But perhaps the day for a universal biographical dictionary has returned? With so many national biographical dictionaries now published or in continuous publication; with so many biographical scholars, in so many different countries, now at work; with so much specialised biographical knowledge now available; and, above all, with the technological means to handle vast bodies of information and project them into libraries, offices and homes all over the world, perhaps the time has come to revive Smith’s first idea and create that wonder of the Enlightenment, the universal dictionary of everyone; an accompaniment to encyclopedias of everything?

In little more than a decade, the Internet has given access to stocks of knowledge beyond the wildest imaginings of Diderot, D’Alembert and their collaborators on the Encyclopédie. For those hunting biographical information, it is possible to find details as never before. As things stand, there are online biographical dictionaries for, among others, the British, the Americans and now the Australians, with the Irish to follow in a matter of months. European nations have either launched their own Internet biographical dictionaries, or will surely do so soon, turning their many volumes of national biography into Web-based resources. We can envisage the linking of these databases and dictionaries into one great biographical corpus of everyone of note who ever lived.

Even if the links are not made, the scholar or casual reader can flick between dictionaries at the click of a mouse. Technology has not only made more information more accessible than ever before: it has also made it possible to compose and compile biographical dictionaries – in a fast and efficient manner. The successor to Smith and Stephen’s DNB, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), which was published in 2004, was projected in the early 1990s to be compatible when published with whatever electronic technology might then be in use. That the ODNB was produced to time in twelve years owed a great deal to the development of e-mail as a by-product of the Internet, making communication with the Dictionary’s ten thousand contributors all the swifter, and the transmission and editing of submitted text all the easier.

Contrast this with the labours and the manuscripts of the man who has been credited with compiling the first British dictionary of biography, John Leland, who lived at the time of the English Reformation and was employed by Henry VIII as library keeper and antiquary.² Leland compiled a dictionary of British writers which he himself called De viris illustribus (when eventually published, in 1709, nearly two centuries after its composition, it was as Commentarii De Scriptoribus Brittanicis). Its original title places Leland’s work within a genre – the biographical catalogue – that had originated in Renaissance Italy. Ultimately derived from such classical authors as Suetonius and Plutarch, it had been reinvigorated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by writers such as Petrarch and Platina. In gathering material for his magnum opus, Leland spent years travelling through England in the 1530s and 1540s. He visited all the then centres of knowledge, the religious houses and colleges of the two ancient universities, to catalogue their libraries and transcribe their manuscripts. At Leland’s death, the then king, Edward VI, assigned his papers to his friend Sir John Cheke, who made them available to two other great compilers of biography of this era, John Bale and John Foxe. But when Cheke left England in 1554, the collection was dispersed among several scholars and patrons. Most of those papers that survived were collected together by William Burton, the Leicestershire antiquarian and elder brother of Robert Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), who in 1632 presented them to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where they remain to this day. For a century, therefore, Leland’s papers, comprising one of the most important of all sources for historians of England, and an unrivalled corpus of biographical knowledge, which, be it noted, provided crucial information for dozens of biographies in the ODNB, were passed around in manuscript from scholar to scholar. In 1576 the author of The Historicall Description of the Island of Britain, William Harrison, described the manuscripts as ‘utterly mangled, defaced with wet weather, and finally imperfite through want of sundrie volumes … For so motheaten, mouldie, & rotten are those bookes of Leland which I have, and beside that, his annotations are … so confounded, as no man can … picke out anie sense from them by a leafe together.’ Let no scholar today ever complain of having difficulty getting access to sources. Yet this essay is not designed as a mere celebration of new technologies and their capacity to connect and liberate scholars as never before. Rather, this is a cautionary tale which will question our present electronic hubris, and ask whether merely ‘having the technology’, a phrase of the 1960s, is sufficient? It will ask whether we should do things merely because we can do them? Whether, as scholars and biographers, if we lack a secure rationale for what we do, we are merely producing information for its own sake? Whether the serendipitous nature of the Internet may only assist us in piling up irrelevant or unnecessary detail at the risk of losing contact with the major themes? Whether in bringing together hitherto separate bodies of knowledge, each collected and compiled for its own special reason and according to its own conventions, we may do violence to works conceived in isolation of each other? And whether, for these reasons, the Internet may be a great leveller, stripping out those elements of style, nature and genre which scholars have prized and respected in the past because they make a work distinctive, unique.

