In replacing the monumental Victorian Dictionary of national biography, the expanding and updatable ‘living resource’Footnote ¹ of the Oxford dictionary of national biography offers radically different research capabilities. Most twentieth-century public and institutional British libraries boasted a stately parade of the sixty-three volumes of the 1885–1900 DNB, together with its sixteen volumes of successive supplements, further volumes of indexes and epitomes, and the 1993 Missing persons volume (rectifying prominent pre-1985 omissions). In succession, the ODNB is available by subscription on-line and in a £6,500 bound edition that adorns hundreds of libraries worldwide.

Historical interest in the writing and purpose of collective biography burgeoned with the collaborative labours of the new ODNB, and will continue as this gargantuan dictionary expands and mutates. Seminars, lectures, and promotional events accompanied ODNB's gestation and launch, and several publications probed the construction methods of biographical dictionaries. These included two Leslie Stephen Lectures in 1997 and 2004, the first by the original editor of ODNB, Colin Matthew, and the second by the chairman of the ODNB supervisory committee, Sir Keith Thomas. Both lectures presented new questions about the scope and intention of the writing of biography that was, in changing and challenging ways, collective, historical, and national.Footnote ²

The world's family of national biographical dictionaries is eccentric (and in some branches, dysfunctional). Almost every European and Western nation produces some form of a DNB, although the viability of many is uncertain. Among the most successful, the American national biography, published on-line and in twenty-four volumes in 1999, replaces the estimable Dictionary of American biography issued between 1929 and 1937. The Deutsche biographische Enzyklopädie, published in ten volumes between 1995 and 1999, with four supplementary volumes in 2000, contains short articles on some 56,000 Germans (and a few Swiss and Austrians besides). Almost all these entries are culled from other reference books, an editorial strategy designed to avoid the calamity of dictionaries of lives which themselves take longer than a human life to complete. The first volume of the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani was published in 1960. Forty-five years and sixty-five volumes later, the project has reached the letter M. This is one letter ahead of the Dictionnaire de biographie française begun in 1933 (some of L was published in 1996). The triumph of ODNB (conceived 1990, and born, complete, 2004) is manifest.

The archaeology of such biographical dictionaries celebrates scholarship but also exposes pedantry, populism, and commercialism. A century and more before the Victorian DNB, industrious antiquarians in Enlightenment Britain sought to assemble competing pedigrees of past intellectual and sectarian endeavour, even if some remained little more than lists.Footnote ³ By the mid-eighteenth century, entrepreneurial booksellers also recognized the market potential for informative and entertaining collective biography aimed at an increasingly literate and discerning audience. Multiple-life writing was not left simply to martyrologies, hagiographies, and family trees. In one adroit enterprise, between 1779 and 1781, a grand association of thirty-six London booksellers and partnerships published the sixty-eight-volume Works of the English poets for which Samuel Johnson wrote biographical prefaces (his ‘Lives’). Rival projects tapped further, popular demand.Footnote ⁴

In addition to group biographies, with their classical and neo-classical progenitors,Footnote ⁵ the encyclopaedic collection of past human eminence notably prospered in Britain under the direction of Thomas Birch (1705–66).Footnote ⁶ His General dictionary, historical and critical, published in ten volumes, 1734–41, exemplified an enterprise pioneered in France and Germany.Footnote ⁷ Such collective biography continued in Britain with the publication by a fourteen-bookseller consortium of an eleven-volume New and general biographical dictionary between 1761 and 1762 (with a supplement in 1767). Birch's labours inspired The British plutarch by Thomas Mortimer (1762), and a continuation by Andrew Kippis, whose unwieldy second edition was never completed. A further edition of the New and general biographical dictionary by Alexander Chalmers in 1812–17 was followed by the ten volumes of John Aikin's General biography between 1799 and 1815, and the New general biographical dictionary of 1839–48.Footnote ⁸

Business as much as cultural interests propelled biographical dictionaries. Some schemes, like that begun by the SPCK in 1842, proved abortive (if inspired and prescient). Biographists were also competitive. The triumph of the Biographie universelle compiled in fifty-two volumes by Louis-Gabriel Michaud and 300 assistants, and published between 1810 and 1828, caused consternation in London and Edinburgh. Together with the rival Nouvelle biographie générale (forty-six volumes, 1852–66), Michaud's achievement explains the original proposal of George Smith, the heroic publisher of the DNB, that Leslie Stephen should embark on a global rather than a national biographical dictionary.Footnote ⁹ In such ways, the history of biographies illuminates the history both of publishing and of the business and literary context in which biographical projects matured.

