Municipal Buildings (opened in 1884), see Kingstone, 55–56. On the phenomenon more generally, see Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske, eds., Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004).

  3. 3.

    Sidney Lee, “The Dictionary of National Biography: A Statistical Account,” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, vol. 63 (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1885), xii. His statistical table does not specify whether these individuals were born, lived the majority of their lives or simply died in, the century he allocates them to.

  4. 4.

    A. F. Pollard to his parents, 14 November 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4. The clergyman in question was Thomas Mozley (1806–1893).

  5. 5.

    Amber Regis, “Un/Making the Victorians: Literary Biography, 1880–1930,” in A Companion to Literary Biography, ed. Richard Bradford (Oxford: Blackwell, 2018), 76.

  6. 6.

    Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory.”

  7. 7.

    Cara Murray, “Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography,” Victorian Literature and Culture 50, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 92.

  8. 8.

    Helen Kingstone, “Recent Lives in the Dictionary of National Biography: a Corpus Linguistic Analysis,” in preparation.

  9. 9.

    Christopher N. Warren, “Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB),” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2018, para. 4, https://doi.org/10.22148/16.028.

  10. 10.

    Colin Bell, “Some Comments on the Use of Directories in Research on Elites, with Particular Reference to the Twentieth-Century Supplements of the Dictionary of National Biography,” in British Political Sociology Yearbook: Vol. 1 Elites in Western Democracy, ed. Ivor Crewe (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 161–71.

  11. 11.

    David Amigoni, “Life Histories and the Cultural Politics of Historical Knowing: The Dictionary of National Biography and the Late Nineteenth-Century Political Field,” in Life and Work History Analyses : Qualitative and Quantitative Developments, ed. Shirley Dex (London: Routledge, 1991), 163.

  12. 12.

    Murray, “Cultivating Chaos,” 96.

  13. 13.

    Cannadine, “British Worthies,” 3; Lawrence Goldman, “A Monument to the Victorian Age? Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography 1882–2004,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 112; Brian Harrison, “‘A Slice of Their Lives’: Editing the DNB, 1885–1999,” English Historical Review cxix, no. 484 (November 2004): 1191–92.

  14. 14.

    Colin Roberts, lead of OUP’s academic board in the mid-twentieth century, quoted by Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 6.

  15. 15.

    Augustus Jessopp, “The Dictionary of National Biography,” The Nineteenth Century 28, no. 166 (December 1890): 1011. Jessopp contributed a range of mainly early modern lives (including that for Elizabeth I).

  16. 16.

    The disproportion is heightened by a contrast with the later DNB’s parsimonious coverage of the twentieth century: especially after the Dictionary was passed on in 1917 to its reluctant new publishers Oxford University Press, later “supplements” were much more modest in scale. As Colin Matthew has put it, “The twentieth century, both absolutely and in ratio to population, is thus much more selective than the nineteenth.” Matthew, “Leslie Stephen and the New DNB.”

  17. 17.

    Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, Chapters 39–49.

  18. 18.

    Gillian Fenwick, “The ‘Athenaeum’ and the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’, 1885–1901,” Victorian Periodicals Review 23, no. 4 (1990): 180.

  19. 19.

    Harrison, “‘A Slice of Their Lives’: Editing the DNB, 1885–1999,” 1186.

  20. 20.

    Leonard Huxley, The House of Smith Elder (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1923), 182.

  21. 21.

    Iain McCalman, “Introduction,” in National Biographies and National Identity: A Critical Approach to Theory and Editorial Practice, ed. Iain McCalman, Jodi Parvey, and Misty Cook (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 1996), ix.

  22. 22.

    Robert Faber and Brian Harrison, “The Dictionary of National Biography: A Publishing History,” in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (London: British Library, 2002), 173.

  23. 23.

    Marcello Verga, “‘Biographical Collections in National Contexts,’” in Setting the Standards: Institutions, Networks and Communities of National Historiography, ed. Ilaria Porciani and Jo Tollebeek, Writing the Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 97.

  24. 24.

    On introduction of obituaries in The Times newspaper under the editorship of Delane (1841–77), see Bridget Fowler, The Obituary as Collective Memory (London: Routledge, 2007), 6.

  25. 25.

    Alison Booth, “Fighting for Lives in the ODNB, or Taking Prosopography Personally,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005): 273.

  26. 26.

    Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 4.

  27. 27.

    Sidney Lee, “National Biography,” Cornhill Magazine 26 (March 1896): 261.

  28. 28.

    Lee, 269–70.

  29. 29.

    Lee, 272.

  30. 30.

    Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, vol. 3 (London: Smith, Elder & co., 1892), 240–41.

  31. 31.

    Leslie Stephen, “Biography,” The National Review 22, no. 128 (October 1893): 172.

  32. 32.

    Leslie Stephen, “National Biography,” National Review 27, no. 157 (March 1896): 59. A similar impetus has emerged recently; see, for example, Michael Wood and Johannes Birgfeld, eds., Repopulating the Eighteenth Century Second-Tier Writing in the German Enlightenment, Edinburgh German Yearbook 12 (Rochester, New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2018).

  33. 33.