George Smith’s universal biographical dictionary is probably within our grasp – but should we want it? Were it to be composed of different sources merely linked together and searchable throughout, I should advise great caution. Scholarly works derive their value from their distinctiveness; to ransack them for information without understanding their rationales – including the way they were composed, by whom, under what circumstances, and for what ends – is to objectify, to vulgarise, to disrespect, and to invite error.

To make this perhaps unfashionable case, I want to examine the various notable collections of biography that have been made in Britain since John Leland and consider their reasons for being, the reasons why we recall them today, and, as a corollary, the way in which they should be used by modern scholars. I will begin with those sources of biographical knowledge I know best, the DNB and the ODNB – published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, respectively – the one growing organically out of the other, including all of its subjects and some of its text, but adding to the range and diversity of the first Dictionary through the addition of a further twenty thousand lives drawn from a wider range of backgrounds and occupations than before, and including three times as many women.

Immediately, we come up against the contingent nature of all great human enterprises. If we ask why George Smith conceived of a biographical dictionary, one answer is simply that, as editor of the Cornhill Magazine, which Smith also published, Stephen was losing his friend a good deal of money. He was putting out a journal that was rather too elevated in style and serious in tone for any likely readership. The circulation was falling, and Stephen had to be moved. Smith, a remarkably wealthy and munificent man, who, it is calculated, lost some £70,000 on the DNB, could have sacked Stephen. Instead, he dreamed up a project that would meet the great scholar’s interests and talents, though at the publisher’s expense.³

Similarly, I can say on authority that there would be no ODNB today were it not that Colin Matthew, its first editor, who planned the project from which the Dictionary emerged, was available in Oxford and willing to shoulder the burdens. In the early 1990s, when OUP considered what was to be done about Smith’s DNB, which had been passed to them by his family after Smith’s death, and which was now outdated and in need of wholesale revision, Matthew was coming to the close of his fourteen-volume edition of the diaries of William Ewart Gladstone. Matthew had the intellect, the experience and the worldwide respect required to lead a project on this scale; he was also available. Those who invited him to be editor have told me that if he had declined they would not have gone ahead. Scholars are rarely indispensable; but Matthew was rare indeed.⁴ He alone made the new biographical dictionary possible.

Beyond personalities, however, we can also explain the origins of the DNB and ODNB in terms of a wider scholarly rationale. The Victorians had several inferior biographical dictionaries at their disposal, and attempts to compile bigger and better ones had not always succeeded. The first edition of the Biographia Britannica, published in eight volumes between 1747 and 1766, was by then out of date. An attempt had been made to produce a second edition, but this had faltered in 1793 after five volumes had been published and they had only got as far as the letter F. This was somewhat better, however, than the record of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge – the ‘steam intellect society’, as it was called – which made a start at a universal dictionary under a committee chaired by the Whig politician Henry Brougham in the 1820s, but gave up after only seven volumes had appeared on names beginning with A alone. The expansion of historical knowledge in Britain from the 1850s, one of the most notable aspects of Victorian intellectual life, not only made a new dictionary necessary in order to incorporate and make available the new information, but also made it possible as it had not been before. Modern dictionaries of national biography are not only monuments to the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but have depended on the development of historical knowledge, the professionalisation of historical studies and the institutionalisation of history in museums, libraries and archives, for their composition. As the author of the DNB article on Elizabeth I, the Rev. Dr Augustus Jessopp, explained in a review of the original Dictionary, before the late-nineteenth century,

the task was then an impossible one. The actual materials for writing the lives of many of our greatest were wanting; the sources of trustworthy information on a thousand questions of fact were packed away in obscure hiding-places; heavy fees had to be paid for the liberty of search in archives public and private; there was nothing answering to the Public Record Office; the great libraries in the country might have been counted on a man’s fingers. Societies for printing original documents were unknown; the time for writing English history had not yet come, still less had the time come for investigating the minute facts of personal biography.⁵

By the 1880s all this had changed. Systematised research has continued ever since, so that, by the mid-twentieth century, much of the late-Victorian DNB was showing its age and ceasing to be of much use to scholars. The medievalists among my colleagues tell me that long ago – perhaps in the 1930s or 1940s – medievalists gave up referring to the DNB as a source of primary information, and referred to it only as an example of what previous generations of scholars had thought in all their innocence: it had become an historiographical rather than historical source. The enormous expansion of historical scholarship in the twentieth century deserved to be incorporated. Moreover, an ageing Dictionary updated by single-volume decennial supplements of those who had died in each decade of the twentieth century was also becoming unwieldy and difficult to use. By the early 1990s the scholarly and practical rationales for a new edition of the DNB were overwhelming.

