Fifty Thousand Lives
by Albert R. Vogeler
The long-awaited publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in
September 2004 is an historical event in the world of scholarship. It also has a more local
significance because the Pollak Library has purchased it, sharing the cost equally with the
Patrons. And a third, purely personal, connection is reported here as well.
Publicity surrounding the Oxford DNB is suffused with superlatives. The largest
cooperative research project ever undertaken in the humanities, it comprises sixty volumes,
sixty thousand pages, and sixty-two million words. Occupying eleven feet of shelf space
and weighing in at 280 pounds, it presents the biographies of 54,922 men and women over
2,400 years of British history and has 10,000 contributors and 10,000 illustrations.
The superlatives are qualitative as well as quantitative. A complete revision of the
original late Victorian DNB, it finally does justice to women with 3,000 new biographies
and to people whose contributions to history lie beyond the traditional categories of royalty,
aristocracy, politics, literature, army, navy, church, and law. It embraces influential lives
devoted to, for example, business, music, science,
teaching, sports, acting, building,
gardening, and even to crime and treason. Every entry in the original Victorian DNB has
been updated and 13,500 new ones written. Notable personalities in the Empire—India,
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, the West Indies, and pre-revolutionary America—
appear as part of greater Britain, as do Britons living in other countries such as Holland,
Russia, Arabia, and China. Thus Britons--including Welsh, Scottish, and Irish--appear as
part of world civilization rather than as merely insular Europeans.
But new facts and liberalized principles for inclusion, though important, are not the
essence of the new DNB. That essence lies in the spirit of the writing, modernized for the
21st century. More direct, colloquial, and frank, more evaluative and critical, more ready to
use anecdote and quotation—more readable and revealing—the new prose style was already
being approximated in the biographies of the single-volume supplements to the old DNB
that appeared each decade from the fifties to the nineties. Younger scholars were writing a
newer kind of prose for a wider, not necessarily academic, audience. It was to them that
the Oxford DNB turned for many of its contributors.
How was such an ambitious project organized and managed over the twelve years
since 1992? Very thoughtfully. The founding editor, the Victorian scholar Professor Colin
Matthew, with the backing of Oxford University, the Oxford University Press, and the
British Academy, and supported by thirty full-time researchers, laid out the parameters.
Subject categories, chronological periods, researchers’ assignments, nomenclature, style,
length of entries, computer coding, scheduled completion dates, proofreading policy, and
the like were established and tested. All the rules, procedures, and aims of the staff had to
be transmitted to the 10,000 contributors by mail, since e-mail could not be assumed to be
universally available nor was it appropriate for lengthy communications.
attention was paid to the book’s design, illustrations, paper, binding, and ink.
Meticulous
And the
expert contributors themselves had to be recruited.
Early in the project, my wife Martha and I had met Colin Matthew at a conference
where he spoke in order to encourage American scholars in British studies to volunteer as
contributors. Brought on board, we researched and wrote our entries and often thought
about the project as a whole. We wondered who else was contributing to it, what their
assignments were, what names would be included for the first time, and who was revising
old entries in which we felt a certain proprietary interest.
But all such information was
strictly, and probably wisely, withheld by the editors.
At the beginning
we were somewhat daunted by
our assignments. Writing
commitments were formalized by a signed contract for each entry, had to be submitted and
later proofread on individual schedules, and were rewarded by surprisingly prompt, if
modest, payment for each completed entry.
Work on several entries could proceed
simultaneously. Each entry required exact information on personal details such as birth and
death dates, education, marriage, and residences, but the Oxford staff had sources for
documentation unavailable overseas. Monthly and annual progress reports, newsletters,
instructions, and reminders, all on inconveniently-sized British A4 paper, came to us at the
speed of flight from London, and shorter messages by e-mail at the speed of light from
Oxford.
For quite a few years, in Oxford in the summer, I would make my way along St.
Giles to the unassuming old Georgian building numbered 37a and climb the broad wooden
stairs to Colin Matthew’s book-lined, book-piled office. There, after brief pleasantries, I
was given just 20 minutes to discuss my ongoing, possible, or problematic entries. If I
suggested a name as worthy of a new entry, I usually learned that I was thereby assigning
the task to myself—a sobering deterrent to name-dropping. On parting I was generally
referred to one of the many research specialists working in odd hidden rooms in the old
University Press. I eventually emerged feeling privileged to have been allowed even this
much time with the Editor-in-Chief. When, in 1999, the scholarly world was dismayed to
learn of his sudden death, we wondered how the project would be affected. Fortunately, he
was soon succeeded by another noted Oxford historian, Professor Brian Harrison, under
whom the Oxford DNB was completed on schedule.
One great fact about the Oxford DNB has so far gone unmentioned.
As an
alternative to the printed book edition, Oxford offers an electronic online edition of the full
text which can be accessed by any library patron at a computer using an entry code.
(Institutions that purchase the volumes qualify for a year’s free online service, which may be
renewed, and individuals may subscribe without buying the books.)
The electronic DNB
was envisaged from the beginning as the coming form of 21st century reference publishing,
and the entire project was designed to make this possible. It offers a means of searching the
biographies for relationships of every conceivable kind because any of the key facts on
each web page can be cross-referenced, linked, compared, and organized. New connections
and new generalizations may be seen, and new avenues for research may be opened up with
a comprehensiveness, precision, and speed impossible in the realm of print. Regular updates
and new entries will be added automatically and indefinitely. We now have the beautifully
printed books, and they will serve readers well. But the future is in the bytes and pixels.