The founding editor of the original Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen, abandoned sole responsibility midway through his enormous task. His wife Julia was convinced that it was ruining his health, and persuaded him to resign and take refuge in the Alps. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Stephen's daughter, Virginia Woolf, commemorated her parents as Mr and Mrs Ramsay, paying tribute to his dogged persistence and to her beauty and loving kindness (both were long dead: she died in 1895, he in 1904). Julia Prinsep Stephen was a woman who lived in and through family, friends and philanthropic projects, in a largely domestic sphere of their affections, with no longings for immortality. Leslie, in contrast, wished to be remembered as a Great Man. Hers was one of those many lives that tend to disappear from history; he, like his ambitious daughter, wanted to make a lasting mark. Julia had no expectations of becoming an entry in the DNB, though she was enlisted by her husband to contribute one brief entry on her eccentric aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, which notes, in passing, in its third and last paragraph, that Cameron "at the age of fifty… took up photography." How times change.
Woolf's characterisation of her father in the novel recalls the not so harmless drudgery of the dictionary. Ramsay is a philosopher, but not, he fears, of the first rank. He has been working his way through the philosophical alphabet and he has reached the letter Q. "But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes… Z is only reached by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something…" But he cannot reach R, strain though he may, and in his head he hears people saying: "He was a failure—that R was beyond him."
Leslie Stephen's anxiety about his posthumous status as a writer and thinker was evidently exacerbated by his work on the DNB, which involved the unending process of evaluation and assessment of the successes and failures of the great men of the distant and recent past. Writing obituaries is a mournful trade. The physical labour of the editorial process—unaided by a great editorial team or modern technology—was considerable, but the intellectual strain was overwhelming. Apart from taking initial responsibility for the overall planning and selection of contributors (653) and entries (29,333), Stephen wrote 378 lives, "almost any one of which might have earned an American PhD," according to Alan Willard Brown in The Metaphysical Society (1947). He continued to write large entries after he handed over in 1891 to Sidney Lee. (Stephen edited the first 26 volumes, the first of which was published in 1885; Lee edited the remaining 37 and the first supplements.) The DNB stands as a monument to Stephen's tenacity and status as a man of letters: it is his cairn upon the icy mountain top. It marks one of the great and characteristically British achievements of the Victorian age of private enterprise. It is also a tribute to the Oxford amateur spirit. Many of his contributors had no grounding in historical method, and they were to look back on Stephen's "careful and stringent" editorial regulations and guidance as "our first training in anything like historical investigation" (TF Tout, quoted in John Kenyon's 1983 The History Men).
The scope of the first DNB was vast, and would have been vaster had not Stephen rejected publisher George Murray Smith's original proposal for an encyclopaedia of universal biography, in the tradition of the great encyclopedias of the Enlightenment. Stephen settled for the national, and so have the editors of the new Oxford DNB (published in 60 volumes last September). They have, however, greatly extended that concept. Stephen's definition was not narrow, and the original editor of the new DNB, the late Colin Matthew, who died in 1999, and his successor Brian Harrison are even more inclusive. In the introduction, Harrison describes the principles of inclusion, which in addition to all the old DNB entries, many revised or rewritten, admit early Americans, non-British colonials, and a medley of those who have lived in or influenced Britain and Britishness. (Some reviewers have suggested that the increased number of Americans is a cynical bid to enlarge the US market.) It is increasingly difficult to define nationality, and this new project does not make it any simpler. The Victorians had a clearer idea of their borders.
Several of the previewers of the ODNB have declared, somewhat chauvinistically, that the old DNB was the best of its kind, and that the new one is even better. Its continental rivals are chastised for inaccuracies and tardiness. The allegedly methodical Germans, whose first 56-volume attempt at national biography (Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 1875-1912) was a conscious exercise in nation-building, have failed to complete its official successor, the Neue Deutsche Biographie. The NDB is planned as a 28-volume work but so far has only reached 21 volumes and, by chance, the letter R. Similarly, the Dictionnaire de biographie française (successor to the Nouvelle biographie universelle 1852-65) began to appear in 1933 but is only halfway through the alphabet. The Italian Dizionario biografico degli Italiani is also incomplete, abandoning us with 62 volumes at the letter L. The OUP, with backing from the British Academy, has met its target and can feel proud.