Beyond these personal and academic factors, those who would really understand these two Dictionaries need also to think broadly about the political and social contexts which they embody. I have no doubt that future scholars will look back on the ODNB as an exemplar of the liberal values of our age, noting that its breadth and inclusivity reflected the democratic culture which gave birth to it. Matthew set out to include more women in the ODNB, and more figures from minorities of all types – religious, ethnic, racial and occupational. He wanted his Dictionary to reflect all sides of life, lowlife as well as eminence – though in this he was merely following Stephen’s model, for the latter too had spread the net wider than might be imagined, and was criticised for including too many malefactors alongside the benefactors of society.

Matthew also wanted the ODNB to reflect new aspects of our culture, some overlooked as unworthy by the Victorians, such as applied science and engineering, and others simply unknown to them, such as the enormous development of popular entertainment in our own era, which is today the surest and swiftest way to popular fame. Ours is a Dictionary which can comfortably include Freddie Mercury, Sid Vicious and George Harrison. The first life in Stephen’s Dictionary was that of Jacques Abbadie of Pau in France; the very last, that of William Zuylestein of Utrecht. No one, in other words, could accuse Stephen of insularity in his definition of the nation. The ODNB builds on this example, and has added many thousands of transnational lives lived by persons who had some attachment to Britain, whether as immigrants to it, emigrants from it, or as figures who never set foot in the British Isles but who influenced its history nonetheless. We have even taken pains to include notable foreign travellers to Britain, whose memoirs of what they saw, offer remarkable insights into British history.

Matthew was also conscious of the timing of his new British biographical dictionary. Intensely interested in the historical development of British political and constitutional institutions, and aware at every turn of the Victorian traditions which underpin so much of British public life, Matthew saw the Oxford DNB as marking an epoch in British history. It was compiled and then published during a generation in which centuries of self-government and global reach were giving way to a new identity and constitutional reality within the European Union. Those who knew Matthew appreciated his ambivalence towards these changes, an ambivalence which may be reflected in the breadth and catholicity of the ODNB, whose instincts are to include rather then exclude and thus to avoid the difficult business of making a choice about the nation’s historic identity.⁶ At a point of profound political change whose outcome is not yet clear (for Britain’s place in Europe has yet to be determined), the Dictionary may be read, in political terms, as indeterminate and undecided, an interim statement which gives due weight to all Britain’s international relations and history – imperial, transatlantic and European – without choosing and defining. That is how Matthew wanted it, because it is a fair reflection of Britain’s current historical position.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I would not make a similar argument for the original DNB, however: it is not the case, in my view, that the late-Victorian Dictionary merely represents what is taken to be a late-Victorian view of the world. But in this matter the problem may lie not with Stephen and his collaborators but with our scholarship and with present-day notions of Victorianism.

Those who have got really close to the DNB, Matthew pre-eminently, have not concluded that it is the epitome of supposed and so-called ‘Victorian values’. Stephen’s letters and speeches from this period repeat his modest ambition that the Dictionary prove itself merely in its usefulness to scholars and readers alike. ‘He cared not for praise or blame if he had done a good piece of work. He was glad to think that the dictionary had done something to raise the standard of historical and biographical work.’⁷ The tone and style of the Dictionary was not grandiloquent, rhetorical and imperial, but businesslike, factual and understated, and was praised as such in many quarters.

As one of the contributors, Canon Alfred Ainger, explained, ‘[t]he motto of the dictionary was of that funereal kind with which they were all familiar, “no flowers by request”’. It is certainly true that many contemporaries wished to see the DNB as a national triumph and as the celebration of national achievement. Lord Rosebery, the prime minister, ventured the opinion that it was ‘the monumental work of her Majesty’s reign’, and Stephen’s successor as editor in 1890, his former assistant Sidney Lee, born Solomon Lazarus Levi, the son of a London Jewish merchant, was notably more bullish and jingoistic when he came to discuss the Dictionary in print.⁸ But Stephen’s dry, rational, logical and unsparing intellect and his membership of a family famous for their long public agitation against slavery in the British empire, together combined to develop a Dictionary in his image.

