Best of British

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison OUP, in association with the British Academy, £6,500 until 30 November, thereafter £7,5000, pp. 61,440, ISBN 019861411Y on-line edition £195+VAT p.a. At this moment a Biographical Dictionary begins to loom on the horizon.' That short, electric sentence is found in the biography of one great Englishman by another, the life of Sir Leslie Stephen by his friend F. W. Maitland, published in 1906. Maitland was the man who reinvented the study of the Middle Ages, of English law, and of how we try to understand history; a man of whom it was once said that if his work survived and everything every other English historian had written since disappeared it would be a tolerable bargain.

He died before his time, but he survived Stephen, that truly and splendidly eminent Victorian, and how grand such men do seem compared with the pipsqueaking Lytton Strachey. Critic, Cambridge don, clergyman (until he shed his holy orders, saying that he hadn't lost his faith but simply found he never had any), mountaineer, rowing coach, journalist, husband, and father of four, one of them Virginia Woolf, Stephen personified that slightly demonic energy and prolificity of his age, a writer for whom it was an empty week if he hadn't turned out three essays of at least 5,000 words each.

If that was one of the characteristics of the age, another was a mania for computation and classification, an unmistakable expression of the English genius. These were the days when the Victoria County History was conceived, when the Ordnance Survey maps were consummated, and when James Murray began his New English Dictionary which would become a tribute by a nation to its language matched nowhere else on earth. With the same slightly crazy zeal as Murray, Stephen first envisaged a universal biographical dictionary, everyone in the whole wide world, but realism soon dictated confining it to his own country. For this Dictionary of National Biography he enlisted the publisher George Smith, under whose imprint the DNB first appeared, and Sir Sidney Lee, an elusive but attractive figure, a bachelor scholar, historian and ardent Shakespearian. Lee was born Solomon Lazarus, and among the correspondence in the DNB archives are sniping snippets of genteel English anti-Semitism directed at him. but Stephen was untouched by that and they remained deeply loyal colleagues.

Between them they produced their vast work at what now seems astonishing speed. The first volume appeared in 1885, the 63rd and last of the original edition in 1900. The editors were immensely hard workers, who expected hard work from others. Lee said of Stephen that 'he refused mercy to contributors who offered him vague conjecture or sentimental eulogy instead of unembroidered fact' — an excellent motto for his successors today — and Stephen said of Lee that he was 'always calm and confident when I was tearing my hair over the delay of some article urgently required', something those successors no doubt recognise all too well.

After its original volumes, and then a couple of supplements, the DNB was updated throughout the 20th century in decennial and then lustral volumes of varying quality. 'Murray's' was taken over by 'the Press', as Oxonians call it, to become the Oxford English Dictionary, and 15 years ago was reborn in its magnificent second edition. The DNB likewise passed from Smith's firm to the Oxford University Press, and as the century drew on the DNB editors might have continued with those volumes for the indefinite future, or perhaps all the existing work, original and supplements, could have been cobbled together in a pretence of a revised edition.

Instead of which, in the manner of the OED second edition though on a vaster scale, the decision was taken to start again and to produce a new edition of the dictionary. It is this Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which is now before us, and one can say confidently and without exaggeration that it is the publishing event of the year or perhaps the decade. Not the least remarkable thing about it is that the 60 volumes are appearing in the very week that was marked down as publication date more than 12 years ago, and anyone who has ever had any dealings at all with the book trade will start back in amazement at that statement.

It is not a completely new work begun from scratch, which would have been unnecessary as well as unfeasible. In a work of the DNB's scale, with the best will and the greatest effort, the contents were bound to be uneven in quality. Some of the work in the original was of the highest scholarly and literary standard, some of it was not far short of hackwork. It's exhilarating but also amusing and touching to think of those editors in late-Victorian London commissioning and chasing their contributors, scholars and scribblers, men of genius and penny-a-liners, meticulously punctual or woefully tardy.

So not everything had to go, and a first decision for the present editors was what to keep, what to revise, and what to replace. Roughly speaking, the more recent and the shorter essays were, the more likely they are to have been kept. To take a not quite random case, the essay on Shiva Naipaul is almost untouched from its appearance in the 1981-85 volume (less random than solipsistic, since I wrote it), and that seems to be true of many essays written in the past 30 or 40 years. It would be captious to suggest that some of them might have well been superseded: there are one or two cases where the danger of sentimental eulogy wasn't wholly avoided.

On the other hand, almost all the longer essays on more important personages, monarchs, archbishops and every prime minister, have been replaced with new work, sometimes no doubt with a tinge of regret, and sometimes with the original itself mentioned in the new essay, under 'Reputation'. Thus Christopher Hibbert's fine essay on George IV quotes the gloriously brutal peroration of J. A. Hamilton's original DNB essay:

There have been more wicked kings in English history, but none so unredeemed by any signal greatness or virtue. That he was a dissolute and drunken fop, a spendthrift and a gamester, 'a bad son, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad subject, a bad monarch and a bad friend', that his word was worthless and his courage doubtful, are facts which cannot be denied.