The broader definition of nationality admits many foreign-born subjects. Voltaire makes his first full appearance, and we find fine new entries on Marx by Eric Hobsbawm and on Engels by Gareth Stedman Jones. Herzen and Isaiah Berlin are here for the first time, and Wittgenstein has a new entry. Sigmund Freud joins his daughter Anna (1895-1982), who had been admitted to a previous supplement. All of these have British connections and residential claims, so we should not complain about the absence of Rousseau and Jung and Einstein.
We are greeted by musicians ranging from Queen Victoria's favourite, Mendelssohn, to the singer Grisi (born in Milan, adored in London, died in Berlin, buried in Paris). Among writers, we do not find Nathaniel Hawthorne, who might have had a claim for his years in Liverpool, but Ezra Pound has been admitted. Percy Lubbock's personal 1927 account of Henry James has been replaced, and so has Richard Ellmann's 1981 entry on TS Eliot. Detroit-born Ellmann is himself memorialised, but not his wife Mary, who has a claim to be the mother of feminist criticism. A minor and short-lived Anglophile American, Stanley Olson (1947-89) makes a swaggering entrance, justified by Selina Hastings's colourful entry recording his beautifully tailored suits lined in red silk and his shoes of red leather, but we do not find his earlier and equally Anglophile compatriot Howard Sturgis (1855-1920), author of a Jamesian country house novel Belchamber (1904). In a new article by Claire Tomalin, New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield still appears under her married name of Kathleen Murry. (Similarly, one has to search for Rebecca West under the disguise of Dame Cicily Isabel Andrews.) Rubens and Canaletto make their debut, and Whistler and Oskar Kokoschka are rewritten. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska appears for the first time, but we do not meet Van Gogh in Brixton. Nor should we, for this is not a dictionary of cultural contacts any more than it is a narrow definition of ethnic identity, as espoused by the cantankerous 19th-century historian EA Freeman. (Freeman caused Leslie Stephen much trouble with his insistence on Anglo-Saxon spellings: until 2004 you had to hunt for Alfred under Aelfred, for Elfrida under Aelfthryth.)
Our sense of Britain's place in the broad sweep of European and global culture is extended by this generous welcome to incomers, and colonial history has been updated. The new ODNB, as one would expect, eschews jingoism and insularity. Postcolonial historians and history itself have altered the map, and nowadays we refer to the English Channel, in David Cannadine's words, "not as a moat but as a highway," (a phrase quoted with approval by Gordon Brown in his 2004 British Council lecture on Britishness). Here is a much more varied subset of names than in the old DNB, representing enemies, rebels and insurgents: for example, the Matabele chief Lobengula Khumalo, Queen Lozikeyi of Bulawayo and Paul Kruger himself now appear in their own right, not as appendages to the lives of Jameson and Cecil Rhodes (on whom there is an excellent new entry by Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido).
This process of expansion and inclusion was already well under way in earlier supplements: Gandhi (d1948) was admitted in 1959 as a political leader and social reformer who "did as much to change the course of history as any other single man, not excluding Lenin," and he was followed in 1981 by Nehru (d1964). But we still don't get Lenin or indeed Ho Chi Minh, even though Ho once worked in London in the kitchens of the Carlton Club.
Many of these extensions of the island story are really no more than a welcome enlargement of context, but they prompt a bigger question: does the redrawn map tell us anything about who we are now? Can we see a more fluid multicultural and multi- ethnic and yet recognisably British identity in the making? This is an agitating topic, and you won't find a quick answer in the ODNB. Each age redefines its concept of national identity: Daniel Defoe in 1701 famously praised the "mongrel" strain of the nation in his satirical poem "The True-born Englishman," which attacked prejudice against foreigners and a foreign monarch, but this was a rare example of polemical inclusion. More commonly, definitions are intended to exclude, and national identity is built on exclusion, as historian Linda Colley demonstrated in Britons: Forging the Nation (1992). Politicians from the mainstream parties are obliged to pay lip service to some form of multiculturalism, but are divided about the meaning of the term. Some of our best contemporary writers (Naipaul, Ishiguro, Rushdie, Kureishi, Kunzru, Ali) don't sound very British, although they are deeply engaged in exploring the phenomenon of new and old Britishness. Monica Ali, I believe, began writing Brick Lane in the lake district.
The ODNB is a fine genealogical research tool that allows you to explore family history, heredity and even ethnic identity. But an anti-aristocratic bias has been detected by reviewer Edward Chaney, who claims that one or two significant dilettante dukes have been omitted or conflated. It is clear that the editorial board has worked hard to extend the social register. Colin Matthew, according to the excellent entry on him by Ross McKibbin, was a Labour supporter, and he and his successors have ensured that under-represented categories like trade and industry, technology, the labour movement and women's rights campaigners—and, of course, women themselves—bid equal now with parliament, the church and the universities.
Describing Gandhi as a man "who changed the course of history" begs the question about history as the story of individuals or the product of economic forces. Maybe an alphabetically arranged dictionary of biographies is in itself an outdated concept, a collection of disconnected items, like a dusty old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities—Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books speculates that it is in essence a nerdish enterprise. The political right traditionally backs the Great Man (or Cleopatra's Nose) thesis, whereas the left continues to follow the sociological view. But the very concept of biography is now widely challenged. Reviewers are divided on its current status: it is agreed that literary biography, in the words of Richard Holmes (professor of biographical studies at UEA and romantic biographer par excellence) enjoyed a golden age in the second half of the 20th century, but in much of academe it is not even called biography any more; it is called life writing.
Life writing is evolving a new critical theory. Those who want to discover more about the postmodern frame of reference could look at Margaretta Jolly's useful two-volume Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (2001). In her editor's note, she argues: "as the individualism unleashed by capitalism cracks and reshapes in the fire of globalisation and the communications revolution, a literature that foregrounds the shape of a single life and its span seems to focus the anxieties of an age. Life writing is now being explored in literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, theology, cultural studies, and even the biological sciences." You will find many matters in Jolly that never surface in the ODNB.
But in one sense the ODNB is astonishingly, admirably modern, and outbids all rivals. Its online version (www.oxforddnb.com) is a wonder. There is a handsomely bound 60- volume hardcover library edition, but for a modest sum (£50 plus VAT for three months, or £195 plus VAT for a year) you receive online access to both the new ODNB and the old DNB, including all the supplements. This opens a world of wonders. You can search by entry, by contributor, by theme or by phrase. You can browse for hours, chasing ideas and events as well as people. Some of these facilities were available on the 1995 CD-Rom, but they have been enormously augmented by the adoption of new technology, which can cope with full-text phrase searches to astonishing effect. It is enthralling. One entry leads to another, and another, and another, and you learn things you never knew you needed or wanted to know. The editors must have wondered, a decade ago, about the wisdom of going online in an age of such rapidly changing technology. In 1979, when I embarked on the fifth edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, we did it all by typewriter and triple filing. But the ODNB team's courage in going for the new has been gloriously vindicated.
You can have much fun with this format. Reviewers have amused themselves by feeding in surviving euphemisms like "confirmed bachelor" and "he did not suffer fools gladly," and have come up with entertaining results. You can track the changing meaning of words, and hunt for diagnostic neologisms. In 1995 CP Snow was described as a "publicist" (a public intellectual); that word means something rather different now, and Snow is inscribed as a "writer and scientific administrator." Richard Ingrams in the Observer expressed his irritation at finding the word "intertextuality" tagged on anachronistically to the revised entry of his piece on TH White, and John Gross in the Times Literary Supplement does not care for the phrase écriture féminine in the entry on James Joyce. Such comments send one on a trail to see how many times these phrases are used, and how far back into time cultural historians such as the late Edward Said have shed their searchlight. The ODNB lists many uses of the words "orientalism" and "orientalist," most of them in pre-Said contexts, and there are five references to Said himself. There appear to be six, but on closer inspection, one reference under Edward Elgar refers not to the great Palestinian scholar, but to something "Edward said…"
Will the Palestinian-born US-based Said himself get an entry in the ODNB's next edition? His influence on postcolonial theory has been global, and has a particular relevance to British history, but it is not clear that this in itself would justify his presence in a British reference book.
Maybe national identity and the alphabet are both out of date, rendered obsolete by technology. Maybe there is no need to get to Z. The online ODNB moves in other dimensions, and can take any starting point, but with the assurance (which you don't get with Google) that what you find will be reasonably scholarly and accurate. If you look up a famous name, like that of the Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who doesn't have his own entry, you embark on a search that leads you to the politics and passions of JD Bernal (whose "marriage did not cramp his amorous nature"), the limitations of JBS Haldane, the career of Rosalind Franklin, and the discovery of DNA. It is interesting to note how many of those involved with the creation of the London Zoo were Marxists, and the number of marine biologists who were members of the Society of Friends. (My favourite marine biologist is Gwynne Vevers, whose private life "was very private indeed, and largely unknown to his colleagues. He had four wives… greatly enjoyed the company of women, and there were a number of other, less formal liaisons.") You can follow, through the lives of their protagonists, debates on subjects such as evolution, continental drift, eugenics or sociobiology. You can track professional disappointments under phrases like "backed the wrong horse." (The Soviet Union was a bad horse to back.) You can look under the names of well-known malcontents for tales of feuds and revenges: historians score well here, including the aforementioned Freeman and the more recent Geoffrey Elton, who according to Patrick Collinson was treated in print after his death to "an act of dismemberment… reminiscent of the last scene of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus."
Some of the revised lives are emblematic of the continuing historical reassessment of this Forth bridge of a project. Take, for example, that of controversial psychologist and eugenicist Cyril Burt (1883-1971) whose posthumous reputation has been more than usually unstable. The first entry on Burt in 1986 discussed the well-known accusations of fraud and falsification, particularly in his notorious twin studies, and outlines the manner in which his views on IQ and heredity became unfashionable; the new entry (by Pauline Mazumdar) brings us up to date by describing a process of rehabilitation linked "to a swing against egalitarianism that was powered by Margaret Thatcher's education policies." This is not strictly biography (or even necessarily true), but it is fascinating. A less obviously contentious figure was the benign and paternalistic colonial governor and ethnographer Arthur Grimble (1888-1956), who wrote an affectionate portrayal of life on the Gilbert Islands called A Pattern of Islands (1952). A posthumous lawsuit about mineral rights brought by the landowners in the chancery division of the high court, in which Grimble as administrator was implicated, culminated in a BBC television programme shown in January 1977 which cast him as "a fallen idol." JH Smith sagely concludes: "Ironically, had Grimble not written so engagingly about the people he so greatly liked and admired and for whom he had fought so hard, the court actions would have attracted far less attention."
The illustrations and portraits have been largely welcomed, though some are said to be printed the wrong way round. There have been complaints that Virginia Woolf is portrayed as too young and too beautiful, and Caroline Norton as too old and too plain. The photograph of the bohemian Singhalese writer and editor Tambimuttu, taken by the poet Edward Lucie-Smith, reveals him as astonishingly and unexpectedly handsome. Diarist Alan Clark's portrait by an "unknown photographer" is larger than the Graham Sutherland painting of his more distinguished father Kenneth (the son's entry is longer too). A haunting photograph of film director Derek Jarman by David Thompson is accompanied by an evocative pen portrait by Stephen Bury, which spares us none of Jarman's Aids-related anguish.
The frequent, but not ubiquitous, noting of "wealth at death" is another innovation, and characteristically British, for not all countries place this information on the public record. It has been painstakingly retrieved for us by the ODNB's diligent (and ill-paid) contributors. Some of these entries are surprising, and some are sad. The lovely Mrs Patrick Campbell left less than nothing: her possessions were "sold after death to pay debts." The estate of John Wilkes did not cover his bequests, Samuel Johnson left "approximately £2,300" and Henry James left £8,961 5s 2d. Cecil Rhodes, mysteriously, is credited with an estate of "under £5,000,000," whereas Arthur Grimble left precisely £9,074 0s 5d.
Legendary characters are also new: Jack the Ripper is here, and so are many saints who hover between legend and history. It has been protested that these figures belong more to cultural history than to the ODNB, but some of these entries are excellent: our patron saint St George is well covered by the heroic Henry Summerson, who has contributed 151 articles on medieval topics, an area which has seen great improvement. Less welcome are some of the more eccentric contemporary entrants. I was moved to read of the strange brave life of Laurence (born Laura) Michael Dillon (1915-62), transsexual, Buddhist monk, and admitted by Debrett's as heir to a baronetcy after his sex change operation. (His autobiography, we are told, remains unpublished.) It is good to find Sid Vicious: a man who can invent a name like that deserves more than a brief candle. But it is not easy to see why television personality Jill Dando is here, although her celebrity death may be read as a sign of the times, and I am even less happy with the inclusion of child victim James Bulger. And poor little Fanny Adams (1859-67), "murder victim and source of a colloquial expression," fits better in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, where she rightly appears, than in the ODNB. The Kray brothers are of acceptable sociological interest as villains, but we should draw the line with victims. Let them rest in peace.
There are mistakes, some of them completely inexplicable. How on earth did the novelist Joyce Cary transform himself into Joyce Carey in Michael Holroyd's entry on Augustus John? How do we spell Sybil or Sibyl Colefax? And who or what is responsible for the extraordinary error at the end of the entry on George Murray Smith, the publisher of Charlotte Brontë and the DNB, which locates his portrait in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Howarth (sic), Yorkshire? There are many more such, which leap off the page and startle you, but we are assured they can all be corrected online. There are also omissions, misrepresentations and disputed opinions, which led in early commentaries to extreme allegations of shoddy editing and scholarship. (My own first reaction was also hostile, as I had the bad luck to hit on typos in the first four articles I consulted: this does rock confidence.) There has been public debate about the entry on Florence Nightingale by Monica Baly and Colin Matthew, which Alex Attewell of the Florence Nightingale Museum accused in the TLS not only of small factual errors but also of representing "the furthest point on the revisionist pendulum." Nikolai Tolstoy entered the lists on behalf of his late stepfather, novelist Patrick O'Brian, in a sweeping attack on the whole enterprise which seemed to peter out in an inconclusive discussion as to whether or not O'Brian had read Captain Marryat. It must be admitted that the ODNB has tendentious critical comments, hack entries and many gaps: why no mention, for instance, of The Daughter of Adoption (1801), the only novel by the reformer and speech therapist John Thelwall?
But these are quibbles: the work is not meant to be a bibliography, it is bound to have mistakes, and without opinion it would be dull. The overall standard is high. It seems invidious to single out individual contributors for praise. John Gross rightly paid tribute to the magisterial essays by Michael Slater (Dickens), Pat Rogers (Samuel Johnson) and Roy Foster (WB Yeats), and there are many other entries beautifully matched with their subjects. The late Robertson Davies's scholarly love for the theatre shines out in his piece on Henry Irving. The entry on Anthony Blunt, written by art historian Michael Kitson and updated by biographer Miranda Carter, is impeccably judged. Malcolm Bradbury on Angus Wilson is excellent, and so is David Lodge on Malcolm Bradbury: these portraits are alive with personal knowledge and feeling, and were captured at the right moment. Contributors become entries as the waves make towards the pebbled shore. Robertson Davies is an entry, Michael Kitson is an entry; Colin Matthew himself became an entry before his task was completed. There is a sadness in this kind of progression and the collecting of death dates is not a happy task.
And yet there is an element of resurrection in biography, as in fiction. We come full circle with Julia Prinsep Stephen, famous beauty from a famously beautiful family. She too appears, accompanied by the iconic photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron. Unlike her daughter, she was in no sense a feminist: she voted against the suffrage, admired anti-suffragists Octavia Hill and Mrs Humphry Ward, tended the sick and the poor, and published a minor work called Notes from Sick Rooms (1883). Hers was not a radical agenda, and unlike Florence Nightingale she did not become known beyond her own (albeit large and distinguished) circle. It is fair to say that she is remembered largely for her connections, yet her legacy is rightly recorded. She is one of the many who have joined the vastly extended coverage of women that the ODNB actively sought and implemented, and which illustrates perhaps the greatest political and social change of the past 50 years.
Women have been disinterred from the distant past, and gathered together from more recent times. No doubt there are still critics who see this widened spectrum as an exaggerated form of political correctness. (I remember being warned in 1979 at a meeting at the OUP that feminist criticism might prove to be a temporary fashion, a fad not worthy to be noted in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, and we hadn't even heard of gender studies then.) The ODNB now includes female archaeologists and athletes, barristers and biochemists, crystallographers and courtesans, doctors and dancers, filmmakers and fanatics, and onwards through the alphabet to warrior queens, witches, yoga advocates and zoologists. We do not yet find any admirals, bishops or cardinals, but we will, we will. The main questions that linger are these: how could the long march of Everywoman have taken so long and been so very slow, and will the ODNB survive in any recognisable form to chart the next stages of the journey? Maybe this will prove to be the last of all such large concerted enterprises. If so, it was well and bravely done.