It is not that Stephen was an unconventional Victorian: it is rather that present conceptions of Victorian culture are stereotypical, narrow and just plain wrong, presenting a pantomime Victorianism of pageantry, propaganda and imperialism. The DNB cannot be assimilated into this. Indeed, my own sense is that, like the ODNB, the first Dictionary is more the product of cultural uncertainty than of imperial self-confidence. Irish Home Rule became the central question of British politics, and the Indian National Congress first met in 1885, the year in which publication of the DNB began. Together, they challenged the nature of the United Kingdom and its empire. And in Stephen the Dictionary had an editor whose own experience of religious doubt, growing since the 1860s and leading him to atheism, was symptomatic of the growing scepticism of the Victorian élite in general – a doubt that was more than merely religious and which, in an existential sense, pervades late-Victorian intellectual life.

In other words, the DNB and the ODNB have complex and unexpected histories in themselves, which can be understood at various levels, personal, institutional and political. If we pick up a volume, or access one or the other dictionary online – because the DNB is available alongside the ODNB in electronic form – it is as well to appreciate these histories. In the search for basic information, this background may be unnecessary, of course; but for more profound work requiring that we understand the provenance of our sources, these contextual and personal factors are crucial. The ODNB has been written by ten thousand contributors, three thousand of whom live outside the United Kingdom, and most of whom work or worked in universities and the equivalent; it was largely funded by a university press with only limited government assistance to the value of less than fifteen per cent of the total expenditure of some £25 million;⁹ it was typeset by a company based in Pondicherri, India; it was printed by Butler and Tanner, a long-established west country printer with a nonconformist heritage; its website was designed by a company based in Boston, Massachusetts. All these things tell us something and should speak to us as scholars.

Ad so it has always been. The singularities of DNB and ODNB may be compared with those of earlier biographical dictionaries, and the comparison will show just how long is the tradition of collecting together biographies, and how complex and varied the reasons for doing so. Today we tend to think primarily of national biographical dictionaries. Recently, Keith Thomas has surveyed the origins and changing forms of national biographical collections, charting their development in Britain in comparison with similar collections undertaken by other nations.¹⁰ But if the specifically national dictionary is the norm in our age of nation states, and at a time when we still organise scholarship into the study of the language, literature and history of discrete national cultures, there have been other ways of collecting and organising biographies in the past.

Some collections, such as that produced in 1620 by Henry Holland the Jacobean printer and bookseller, the Heroolgia Anglica, which contained sixty-five portraits of Tudor worthies, starting with Henry VIII, were simply made for profit alone. Others were compiled for moral and didactic purposes. The Scottish physician George Mackenzie produced his Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Writers of the Scots Nation between 1708–22, at a singular moment following the Act of Union with England, in an attempt, no doubt, to celebrate and preserve specifically Scottish achievements and identities. But his purpose was also educative in the broadest sense, and he encouraged his readers to learn from ‘the Vertues and Failures of Others’.

We might cast forward also to the Victorian, Samuel Smiles, the misunderstood author of the famous text Self Help. Smiles worked in a tradition of exemplary biography and presented the engineers and technologists of Britain’s industrial transformation as character models for his audience, examples of commitment, perseverance and the will to make the best of themselves for the good of their fellow men and women. Other compilers had a point to prove and a more personal motive for picking up their pens: it is suggested that Sir Robert Naunton, a minor politician, produced his Fragmenta Regalia in 1634 on the personalities of the court of Elizabeth I, and which also offered practical advice on governance to Charles I, to demonstrate to his king that he had not yet lost his faculties and was still up to the job of Master of the Court of Wards. Alas, it did not work: the king dismissed him in the following year, and he died within a matter of days.

For others again, the collection of lives was an extension of the collection of information in general. John Leland planned to write books on the geography and genealogy of England as well as on the nation’s authors: bio-bibliography was just part of a vast national project that Leland never completed, but which was taken up again at the end of the sixteenth century by William Camden, whose Britannia was first published in 1586, and by the scholars who gathered round him to form the first Society of Antiquaries. The Society’s wide-ranging interests fostered developments that culminated in the work of John Aubrey, the remarkable late-seventeenth century antiquarian known for his Brief Lives of notable figures since the reign of Elizabeth I. Aubrey was interested in ancient monuments, folklore, topography, place names: why not also the history of people? He worked in an antiquarian tradition which did not differentiate as we do between people, places, natural wonders, and man-made landscapes.

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) taught us that the modern disciplinary boundaries we recognise and work with – the way knowledge is organised and divided into separate subjects – is a product of the late-eighteenth century. Before then, biography took its place alongside other and unfamiliar bedfellows, and was an extension of other forms of knowledge. A work like Robert Plot’s The Natural History of Oxfordshire, being an Essay toward the Natural History of England, published in 1676, was clearly composed on the assumption that readers would be as interested in the biographies of county worthies as in the geology, flora and fauna of Oxfordshire, and would see no contradiction in reading of all these things in the same book.