The organization and profile of the twenty-first-century ODNB raises the bar to heights unimagined twenty years ago. The DNB, far more than its antecedents, claimed a public domain. Along with the Oxford English dictionary, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Grove's dictionary, Fowler's modern English usage, Cruden's concordance, and the annual volumes of Who's who, Burke's peerage, Crockford (and, for some, Wisden), the DNB formed part of the scaffolding of civic knowledge in Britain. The ODNB promises to modernize and extend the reach of this provision. The original DNB, London-based and largely financed from the pockets of gentlemen, depended upon a relatively small cast of learned writers and incurable antiquarians.Footnote ¹⁰ By contrast, the university-based ODNB is mainly funded by the university press that publishes and sustains it, together with a public subsidy equivalent to something over a seventh of the original budget of £25 million.Footnote ¹¹ The ODNB editors, Colin Matthew and then Brian Harrison, worked with a 20-strong supervising committee, 13 consultant editors, 375 assistant editors, 40 project staff, more than 60 publishing staff, and (quite besides the battalions of writers) a further 450 assistants and part-time researchers.

On release in 2004, the ODNB presented the lives of 54,922 people (dead before 31 December 2000) in 50,113 articles written by 12,550 authors. By October 2006, the ODNB comprised 63 million words, 55,828 lives, and 50,977 articles by 12,851 authors. In comparison, the original sixty-three-volume DNB contained 30,941 articles by 653 authors (most of them, 57 in-house writers). Including all its supplements, the DNB contained 36,466 articles on 38,652 people (dead before 31 December 1990).Footnote ¹² The life count between the old and new DNB has therefore increased by some 44 per cent – and far from simply as the result of inclusions of the deceased since 1990 or the dredging up of minor individuals from modern periods. The number of entries for every century before 1500 (save for the seventh and eleventh) has increased by more than half again. The heroes of the new enterprise are the writers, many of whom individually contributed hundreds of articles. Mark Pottle wrote 201, W. P. Courtney 219, Philip Carter 251, Andrew Lambert 307, and Elizabeth Baigent 439 (to select only a few). Nilanjana Banerji revised 228 of the old DNB entries, James Lunt revised 213. Colin Matthew himself wrote 147 articles (in 289,447 words) and revised 631 existing articles. To offer one further comparison, when released in 1999, the American national biography carried 17,435 essay ‘portraits’, a total increased by supplements to 18,300 by the end of 2006.

For all the elegance of their 3.84 metres of shelf-space, the ODNB printed volumes will nevertheless rapidly become an expensive – and hazardous – redundancy. Who will consult the 2004 printed edition (and the promised supplementary volumes) when the touch of a computer keyboard offers a version updated every four months to include not only new (usually recently deceasedFootnote ¹³) lives but also critical revisions to existing entries? The electronic ODNB, moreover, offers searches throughout the full, prodigious text rather than entry by entry. The on-screen version of ODNB hosts updated daily features, including ‘today's birthdays’ and ‘today's life’, which can also be received daily by e-mail. Other novelties such as the random ‘get a life’ selection and occasional competitions, can make ODNB seem more magazine than manual, inviting (or perhaps reinventing) a sense of public ownership. The dictionary also solicits institutional support and subscription. The main defence for book publication is that the volumes will be consulted by those without access to on-line subscription. Even authorized channels, however, already by-pass the rapidly ageing shelved volumes. Few public libraries in the country are not subscribers, and each offers its members free at-home access to ODNB. The Welsh assembly bought an early subscription for all Welsh secondary schools. General restrictions will also soon prove untenable in the leaky, downloadable world of the web.

