MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD
Christopher Howse on how some
illustrious corpses were finally rounded up for posterity
WHY SHOULD anyone buy the latest volume in the ever-expanding Dictionary of National Biography? I do not mean that it is bad, as the reviewers will agree. But it will cost you £65 (£80 after the end of March). And have you got the rest of the volumes? You need the basic 22 (original- ly published as 66) plus the largely decen- nial supplements, bringing the total to 31. There used to be an extra volume of Index and Epitomes, but, since that seems not to have been republished and no one can have found it much use in the first place, we can forget about it.
Of course, it will be answered, public and academic libraries will want the new volume. After all, it adds 1,068 lives of people who escaped the net of the original compilers. Yet in 10 years' time a revised version of the whole caboodle, called the New Dictionary of National Biography, will `It's a great night for acting. The cheers are really convincing.' be published. Its editor, Professor Colin Matthew, tells me that he will have room for about 50,000 lives, some 13,000 more than in the current DNB. This rather puts the 1,068 in Missing Persons in the shade.
(The New DNB will be published simulta- neously as a piece of computer software as well as a book, which will be handy for researchers seeking cross-references, but fills me with an irrationally uncomfortable feeling.) By the way, Dr Matthew is anxious to dispel inaccurate press reports that he will remove any lives from his revised edition; he won't, though he may trim some down. This seems not unreasonable in cases such as Queen Victoria's. She got 112 pages, approaching 100,000 words, in the 1901 supplement to the first edition, written by the then editor, Sir Sidney Lee. Her near- est rival, Shakespeare, got only 49 pages, and the average length of an entry was just under a page. Still, it was right in a way that Sir Sidney should let his pen run away with him with Queen Victoria's life. For it was the culminating contribution to a vast Victorian enterprise comparable to the compilation of the Oxford English Dictio- nary or the establishment of London Library or the reading room of the British Museum (now known as the BL and ripe for destruction). It is in a spirit of celebra- tion that we are asked to pay out our £65 (or £80 after March). And Dr C.S. Nicholls, the editrix of Missing Persons, has understandably been whipping up that cel- ebratory spirit for all it's worth.
We in Britain do seem rather good at such undertakings. The original DNB issued a volume averaging 460 pages every quarter day from 1 January 1885 until Mid- summer 1900 with unbroken punctuality. By that time a similar enterprise, the Dic- tionnaire Nationale of Belgium, had been 33 years in preparation and had got no fur- ther than the letter N, with 5,000 lives com- pared with the DNB's 29,190.
When Dr Nicholls wrote to The Spectator in 1989 asking for names of people whom readers had looked up in the DNB and had been disappointed not to find, she says that she received some 100,000 suggestions. (Well, she had written to other 'quality newspapers' too.) As soon as her commit- tee had whittled the numbers down, the professional problems of an editor began. Contributors didn't file copy on time; some who did sent too much: '50,000 words instead of 500 is a record,' according to Dr Nicholls.
There remains the dinner-party game of who's in, who's out. That is a game that the reviewers have and will continue to play. Criminals were my initial worry. After all, the original edition of the DNB boasted: 'Malefactors whose crimes excite a permanent interest have received hardly less attention than benefactors.' Mr John Gross clearly had similar anxieties, for he complains that, while the murderer Christie is in, Crippen is out. One might say in reply that the injustice of the hang- ing of Evans instead of Christie was a force in the repeal of capital punishment in Britain, as Ludovic Kennedy (the author of the book 10 Rillington Place and of Christie's entry in Missing Persons) notes. But then Crippen was reputed as the first murderer to be caught by telegraphy (he had tried to escape by ship to America).
It is surprising to find Max Miller (though not Kenneth Horne) excluded when really not very memorable names get in. There has been a conscious effort to put in artists and architects from the Mid- dle Ages. About their lives not much is always known.
Of Hugo of Bury St Edmunds, a 12th- century illuminator whose dates of birth and death are not recorded, his biographer comments: 'Whether or not Hugo was a wall-painter, the records of his activities as carver and manuscript painter attest to his versatility.' Then there had to be more women, too (12 per cent, against the origi- nal DNB's 3), such as Roy Strong's sub- ject, the decoratively named Tudor painter Levina Teerlinc, of whom he remarks: `Her most characteristic feature is a head attached to a too small, spindly body. Her technique remained awkward, thin and often cursory.' Doesn't seem to qualify her as a memorable artist. Yet it may be better than the record of the original DNB, which included lives of people who never existed (such as Merlin) and even managed to give thanks to J.W. Clerke as a contribu- tor, though, as a later edition admits in a shamefaced footnote, 'except for the entry in the List of Contributors there is no trace of J.W. Clerke'.
Then there are Timothy Stunt, Steven Sturdy and Peter Sluglett. They are all included in the new volume. Not as sub- jects, mind you, but as contributors. It is the choice of who would write the lives that I find fascinating. Messrs Stunt, Stur- dy and Sluglett are experts in their field. Each has written one life. Richard Ingrams has written three (Gerard Hoff- nung, T.H. White and Graham Laidlaw, the cartoonist Pont). The way it happened seems to be that he suggested their inclu- sion (and each deserves to be there), some consultation went on (Hugh Massingberd was asked informally about Pont) and then Mr Ingrams got the reply, 'Yes, all right, why don't you do them?' Odder is the case of Eric Liddell, the runner (Chariots of Fire and all that). Sally Magnusson wrote a biography of him_ in 1981, but it is her father, Magnus, who writes the life in Miss- ing Persons.
Some contributors have clearly been cho- sen for their personal knowledge. Thus Lord Deedes writes on A.G. Macdonell (England, Their England), whom he knew; Frances Partridge writes on the Blooms- buryite Dora Carrington, her late hus- band's former wife. It is surprising, though, to find Bernard Levin writing on Stewart Headlam (1847-1924), the Christian Social- ist who was deprived of his licence to preach after advocating the abolition of the House of Lords, and who once sent the imprisoned atheist Charles Bradlaugh a telegram reading, 'Accept my warmest sympathy. I wish you good luck in the name of Jesus Christ, the Emancipator, whom so many of your opponents blaspheme.' Headlam seems a more sympathetic character than Jacob Bauthumley or Bot- tomley (a relation perhaps of the current Health Secretary), defined as 'Ranter'. He was bored through the tongue with a hot iron for blasphemy, for writing The Light and Dark Sides of God, which was ordered to be burned. He was referred to unfavourably by George Fox, the Quaker. For the last nine years or so of his life he was keeper of the house of correction in Leicester. I should rather spend my days in Dr Nicholls' scriptorium than there, I think.
The Dictionary of National Biography: Miss- ing Persons, edited by C.S. Nicholls, Oxford University Press.
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