The antecedents of our biographical collections, in Britain at least, are largely religious in nature. It is true that secular history was given what may be called a biographical dimension in the writings of a chronicler like William of Malmesbury, whose early twelfth-century Gesta Regum is laid out on a reign-by-reign basis, and gives details of the lives of successive kings. However, this process was taken much further in the hands of ecclesiastical writers: hence, for example, the succession of lives of the abbots of St Albans written by the great chroniclers from that abbey, Matthew Paris and Thomas Walsingham, which Paris began in the mid-thirteenth century and which Walsingham continued up to the late-fourteenth century.

Perhaps the most notable figure in the medieval tradition was Henry Kirkestede, once mistakenly known as John Boston of Bury, the fourteenth-century prior of Bury St Edmunds, who compiled for the Bury novices lists of ecclesiastical works, each with a biography of the author, some 674 in total, in his Catalogus scriptorium ecclesie. Kirkestede’s labours originated a Christian bio-bibliographical tradition in which biography grew out of the attempt to compile lists of manuscripts and books and to tell posterity something about their authors as well, a tradition which continued into the early modern period. Thus, in the late-seventeenth century, William Cave, an Anglican clergyman and patristic scholar, produced a series of works listing all the Christian writers known to him, with basic biographical details appended, from the birth of Christ until Luther. He followed this with a literary history of the writers of the Church, his Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria in 1688. There was also a separate hagiographical tradition, perhaps starting with the Sanctilogium compiled by John Tynemouth, a Northumbrian vicar, in the mid-fourteenth century, which contains the lives of 156 British saints. Later compilations were undertaken by Catholic scholars such as the ‘Briefe register or Alphabetical Catalogue’ of Nicholas Roscarrock, collected in the early seventeenth century, which contained nearly a thousand lives of the saints of Britain and Ireland.

The urge to collect biographical information seems to have been all the stronger in periods of uncertainty rather than stability. Leland began his quest to catalogue English libraries and manuscripts in 1533 with a commission from Henry VIII in his pocket.

But the dissolution of the monastic orders and the consequent disruption and dispersal of the great learned collections from 1536 gave a new and urgent purpose to his work, and seems to have engendered the idea in him, and also in his friend and co-worker John Bale, later Bishop of Ossory in Ireland, who likewise sought to catalogue and preserve the major manuscript holdings in England at this time, of a biographical dictionary as a necessary companion to a national bibliography. It was not only the manuscripts and books that were in imminent physical danger; knowledge of their authors might perish in the great disruption as well. In his own words, Leland wrote his Viri illustres ‘so that the reputation of so many learned and elegant writers of our British should not perish’. Leland’s major works were unpublished in his lifetime and circulated in manuscript only, as we have seen. Bale, however, published several works of bio-bibliography of which the most famous and important was his Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytannie (1557–59), an indispensable source on English medieval literature. Interestingly, at one time Bale possessed a medieval copy of Kirkestede’s work, which passed down through the hands of several notable Tudor and Stuart writers and antiquaries.

In a more peaceful era, the collections of the two late seventeenth century antiquarians, Anthony Wood, compiler of Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92), and John Aubrey, who were also long-term collaborators, may be understood as responses to the turbulent passage of Tudor and Stuart History, from the Reformation to the Restoration, which now seemed to have reached a conclusion. Thomas Hobbes had contended that the cause of the Civil War from which he had fled into exile was the uncensored and unchecked religious and political ferment of the universities which, since the Elizabethan era, had become seats of political instability: ‘The Universities have been to this nation, as the wooden horse to the Trojans.’ Wood’s biographical opus on Oxford men and their books since 1500 – subtitled An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the Most Ancient and Famous University of Oxford – was thus not as parochial as it might at first seem. Both he and Aubrey reflected the political and scholarly temper of a calmer and more measured age which had deliberately shunned religious and constitutional disputation. But they collected details on the lives of the many notable individuals who had been at the heart of the politics and culture of the ‘century of revolution’ now ended, conscious, perhaps, of the need to provide a record of its leading personalities. In Wood’s case, the politics of biography were not obscure: his sympathies were with the Laudians of the 1630s, his animus to the Puritans.