As has long been obvious, the future for the ODNB (like the American national biography) is as an electronic on-line resource, widely available and imaginatively linked to other projects and databases. Its technological underpinning also encourages its development less as a conventional biographical dictionary than as an innovative historical encyclopaedia. Two general matters therefore invite evaluation: the quality and performance of the ODNB upon its release, and the broader questions of usage and future enhancement.

The electronic features of ODNB are standard: results of searches can be ordered alphabetically or by date of birth or death (in ascending or descending order). Further refinements of results are possible using drop-down options or individual word searches and combinations of search terms. The references section, more extensive than in DNB (and updatable) is available at the side of each article (although the lists of publications by a subject are often far smaller than those provided by DNB). The help resources work well. The entire text is searchable and larger individual entries provide a marginal list of subheadings allowing the reader to advance to a particular part or summary of the life (although once the text of a life is on screen it is not possible to search for a particular word within it). Most articles offer pre-highlighted internal links although these are conservatively done and (save for the very grandest lives) link only to close family members of the subject also featured in the dictionary. The article on Nicholas Ridley (c. 1502–55), for example, provides links to his brother, Robert (d. ?1536), but not to other Oxford martyrs. The article on Thomas Cranmer offers only one link – to the entry for his wife Margaret (d. c. 1575). When names appear of those featured in their own right in the dictionary they are not consistently link-highlighted. John Wilkes, for example, is mentioned but not highlighted in the article on Sir Richard Aston (judge, 1717–78). ODNB editors seem to have limited click-on links because users can draw on a ‘highlight-and-go’ option whereby highlighting any word in an article and then clicking on the search button for ‘full text’ displays all appearances of the word within the dictionary. For novice users, however, the explanation of this is not prominent enough.

With some important exceptions, the ODNB continues the DNB's flexible definition of categories. In 1882, George Smith originally resolved ‘to confine his efforts to the production of a complete dictionary of national biography which should supply full, accurate, and concise biographies of all noteworthy inhabitants of the British Islands and the Colonies (exclusive of living persons) from the earliest historical period to the present time’.Footnote ¹⁴ The headline changes in scope are the increase in the number of female lives and of overseas and colonial subjects, as well as the inclusion of all pre-1776 Americans (excluded, despite Smith's words, from the DNB). Entries for women have increased from 5 per cent of the total to 10 per cent. Many, such as the 2005 addition (by David Loades) of the courtier Susan Clarencius Tonge (c. 1510–64), add intriguingly to British political and social history. The coverage of business, women's, and intellectual history is conspicuously enhanced. DNB's eleven ‘legendary personages’ (twelve if we count two entries for Merlin)Footnote ¹⁵ are now joined, among others, by Britannia, Friar Tuck, Junius, John Bull, Tommy Atkins, and an integrated entry for the apparently irrepressible Myrddin (Merlin). The Unknown Warrior of Westminster Abbey is also given a life.

The ODNB editorial team has endeavoured to make a virtue of the diverse style of its thousands of contributors. ODNB upholds the ambition of the DNB to offer articles that were literary texts in themselves, or in Colin Matthew's words ‘primarily a piece of prose and not a database with prose added’. In Matthew's first (1995) newsletter to contributing writers, he urged them ‘not to be too academic’, to strive for liveliness, including anecdotal colour, and not to be overawed by ‘the dignity of a DNB article’.Footnote ¹⁶ Academic obscurity is mostly culled from the dictionary, although occasional slips include a biography of James Joyce (who, apparently, revealed ‘the sheer “whatness” of experience and language’ and ‘the dream of world/word as an ultimately integral thing’).Footnote ¹⁷ The chance to amuse sometimes gets the better of contributors and editors. Entries include oddball policemen, sensationally described transvestites, and individuals professionally branded as ‘rakes’ and ‘wastrels’. Many, if we are to be strait-laced, constitute exactly the targets of Hayden White's salutary censure of the ‘Ironist, the possessor of a higher, sadder wisdom’, the historical voice all too prone to mock and laugh with the teleological benefit of hindsight.Footnote ¹⁸ Those habitually moved to challenge irony will wince at several of the shorter biographical essays in the ODNB. The more ODNB moves to magazine mode, the greater the temptation to write with the eyebrow raised.