But while Hibbert does not quite align himself with Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags (who felt for that king the veneration others reserved for Charles I), he points out that our view of George has been at the least softened by recognition that he displayed better literary and artistic taste than almost any king in our history:

Friend of Walter Scott, patron of Jane Austen and Robert Southey, bestower of knighthoods upon Humphiy Davy, William Herschel and William Congreve, George IV had enthusiastically encouraged John Nash in his development of Regent Street and Regent's Park. He had bought fine works by Rembrandt and Rubens, Dou, Steen, and De Hooch, and had welcomed Canova to London.

In producing the original DNB, the editors chose the end of the 19th century as their terminus ad quern, extending it to the date when the Queen died in January 1901, when Lee sat down and wrote at high speed a very long essay on her which is still well worth reading.

But it had to be replaced, and the new essay on Victoria, of almost 30,000 words, by H. C. G. Matthew and K. D. Reynolds, is one of the gems of the new work. The Oxford DNB has been brought safe to port by Brian Harrison, who succeeded Matthew as editor. For all Leslie Stephen's renown, Harrison has said that in his view (and he knows more about the subject than most people) Lee was the true hero of the first DNB; and I suspect he would be happy to add that Colin Matthew was the true hero of the Oxford DNB: he died five years ago at only 58, and can be said to have given his life for this project.

He had one other memorial, the incomparable 14-volume edition of the Gladstone Diaries which he took over from M. R. D. Foot, and his successive introductions to which are about the best biography of the man there is. Naturally enough, Matthew bagged Gladstone himself for the new DNB, and his essay is another gem, strikingly free of vague conjecture or sentimental eulogy when he deals with the tricky subject of sex (or 'sexuality', as we now say): he examines Gladstone's tormented personality with commendable honesty and a matter-of-factness that was not possible 100 years ago. Gladstone

recorded many instances of flagellation in his diary between October 1845 and May 1859, almost all inflicted after an encounter with a prostitute. As he noted, he 'courted evil').

Honesty and candour do not preclude a little dry humour: visiting Greece, Gladstone was much admired for kissing the ring of the Orthodox bishop of Athens, although 'his piety was unintentionally balanced by his catching the prelate's chin with his head as he stood up'.

Among essays on 20th-century prime ministers, Simon Ball's Baldwin and Paul Addison's Churchill are outstanding, but things become slightly more problematic with the recently dead, writers or politicians alike. Plenty of these are written by personal friends of the subject, who may well be best equipped in terms of knowledge. But since the DNB, for all its scholarship, is in the end written by human beings who have feelings and opinions and maybe prejudices, some degree of partisanship is hard to avoid, and contributors need to remember what Stephen said about eulogy, or what an earlier DNB hand, the scholarly cleric Canon Alfred Ainger, put still more neatly when he said that their principle should be 'No flowers by request.'

Looking back at earlier volumes, there were on the one hand frankly hostile pieces. H. B. Charlton's essay on Alfred Austin, the absurd poetaster and leaderwriter whom Salisbury whimsically made Poet Laureate, is one of the rare truly bitchy things in the DNB (Austin settled in Kent 'in a domestic community conscious of the privilege of cherishing a great poet . . . to the end he believed that only the malice of critics and odium theologicum prevented the world from tak ing him at his own high valuation His criticism is profuse in the false attribution to others of precisely those faults which he failed to recognise in himself').

On the other, the former essay on Eamon de Valera by his official hagiographer, Lord Longford, was a deplorable exercise in sentimental eulogy (including the mawkish and repellent claim that de Valera saw the Ulster Protestants as 'all Irish and equally dear accordingly'). That has been superseded by a much more rigourous essay by D. George Boyce, which points out that de Valera's 1937 constitution was actively offensive to Protestants throughout Ireland, and that his own 'solution to Ireland's minority problem was that Ulster unionists could be resettled in their British homeland, while Irish citizens living in Great Britain could replace them in Ireland', for which proposed ethnic cleansing 'equally dear' may not seem quite the words. De Valera is included, by the way, on the proper ground that he spent much of his life as a British subject, along with many another who later became citizens of ostensibly independent countries. The exception previously had been the first of all such rebels against the Crown: the American Founding Fathers were for some odd reason not in the original DNB, but that omission has been made good with excellent essays on Jefferson, Washington, Adams and their colleagues.

Of more recent British politicians, the essay on Enoch Powell is by his biographer and disciple Simon Heffer. It is of course very well informed, but just as naturally written with undisguised admiration, and it is not hard to imagine a different approach. From another corner of the Tory party, Ian Gilmour writes on R. A. Butler also with admiration, and ends an accomplished essay by rubbing in the fact that in his last years Rab had 'no great liking for the new Conservative regime' of Mrs Thatcher. Douglas Hurd on Lord Home is generally even-handed, but he very curiously drops into the first person: 'The three most courteous men I knew in politics were Lord Home, King Hussein of Jordan, and President Nelson Mandela. All three had ease of birth . .'. Has that happened before in the DNB? Should it?

Arguably there was no better choice to do Harold Wilson than Roy Jenkins. Any lapses in this essay stem from something I mentioned here not long ago, the grand old man's increasing tendency toward selfparodic anecdotage. Thus the undergraduati Wilson was not one of those who saw the world as their oyster 'and Oxford as, among its other advantages, a very good shell-knife'; 'Just as Lytton Strachey memorably wrote that "there was a lobster salad side to Cardinal Wiseman", so there was a Walter Mitty side to Harold Wilson.'

But Jenkins gets the important judgments right about his old colleague and adversary. Wilson was a brilliant exampasser, not to say a train-spotter (mot juste: he had a lifelong obsession with railway timetables), but 'he showed no wide intellectual curiosity. He was superb at the syllabus, but he ranged little outside it.' He was actually a man 'who had been made nicer by success, and was mostly at that stage' — during the first years of his first government — 'a pleasure to deal with'. In one other sharp note when describing Wilson's relationship with Lyndon B. Johnson, Jenkins says that the prime minister 'wanted to be head prefect' to the American president's headmaster. Plus ca change!

All that is only part of what distinguishes the Oxford DNB. A team of scholarly editors, covering different periods and subjects, has thoroughly revised the contents from the historical beginning. A deliberate effort was made to increase the numbers of people from groups previously neglected (not to say marginalised), and as someone distinctly allergic to the political correction of history I squinted hard at these revisions, but they cannot honestly be faulted. The exiguous numbers of women and non-white people in the original DNB reflected the unconscious predilections of the editors as men of their time, and most of those now gathered in are not simply making the Oxford DNB more 'inclusive' but belong there.

One of the more unlikely hitherto forgotten heroes of the empire was William Hall, a son of freed slaves who was the first black man to be awarded the Victoria Cross, during the Indian Mutiny (he won the VC for storming a mosque held by insurgent forces, which has a most uncomfortably contemporary ring.) As another innovation, there are essays on men who did not exist, either the archetypical, like `John Bull', or the quasi-mythical, like 'Robin Hood', which offer scope for nice exercises in source-criticism. Then there are numerous 'collective biographies', several people treated in one essay. A good example is Norman Tanner's essay on Lollard women, a model of scholarship which manages to be gripping and harrowing. We know for all too grim reasons about sonic of the women who joined that proto-Protestant sect In a story with Stalinist overtones, Agnes Grebill was denounced by her own husband and sons, tried by the ecclesiastical authorities, and then in 1511 'handed over to the secular arm' to be burned at the stake.

A different kind of inclusiveness means that plenty of loafers and boulevarchers with whom one once drained a glass in Fleet Street and Soho have permanent memorials. Old Spectator hands will be pleased that Henry Fairlie is in (Anthony Howard noting that he was a man of captivating charm, when sober), and so is Jeffrey Bernard, a merry and incisive piece by Keith Waterhouse which is distinctly free of sentimental eulogy, though that would have been quite a feat in Jeff's case.

A candid critic scarcely needs to say that he has not read every page of a work like this. In the 60 volumes there are more than 60,000 such pages containing some 60 million words, a total of 54,922 essays written by more than 10,000 contributors. The printed edition weighs in at 20 stone and runs along 11 feet of shelves, for those rather few people, that is, who will acquire the volumes. Technical developments have provided the publishers with an opportunity and a problem. Whereas very many libraries, and plenty of private houses (including my own), possess the old DNB in the form of paper, ink and cloth binding, the Oxford DNB is naturally available in electronic forms, CD-Rom and on-line. That is what most people and even many institutions are going to prefer, reducing the print-run of the printed edition, and in turn thereby increasing its price to a level which means that there really won't be many private buyers.

No review copies have been presented, but I have seen the volumes, rather briefly, and exceedingly handsome they are. On one faintly irritable note. I hope and indeed expect that the official on-line edition will be more trouble-free than the beta versions or prototypes I have been using, or sometimes trying to use, for the purposes of this review.

As soon as it does work, the on-line edition has delights all of its own. At a click of a button you can find everyone in the Oxford DNB who shares your birthday, or who was christened in your parish church. In an idle moment I looked up British personages who had spent some of their lives in New York, which produced a long list ending sadly and bathetically with 'Hervey, Frederick William John Augustus, 7th Marquess of Bristol (1954-1999), wastrel'. Then refining the search further, as we now say, to eminent Englishmen who had died in Greenwich Village, brought up the wondrous duo of Thomas Paine and Sid Vicious.

When all is said, this is a magnificent and noble achievement, a very great credit to its editors and all others concerned with it, who have done Stephen and Lee proud, and to the Oxford University Press, who have undertaken the Oxford DNB in no expectation of making a profit but as some service to the nation and the world. Plenty of us are not feeling much reason for patriotic pride at present, living under a government which criminalises traditional country sports while waging illegal and immoral wars. To have witnessed the publication of the Oxford DNB could almost make you proud to be English again.