Other early modern biographical compilations were inspired by a cause: indeed, they became scholarly weapons to be deployed in the religious and political struggles of their age. Bale – bad tempered and ‘bilious Bale’, as he was called – was strongly anti-Catholic, a bias evident throughout his work. Bale’s close friend, with whom he shared information in turn while they lived in England, and also while they were in exile in Switzerland in the 1550s, and whom he influenced profoundly, was the famous John Foxe, compiler of the remarkable Acts and Monuments. First published in 1563 and commonly known to contemporaries and posterity as Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, this was an essentially biographical listing, running to thousands of pages and many changing editions, of those who had witnessed by martyrdom to the truth of the Christian religion from the apostolic age onwards, a process culminating in the Protestant Marian martyrs of the 1550s.

Foxe was not only concerned with his own age, but was operating on a scale comparable with the most ambitious of biographical dictionaries of any period or nation. Acts and Monuments is in effect cosmic history, recording the establishment of the church, its period of flourishing (roughly between Constantine and Gregory the Great), its deterioration and degradation, and finally the period of ‘the reformation and purging of the church of God’, which is seen as a fight to the finish between the forces of good – the reformers – and evil – the Antichrist, in the form of the Catholic Church. In the eight-volume edition on the open shelves of the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, Foxe does not get to the reformers of Henry VIII’s reign until towards the end of the fourth volume, and to Mary’s reign only in the sixth volume. For a further three hundred years, the work inspired anti-Catholicism in Britain.

Like modern biographical dictionaries, Acts and Monuments was a collaborative and evolving enterprise, using information collected by Bale and other leading Protestant divines, and the ‘fieldwork’ of many more humble people using local records. Much of it was written by other hands than Foxe’s, though, like a modern editor, he presided. It even incorporated oral testimony from those who had lived through Bloody Mary’s reign or could attest to her crimes. Though lesser in length and inevitably unequal in its influence, a reply of sorts to this tradition of Protestant biographising and martyrology was presented in the bio-bibliographical collection of the Roman Catholic priest and English exile, John Pits, whose De illustribus Angliae scriptoribus was published in 1619. It contests Bale’s bias, and provides valuable information on contemporary Catholic authors.

Later biographical collections were made as part of the struggle between the established church and dissent. The leading Presbyterian minister of the early eighteenth century, Edward Calamy, produced his Account of many others of those worthy ministers who were ejected after the restauration of King Charles the Second, which eventually exceeded two thousand pages, and which listed all the ejected clergyman he had been able to trace who were deprived of their livings after the Act of Uniformity in 1662 for failing to swear their loyalty to the new religious orthodoxy. The work grew out of a chapter of Calamy’s biography of Richard Baxter, his Abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s Narrative, published in 1702. In turn, Calamy was answered by the Anglican John Walker in his Attempt towards recovering an account of the numbers and sufferings of the clergy of the Church of England, heads of colleges, fellows, scholars, &c., who were sequester’d , harass’d, &c. in the late times of the grand rebellion (1714), an equivalent book of martyrology, if of less scholarly merit, giving details of those clergy persecuted and ejected by the Puritans between 1640 and 1660.

Like the Reformation, the English Civil War inspired attempts to understand and chronicle it which took a biographical form. The History of the Rebellion, by Edward Hyde, first earl Clarendon, advisor and lord chancellor to Charles II, and accounted one of the greatest works of English historiography, is punctuated by a superb series of character sketches which have worked their way into popular as well as scholarly memory.

Not all of these studies were partisan, however: one at least, Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (1662), containing short biographies of the most noteworthy figures in each county, was the corollary to his serious historical analysis of the Civil War, and was the culmination of several pioneering works that this Anglican clergyman had researched and published on the Civil War’s religious and political origins. These included a study of the leading figures of the Reformation, Abel redevivus, published in 1651; The Church History of Britain (1655), with its discussion of the Laudian reforms and their effects; and an edition of documents from the famous parliamentary session of 1628–29, the last before the eleven-year period of Charles I’s personal rule.

I have provided quite enough examples to make my point clear: that the history of biographical compilation is rich, varied and complex, and has been undertaken for many different reasons, in different circumstances, and often in furtherance of a cause. Specifically national compilations, in recognition and celebration of the nation state, are comparatively recent in origin, and a focus on them may obscure other and older traditions of biographical collection. But this has not been an exercise in antiquarianism in itself, which can be dismissed by the modern scholar as of no relevance to the biographical research that we do today. For these historic biographical collections have an enduring life, their information assimilated over the generations into later, broader and different compilations that nevertheless depend upon the delving and recording of medieval and early modern scholars. In the ODNB, some 158 biographies depend upon Leland as a source; Bales’s work is crucial to 259 of the included lives; Foxe’s martyrology provides information on 224 subjects in the Dictionary. Anthony Wood’s biographies of the university men of Tudor and Stuart England in his Athenae Oxonienses has provided information used for 1470 separate lives in the ODNB; Thomas Fuller’s researches are cited 195 times.