    David Amigoni, “Distinctively Queer Little Morsels: Imagining Distinction, Groups, and Difference in the DNB and the ODNB,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005): 280.

  34. 34.

    Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, 221.

  35. 35.

    Leslie Stephen, “Aikenhead, Thomas (1678?–1696–7),” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885), 184.

  36. 36.

    See H. C. G. Matthew, “Leslie Stephen and the New DNB, Pt 2,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1995, http://global.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/freeodnb/shelves/lslecture1/lslecture2/.

  37. 37.

    Michael Hunter, “Aikenhead, Thomas,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/225.

  38. 38.

    Stephen, “National Biography,” 54.

  39. 39.

    Stephen, 55, 59, 55.

  40. 40.

    Stephen, 54. Previous anthologies that used the term lamentingly include George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790). By contrast, Margaret Oliphant evokes the need for such a veil in Margaret Oliphant, “The Ethics of Biography,” The Contemporary Review 44 (July 1883): 76–93.

  41. 41.

    Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.

  42. 42.

    Stephen, “National Biography,” 58.

  43. 43.

    Leslie Stephen, “Dryasdust,” The Speaker : The Liberal Review 2 (June 23, 1900): 331.

  44. 44.

    Stephen, 331.

  45. 45.

    Murray, “Cultivating Chaos,” 104–5.

  46. 46.

    Stephen, “National Biography,” 63.

  47. 47.

    Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6.

  48. 48.

    Sidney Lee, The Perspective of Biography (London: The English Association, 1918), 4.

  49. 49.

    Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 5.

  50. 50.

    Stephen, “Dryasdust,” 332.

  51. 51.

    National collective biographies completed before DNB include those in Sweden (1835–57, 23 volumes) and the Netherlands (1852–78, 21 volumes), while equivalent projects had been initiated in Austria and Belgium in the 1860s, Germany in the 1870s, Denmark and the USA in the 1880s. See Keith Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–16.

  52. 52.

    Leslie Stephen, “A New ‘Biographia Britannica,’” The Athenaeum, December 23, 1882.

  53. 53.

    H. S. Ashbee, “A New ‘Biographia Britannica,’” The Athenaeum, January 6, 1883.

  54. 54.

    Leslie Stephen, “The New Biographical Dictionary,” The Athenaeum, January 13, 1883.

  55. 55.

    Leslie Stephen to Miller Christy, October 25, 1883, MS Eng Lett c.462 (item 105), Bodleian Library.

  56. 56.

    Leslie Stephen to Miller Christy, 29 October 1886, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. c. 462 (item 108).

  57. 57.

    Leslie Stephen to T. F. Tout, 27 June 1889, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1/ 1140.

  58. 58.

    Sidney Lee to T. F. Tout, 2 July 1883, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1/672.

  59. 59.

    Leslie Stephen, contract for C. L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB, 19 November 1889, London University Library special collections, MS900/5.

  60. 60.

    Contract for C. L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB, [n. d.] 1891, London University Library special collections, MS900/6.

  61. 61.

    Sidney Lee, “Dictionary of National Biography” letters to contributors, 9 November 1895, MS900/37.

  62. 62.

    “The Dictionary of National Biography: Dinner to Mr. George Smith,” 1894, London University Library Special Collections, MS900/62, 2.

  63. 63.

    A. F. Pollard to his parents, 9 May 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4.

  64. 64.

    A. F. Pollard to his parents, 5 September 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4.

  65. 65.

    Sidney Lee to T. F. Tout, 2 July 1883, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1/672.

  66. 66.

    Leslie Stephen to Miller Christy, contract for life of Selkirk Douglas, 29 October 1886, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. c. 462.

  67. 67.

    A. F. Pollard to his parents, 21 February 1893, University of London special collections, MS860/1/4.

  68. 68.

    C. H. Firth, “Memoir of Sir Sidney Lee,” DNB, 1912–21 (London, 1927), xx. Quoted in Laurel Brake, “Problems in Victorian Biography: The DNB and the DNB ‘Walter Pater,’” The Modern Language Review 70, no. 4 (1975): 734. Reprinted in Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 169–87, 174.

  69. 69.

    Brake, 733.

  70. 70.

    A. F. Pollard to his parents, 25 July 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4.

  71. 71.

    A. F. Pollard to his parents, 18 December 1894, London University Library special collections, MS860/2/1.

  72. 72.

    Anonymous, “Gladstone, Sir John (1764–1851),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1889, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.10786.

  73. 73.

    Gillian Fenwick, Women and the Dictionary of National Biography: A Guide to DNB Volumes 1885–1985 and Missing Persons (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 6.

  74. 74.

    The connections between contributors and subjects are even stronger in the ODNB, where the task of writing a recent life is routinely assigned to someone who knew them personally. Information from ODNB Senior Research Editor Dr Alex May (meeting on 12 March 2020).

  75. 75.

    Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 112. See Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80; Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–33.

  76. 76.

    On the literary fascination with the provinces, see Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, Chapter 8.

  77. 77.

    Helen Anne O’Neill, “The Role of Data Analytics in Assessing Historical Library Impact: The Victorian Intelligentsia and the London Library” (doctoral thesis, UCL (University College London), 2019), https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10065428/.

