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  • Lt. Col. Finch and Other Worthies in the New DNB
  • Alan Bell (bio)

For a century and more the old Dictionary of National Biography held the field of British biographical reference books. It had been published at quarterly intervals in sixty-three volumes between 1885 and 1900, under the editorship of Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. The DNB is an immense work, one of the greatest monuments of British scholarship in the nineteenth century, standing alongside the Oxford English Dictionary in many a library. It is all the more remarkable for having appeared not as the product of an academic press but under the commercial imprint of Smith, Elder & Co. It had been personally financed by the London publisher George Smith, who saw it as his gift to the nation, offered in return for the substantial profits he had made from a successful business. George Smith was a major figure in nineteenth-century publishing, with George Eliot, Thackeray, and the Brontës among his authors, and the then famous literary monthly, the Cornhill Magazine, was another valuable asset in his list. He also had business interests in railways (and in bottled mineral water) that enabled him to support scholarship on such a visionary scale. [End Page 275]

After George Smith's death in 1901 the enterprise continued for a while in family hands, with some large additional volumes for the Edwardian period; but in 1917 the family interest in the publishing business came to an end, and Smith's widow presented the DNB to the University of Oxford. In making this gift, the publisher had hoped that the whole set could be kept up to date, but this was clearly impossible since its text was printed from stereotype plates. The best that could be done with it was for the Oxford University Press to maintain a stock that kept the title in print and every ten years produce a supplementary volume containing lives of the previous decade's crop of nationally prominent figures. The earlier additional volumes were generally uneven, with some of the entries reading more like obituary notices than historically focused brief lives. And the one-volume decennial format meant that the editors had to be overselective in their coverage, not taking sufficiently into account whole areas of national achievement—for example in business and commercial life. Meanwhile the "main work"—those volumes published in the nineteenth century—were increasingly showing their age. Their biographies of major early figures had been overtaken by a century of detailed scholarship, and for the Victorian age the longer articles, say those on Dickens or Gladstone or on Queen Victoria herself, had become of little use as critical accounts of their subjects.

Later editors of the Supplements saw to it that the standards of the supplementary volumes were improved. They were a succession that included Sir Edgar Williams (1912–1995), whose academic career as a historian had been interrupted by war service in which he had been Montgomery's chief of intelligence in North Africa and then for D–Day. On returning to Oxford, Williams became part-time DNB editor in 1949. He saw three decennial volumes to press, eventually retiring in 1980. He was succeeded by Robert (Lord) Blake, the Oxford don, biographer of Disraeli, and a Conservative constitutional expert, who was in turn succeeded by Dr. Christine Nicholls, with long previous experience as an assistant editor. She is also a specialist in the history of British colonial administration.

They and their sponsoring publishers knew the difficulty of replacing the original edition. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century the managing committee of the Oxford University Press had from time to time discussed the DNB problem—how to supplement, correct, extend, or even replace it; but the task always seemed overwhelmingly large. A volume of "Missing Persons" was produced in 1993, an odd but diverting mixture including some subjects (notable among them the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins) whose fame was almost entirely posthumous. But such piecemeal gap-filling could not meet the major need.

Bolder steps were necessary, and wholesale replacement came more frequently under consideration. The sheer scale of the task was much alleviated by rapid developments in automated...

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