Truly, in collecting biographies we stand upon the shoulders of others, those many collectors, compilers, antiquarians and scholars whose manuscripts have gone through many hands and many editions over the centuries; have been discussed and argued over; and have been tested by those who came later. According to Richard Sharpe, ‘the way in which Leland, Bale, and [Thomas] Tanner were meshed together, each understanding and building on the work of his predecessors, has given their work a value that has lasted even to the present time’. For these reasons, we can be as sure as may be that the information they left to posterity, though it may reflect a decided point of view, has been scrutinised carefully and those parts of it thought worthy have been transmitted to those who came after – to us, in fact. We cannot be so sure about the vast quantities of information posted indiscriminately on the World Wide Web.

But my argument goes beyond familiar concerns over quality control and the absence of peer review, a term that might have conjured quite other connotations to Sir Robert Naunton in 1634. My concern is also, in the words of Kingsley Amis, that ‘more is worse’, or in the case of biography, that the very nature of fast searching on the Internet will desensitise us to all those many issues – biographical, bibliographical and editorial – bound up in collecting lives and making sense of them, and will lead us to ignore the principles governing the compilations we use and their differences one from another.

My fascinating conversations in the winter of 2006 with the editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), Di Langmore, and her staff have thrown up just such differences between the ODNB and the ADB, now happily and most successfully online as well. I admire very much the sharpness and focus of the entries in the ADB, even more so now that I appreciate the rigorous checking of each and every fact in a submitted article. For her part, Dr Langmore spoke appreciatively of the style of biographical memoir that has always characterised the DNB – the rounded, literary and rather more impressionistic portrait of the life and its context, inevitably longer and more discursive. It is the style bequeathed to us by Leslie Stephen, who had perfected the biographical appreciation rather than the résumé many years before he became editor, and it has come to characterise and distinguish everything we do.

My concern is that in an electronic age that distinction will cease to be appreciated; indeed, may actually deter a researcher in a hurry, looking for information and impatient with the discussion of dress, appearance, character, tastes and style in an ODNB article. The Internet is for searching and Googling, not for reading and reflecting: we use it in different ways and expect from it different things than we do from ‘Hours in a Library’, the title of a compilation of Stephen’s essays published in the 1870s. Merely in the handling and opening of books, through many different signs and indicators, we can discover something of their purpose and provenance. The Internet is much more difficult to decipher and decode.

Hence my message: that to use biographical compilations properly we must use them cautiously, paying due attention to their raisons d’être, the circumstances of their composition, their textual history, their use of sources. This applies even to today’s biographical dictionaries, written by scholars for scholars, which may seem to have escaped the bias and prejudices of the past. I am saying nothing more than that biographical dictionaries are texts like any other, which must be read with care and used with insight. But if they are texts, then they are something more and other than ‘databases’ and ‘Web-based resources’, horrid words all.

The internet promotes fast searching among sources of information whose provenance may be unknown and authority difficult to substantiate. We should not use biographical dictionaries, carefully compiled according to the highest editorial standards, as if they are just another of these many sources, some more dubious than others. We should treat them with respect, seeking to understand why and how they have been created, and to what end, for with that knowledge we can use their information with greater accuracy and confidence. National biographical dictionaries of the type that we use all the time have a rationale as records of the historical development and historical consciousness of the nation state: hence the energies devoted to them in so many countries since the age of nationalism in the nineteenth century.

International and transnational collections will also have a rationale in a globalising age when knowing something about figures across boundaries rather than within them may be required. But let there be a rationale: let us do things virtually for a reason, because it will advance knowledge or truly assist scholarship, not just because we can. And let us treat our texts with respect, as complex entities reflecting many different factors in their production.