  78. 78.

    Huxley, The House of Smith Elder, 188.

  79. 79.

    “The Dictionary of National Biography: Dinner to Mr George Smith” (1894), 10. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford papers, London University Library special collections, MS900/62.

  80. 80.

    Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life Of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 (London: Macmillan, 1928), 290.

  81. 81.

    A. F. Pollard to his parents, 12 June 1894, London University Library special collections, MS860/2/1.

  82. 82.

    Helen Kingstone, “Recent Lives in the Dictionary of National Biography: a Corpus Linguistic Analysis,” in preparation.

  83. 83.

    Annan, Leslie Stephen, 84; Sidney Lee, “Prefatory Note,” in Dictionary of National Biography Supplement, ed. Sidney Lee, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder, 1901), vii. Lee also quoted in Harrison, “‘A Slice of Their Lives’: Editing the DNB, 1885–1999,” 1191.

  84. 84.

    Walter Raleigh to C. H. Firth, 5 September 1896, Bodleian library MS Firth c. 7.

  85. 85.

    Barbara Caine, “Biography and the Question of Historical Distance,” in Rethinking Historical Distance, ed. Mark Salber Phillips, Barbara Caine, and Julia Adeney Thomas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 68.

  86. 86.

    Huxley, The House of Smith Elder, 184.

  87. 87.

    Joseph Hamburger, “Grote [Née Lewin], Harriet (1792–1878), Woman of Letters,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11678.

  88. 88.

    G. C. Robertson, “Grote, George, D.C.L., LL.D. (1794–1871),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1890, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.11677.

  89. 89.

    “History of the Dictionary of National Biography,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed January 27, 2022, https://www.oxforddnb.com/page/1016.

  90. 90.

    All but three of these died in 1850 or later. The rare pre-1850 subjects are William Haines (1778–1848), whose entry was written by his son; William Crawford (1788–1847), whose entry was written in 1888 by John Ward (1805–1890) shortly before his own death; Philip Skelton (1707–1787), whose entry by prolific contributor Norman Moore lists “local information and personal knowledge” among his sources, although the two men’s lifetimes did not overlap.

  91. 91.

    Fenwick, Women and the Dictionary of National Biography, 8. Fenwick points out that fifteen of the female contributors have the same surnames as their (male) subject. Sidney Lee’s sister Elizabeth Lee is an exception to this rule, since she wrote seventy-nine out of her eighty-one credited entries on women subjects. She also wrote probably several that appeared under her brother’s name.

  92. 92.

    Helen Rogers, “In the Name of the Father: Political Biographies by Radical Daughters,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 148.

  93. 93.

    R. G. Blount to T. F. Tout, 17 February 1884, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1

  94. 94.

    Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 147.

  95. 95.

    J. R. O’Flanaghan, “D’alton, John (1792–1867),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1888, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.7064.

  96. 96.

    J. S. Vaizey, “Ker, Charles Henry Bellenden (1785?–1871),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1892, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.15447.

  97. 97.

    W. J. Hardy, “Hardy, Sir William (1807–1887),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1890, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.12294; W. H. Fremantle, “Eardley, Sir Culling Eardley (1805–1863),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1888, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.8393.

  98. 98.

    Joseph Lister, “Lister, Joseph Jackson (1786–1869),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1892, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.16762; G. L’E. Turner, “Lister, Joseph Jackson (1786–1869), Wine Merchant and Microscopist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16762.

  99. 99.

    J. W. Ebsworth, “Ebsworth, Joseph (1788–1868),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1888, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.8432.

  100. 100.

    On a similarly tangent-filled account by Julia Busk Byrne of a visit to Waterton’s Yorkshire home, see Rosemary Mitchell, “Julia Mary Byrne and the Passage of Time,” Journal of Victorian Culture 24, no. 3 (September 21, 2019): 289–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz021.

  101. 101.

    Norman Moore, “Waterton, Charles (1782–1865),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1899, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.28817.

  102. 102.

    Richard Garnett, “Garnett, Jeremiah (1793–1870),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed February 27, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.10390.

  103. 103.

    Samuel Timmins, “Clarke, Charles Cowden (1787–1877),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1887, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.5489.

  104. 104.

    H. T. Wood, “Foster, Peter Le Neve (1809–1879),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1889, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.9966.

  105. 105.

    Ghetal Burdon-Sanderson, “Herschell, Ridley Haim (1807–1864),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1891, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.13104.

  106. 106.

    H. R. Tedder, “Hart, Solomon Alexander (1806–1881),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1891, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.12489. This comment is expanded in Helen Alexander’s ODNB revised entry to explain that “his failing eyesight meant that his work lost its power”.

  107. 107.

    J. B. Bailey, “Rowell, George Augustus (1804–1892),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1897, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.24210.

  108. 108.

    Moore, “Epic and Novel,” 418.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

    Helen Kingstone

Authors
  1. Helen Kingstone
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Helen Kingstone .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Kingstone, H. (2022). Collective Biography as Monument? The Dictionary of National Biography. In: Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_8

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation