Launched to eternity

Even though there are one or two mistakes in it, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is still the publishing event of the year. Giles Foden pays tribute to its editors and 10,000 contributors

Launched to eternity

Even though there are one or two mistakes in it, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is still the publishing event of the year. Giles Foden pays tribute to its editors and 10,000 contributors

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
edited by Colin Matthew, Brian Harrison et al
60 vols, Oxford University Press, £7,500

One of the great institutions of British life - a National Trust of human quiddity - the DNB was founded in 1882. It was originally projected, by publisher George Smith, as a dictionary of world biography. After a meeting with Leslie Stephen, Smith agreed to narrow his vision and focus on the lives of the men and women who have been important in British life. From the outset the DNB's scope was catholic: not only politicians, kings and queens, writers, lawyers, philosophers, scientists and diplomats but adventurers, gardeners and assassins. Quite a few assassins, actually.

Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, became the first editor (styling himself a "considerate autocrat" as far as contributors were concerned), and from 1885 to 1900, successive volumes were rolled out, crashing on the edifice of late-Victorian life like waves on a rock. Since then it has been the standard biographical record of first recourse, an invaluable tool for researchers. Now the whole monument - 54,922 specially written biographies - is published in revised and supplemented form; in effect, every entry has been rewritten. It appears simultaneously in 60 print volumes and online: while the print version is priced out of the range of individuals and will be bought mainly by libraries, the internet-access format is a reasonable £195 per annum.

The revisions, made over a 12-year period, initially under the direction of editor Colin Matthew, represent the work of 10,000 specialists worldwide. Many distinguished figures in their own right, including something like half the academics in Britain, have added to and rewritten the work of Victorian men of letters; 16,315 new lives have been added, including Princess Diana, James Bulger and Linda McCartney. There are far more women in the new DNB, even though - as Kenneth Morgan noted in a debate on the dictionary in the House of Lords on September 10 - they still only account for a 10th of the entries.

There is also a much wider racial, social and professional remit than in the original DNB, and a refreshed "grammar" for the layout of the entries. The temporal range of the dictionary now extends from Piltdown Man (4 million BC) and the original King Leir (820 BC) to December 31 2000: the cut-off point for the present edition.

In between comes all of human life, from the great and the good to the quirky and infamous. It is the last two categories that make the DNB such a pleasure to browse. One advantage of the online edition is that you are now able to do this with ease, applying birth - and death - date filters, searching by term in the body text - the most powerful function intellectually, leading to the killer fact - or simply by scrolling through names alphabetically:

"Adams, Gladstone (1880-1966), motorist and inventor ... had the idea for a windscreen wiper after he had driven from Newcastle to London for the FA cup final at Crystal Palace on 25 April 1908, when Newcastle United were beaten 3-1 by Wolverhampton Wanderers. It began to snow, and he had to fold down his windscreen in order to improve his vision ..."

"Baker [née Willcocks], Mary [alias Princess Caraboo] (bap. 1791, d. 1864), impostor, enjoyed a brief period of celebrity beginning when, on Good Friday 1817, a young woman wearing a black turban and speaking an unknown language was found wandering in Almondsbury, north-east of Bristol ... For the next 30 years she supplied leeches to the Bristol Infirmary, respectable, genteel, and apparently embarrassed (as when children ran after her calling 'Caraboo!') by her earlier notoriety ..."

"Campbell, Duncan (c.1680-1730), soothsayer, was born in Lapland, the son of Archibald Campbell, seaman, and his wife, an eminent Laplander whom he met after being shipwrecked there. Following the death of his mother, Campbell returned to Scotland with his father. Being deaf and mute he received instruction in reading from a 'learned divine of the University of Glasgow' (Defoe, 33), and having already demonstrated remarkable gifts of prophecy went to London in 1694, where his predictions soon caught the attention of fashionable society ..."

"Dagoe, Hannah (d. 1763), thief ... attacked her executioner, Thomas Turlis, daring him to hang her and punching him so violently in the chest that she almost knocked him down. She then threw her hat, cloak, and other articles of clothing into the crowd in order to cheat Turlis of the hangman's right to dispose of the possessions of the condemned. Eventually Dagoe was overpowered and Turlis got the rope around her neck. However, before the signal was given for the carts to move off and the condemned to be 'launched into eternity', Dagoe bound a handkerchief around her head and over her face and threw herself out of the cart with such violence that she broke her neck and died instantly."

And so to Z, all magnificently done.

Well, nearly all. Contrary to the entry on the half-Lap soothsayer above, leading authorities no longer think Daniel Defoe author of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr Duncan Campbell , published in 1720. In the entry on the painter Rupert Shephard (1909-92), his daughter's Christian name is Marylla, not Murilla. I know this because she is my mother-in-law. And it was the same Rupert Shephard, not Rupert Shepherd, who painted the portrait of the fluid dynamicist George Batchelor (1920-2000) referred to in the entry on him.

Moreover, the sources for the Batchelor entry refer to one JRC Hout. This is none other than the husband of the aforementioned Marylla, one of Batchelor's pupils and another fluid dynamicist; his true name is JCR Hunt.

The entry for Hunt's grandfather [James Clerk] Maxwell Garnett (1880-1958) recognises his work as secretary general of the League of Nations Union, but does not mention his scientific achievements; his paper on the optical properties of composite materials, "Colours in metal glasses and in metallic films" (1904), is frequently cited by physicists to this day.

From my own point of view, as one of the agency's clients, I am obliged to report that it was literary agent AP Watt, as in Alexander Pollock, who negotiated generous advances for the thriller writer Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), not AS Watt.

Such errors of detail, magnified through the naughty lens of personal connection, are inevitable in an undertaking of this scale. Matthew - who sadly died before his great enterprise could see the light of day - and his successor Brian Harrison are to be congratulated for keeping them to a minimum. They can in any case be corrected in the online edition. On the broader canvas, Oxford University Press and its partners - including the National Portrait Gallery, which has supplied images for the new edition - have done a fantastic job. The editors deserve lavish tribute simply for having delivered the project on time, a rare distinction in Britain these days. Matthew (1941-99) rightly has an entry of his own, and not just on account of his courageous and visionary work for the DNB.

The cost of the dictionary should not be underestimated: while the British Academy part-funded the new edition, OUP will probably have to run it at a loss for many years to come. They have laid out about £22 million; the government a mere £4 million. For comparison, Smith invested £70,000 in the original DNB, about £5 million in today's money. His philanthropy, which is what it really was, helped to establish one of the pillars of our heritage.

One of the many dangers of our time - it is part of the current disorder in Iraq - is our willing embrace of an ever-lasting present. As Robert Skidelsky put it in the House of Lords debate on the DNB: "We live in an unhistorical age. I do not mean that history is not read, but I do not think that we any longer think historically in the way that we used to."

The great gift of the new DNB - without doubt the publishing event of the year - is that it reminds one forcibly that the human condition in all its shapes, from the tragic to the comic, with infinite degrees of variation, existed in bygone times. Having no alternative, the sun, as Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-89) opens his novel Murphy, must shine each day on "the nothing new"; but we humans need shades by which properly we may see and understand history as it streams past us. Those shades are sometimes nothing less than the ghosts of dead men and women, as collected here. Long live their lives.

· Giles Foden's new book, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika , is published next week by Michael Joseph. For offers on the Oxford DNB , go to www.oxforddnb.com
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview
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