Andrew Kippis was the editor of the second edition of the Biographia Britannica at the close of the eighteenth century. Like other figures we have encountered in the biographical traditions I have sketched, he was accused of bias, by James Boswell among others, though we need to know that Dr Johnson had turned down the position of editor when it was offered to him ahead of Kippis, apparently to his later regret. In the same year, 1777, Johnson signed the contract to produce his own exercise in collective biography, The Lives of the Poets (1779–81). As a Presbyterian minister, a leading dissenter – a colleague, indeed, of Richard Price and the great Joseph Priestley as a tutor at the dissenting academy in Hackney – Kippis was criticised for including too many nonconformist clergymen in his selection of lives, and showing too great a fondness for heterodox doctrines. Alas, his second edition only got as far as the letter F, in five volumes that took more than fifteen years to produce, after which the project was killed off. But Kippis penned an interesting preface to his compilation which is worth rehearsing. Biography, he explained,

may be regarded as presenting us with a variety of events, that, like experiments in Natural Philosophy, may become the materials from which general truths and principles are to be drawn. When Biographical knowledge is employed in enlarging our acquaintance with Human Nature, in exciting an honourable emulation, in correcting our prejudices, in refining our sentiments, and in regulating our conduct, it then attains its true excellence. Besides its being a pleasing amusement, and a just tribute of respect to illustrious characters, it rises to the dignity of SCIENCE; and of such science as must be esteemed of peculiar importance, because it hath MAN for its object.¹²

Kippis’s desire to construct a science of man is a classical statement of a central aspect of the eighteenth-century British Enlightenment. His ambition that biography should be the basis of a human science may seem quaint or inappropriate to us now; and perhaps to his contemporaries it was similarly overblown. But the claim that biography should be more than just ‘a pleasing amusement’ is the final caution in this cautionary tale.

The Internet may provide us with information on a scale and at a speed that was unimaginable just a few years ago; but it may also trivialise and denature sources and texts that deserve and require more careful reading and reflection. Kippis intended that biography itself should be elevated ‘to the dignity of a science’; my hopes are more modest – merely that in a virtual age we treat biographical information with the dignity that it, and those who have compiled it over the centuries, deserve.

Acknowledgments

This is an edited version of the 2006 Seymour Lecture, which was delivered in Canberra, Melbourne and Perth. I am grateful to James Carley and Richard Sharpe for making available to me their recent work on John Leland and the English bibliographical tradition; to Ian Donaldson, now of the University of Melbourne, for his encouragement and advice; to Philip Carter and Rupert Mann of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; to Henry Summerson for his comments on a draft of this lecture; to the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, where this essay was written; and to John and Heather Seymour, who have endowed the annual Seymour Lecture in Biography and who were such kind hosts in Canberra in 2006. Most of the biographical and bibliographical information in this essay is drawn from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Endnotes

¹ R.C. Christie, ‘Dictionary of National Biography’, Quarterly Review, Vol. 164, April 1887, p. 353.

² James P. Carley, ‘The First Dictionary of National Biography’, The Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, University of Oxford, Trinity Term 2006, unpublished. Richard Sharpe, ‘The English Bibliographical Tradition from Kirkestede to Tanner’ in Charles Burnett and Nicholas Mann (eds.), Britannia Latina. Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, (Warburg Institute Colloquia, 8) (London, 2005) 86–128.

³ Jenifer Glynn, Prince of Publishers: A Biography of George Smith (London, 1986), 199–206.

⁴ Sir Keith Thomas referred to Matthew’s indispensability in his address at Colin Matthew’s funeral, 4 November 1999, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.

⁵ Rev. Dr Augustus Jessopp, ‘The Dictionary of National Biography’, The Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1890, pp 1008–09.

⁶ Lawrence Goldman, ‘A Monument to the Victorian Age? Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography 1882–2004’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11.1, Spring 2006, pp 115–16.

⁷ The Times, 9 July 1897, p. 10. Stephen was speaking at a dinner given by George Smith to the editor and contributors of the DNB at the Hotel Metropole, London on 8 July 1897.

⁸ Sidney Lee, ‘Statistical Account’, preface to the 63^rd and last volume of the DNB, 1900.

⁹ The Oxford DNB received £3 million from the British government via the British Academy towards the cost of research. The balance, £22 million, was made up by Oxford University Press, with no prospect of a commercial return on its investment in national scholarship.

¹⁰ Keith Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography. The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (The Leslie Stephen Special Lecture, Cambridge, 2004).

¹¹ Carley, ‘The First Dictionary of National Biography’, Lecture 1, f.1. Quotation taken from John Leland, The Laboryouse Journey & Serche of John Leylande, for Englands Antiquitees, Geuen of Hym as a Newe Yeares Gyfte to Kynge Henry the VIII in Sharpe, ‘The English Bibliographical Tradition’, pp 97-8.

¹² Biographia Britannica, 2^nd edn., Vol. 1 (1778), p. xxi, quoted in Isabel Rivers, ‘Biographical Dictionaries and their Users from Bayle to Chalmers’ in I. Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth Century England: New Essays (Leicester, 2001), p. 157.