Vol. 3 No. 22/23 · 3 December 1981
pages 3-6 | 3434 words
British Worthies
David Cannadine
- The Directory of National Biography, 1961-1970 edited by E.T. Williams and C.S. Nicholls
Oxford, 1178 pp, £40.00, October 1981, ISBN 0 19 865207 0
‘Mr Stephen is editing a little dictionary,’ a friend explained to a clergyman foolhardy enough to ask whether Leslie ‘did any writing’. The enterprise in question was the DNB, one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London. Year after year, at three-monthly intervals, the volumes plopped from the press, 63 in all, from Jacques Abbadie in 1885 to William Zuylestein in 1900, containing some thirty thousand pages on which 650 contributors recorded the details of 30,000 lives. And, as with the painting of the Forth Bridge, once this great Victorian monument was completed it was time to start all over again. In 1901, a three-volume supplement appeared, repairing important omissions from the original work, and adding in those worthies who had died since its appearance. Ten years later, another three volumes followed, spanning the decade from the death of Victoria to the demise of Edward VII.
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Letters
Vol. 4 No. 9 · 20 May 1982
From Carolyn White
SIR: In his review of the Dictionary of National Biography, 1961-1970 (LRB, Vol. 3, No 22/23), David Cannadine writes that ‘the editorial chair has migrated westward, from the Cambridge of Stephen and Lee to the Oxonian and Imperial portals of Rhodes House.’ Unlike Leslie Stephen, Sidney Lee was not associated with Cambridge. He was an Oxford undergraduate at Balliol from 1878 to 1882. The editorial offices under Stephen and Lee were actually located in Waterloo Place, London. Oxford University Press acquired the DNB in 1916 on the death of the son of the founder, when representatives of the family presented it with the copyright, stock and plates. At the time, OUP was reluctant to continue the supplements. When Lee criticised the lack of commitment by the new managers, he was henceforth excluded from further association with the enterprise. He died in 1926.
Although moral judgments do abound in the original Dictionary, Lee himself objected to the writing of biography for purposes of ‘moral edification’ and wrote in 1911 that ‘the biographer is a narrator, not a moralist.’ He did subscribe to discretion and tact, but his view that sinners, if they satisfied the commemorative instinct, occasionally demanded to be admitted to the biographic fold, was an untypical Late Victorian biographical principle. Lee’s DNB biography of Edward VII may today seem ‘a lengthy lament’: however, when it was published, the article appeared so unflattering that zealous servants of Queen Alexandra took extraordinary measures to force a revision. Major public figures were enlisted in a campaign to discredit the author. Lee resisted the pressure, noting that ‘no healthy code of ethics will suffer [the biographer] slavishly to echo the sentimentalities of the family circle or social coterie.’ In spite of the tempest aroused by the article, or perhaps because of it, George V later appointed Lee to be the official biographer of Edward VII.
Carolyn White
University of Alabama in Huntsville