The obverse of this is that ODNB very largely avoids the dullness evident in other national biographical dictionaries. John Roberts, reviewing the latest part of the French project, observed that ‘this dictionary never flinches from an austere and positivistic recording of facts at the cost of the colourful’.Footnote ¹⁹ The editorial preface to the Deutsche biographische Enzyklopädie is candid: ‘this encyclopaedia intentionally avoids value judgments and censorship … The principal aim was to stick to the facts; as a result, it is unavoidable that, particularly in the short entries, a certain dryness prevails.’Footnote ²⁰ Both old and new DNBs offer a grand circus of human foible and tragedy, in which readers are often invited to savour eccentricity in the presentation of the history of individuals. This might, indeed, be a self-consciously British trait (dotty minor lives seem entirely absent from the American DNB).Footnote ²¹ODNB contains dozens of magisterial essays on the illustrious – including Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, John Morrill on Cromwell, Eric Hobsbawm on Marx, Jonathan Parry on Disraeli, Roy Foster on Yeats, Matthew himself on Gladstone – but too many of Matthew's own short contributions, and certainly those of his more colourful writers, exemplify the ultimately wearisome staging of biography and history as a series of divine jokes.Footnote ²² This does at least mean that the ODNB is a livelier read than the decadal increments to the old DNB, articles dismissed by Nicolas Barker as ‘arid and banal apart from the odd posthumous hatchet job’.Footnote ²³

ODNB can also be as vicious as it is capricious. Contemporary obituaries have long influenced not only the scope, but the prose of biographical dictionaries. Barker has acknowledged Edward Cave, founder of the Gentleman's Magazine (published between 1731 and 1876), as paterfamilias of British biography because the obituaries of the Gentleman's sourced so many of the entries in the Biographia Britannica. Both the nineteenth-century DNB and its twentieth-century supplements generated some waspish (and dogmatic) asides, but the development of acerbic obituaries appearing in newspapers from the 1990s seems to have introduced even greater spice and acid to certain ODNB entries. Other comments, if opinionated, are memorable. John Ramsden cites the self-written obituary of the often preposterous Gerald Nabarro (1913–73), and concludes that ‘few men have the gift to see themselves with such clarity’. Alan Wilkinson pithily celebrates Archbishop Michael Ramsey (1904–88) who ‘looked like a medieval carving of God the Father’. Or take Alan Webster on a successor of Ramsey, Robert Runcie (1921–2000) and his performance at the Falklands' thanksgiving service that so offended Margaret Thatcher: ‘many felt that he deserved a bar to his Military Cross for this sermon’. The Runcie life is mischievously adorned by a baroque Snowden photograph.

Unsurprisingly, the quality of the 50,113Footnote ²⁴ODNB entries has been subject to lively debate since the initial completion of the dictionary in 2004. All ODNB contributors were disciplined by a guide sheet to Matthew's ODNB ‘grammar’. To the astonishment (and post-publication unhappiness) of many, contributors were forbidden to communicate with one another.Footnote ²⁵ The haste of the final in-house editing has been commented upon,Footnote ²⁶ observable in misprints and oddities in selection. It also tests the decision made by Matthew in 1992 to bring forward the release of ODNB to 2004 from the originally envisaged date of 2010. The hundreds of errors identified, however, should remain only in the blue volumes, not in the on-line edition.

Assorted outrage appeared in public letters arguing that many entries were travesties.Footnote ²⁷ Some complaints arrived from those claiming superior knowledge or authorship of cited or misattributed works about the subject.Footnote ²⁸ Others were unhappy that the lives of many historians were undertaken by historians of the period about which the featured historian wrote rather than in which he or she lived.Footnote ²⁹ Treatments and attitudes are indeed various. The sprightly article on Diana princess of Wales by K. D. Reynolds (Diana was ‘adored and vilified, loved and loathed’) contrasts with the unnervingly deferential life of Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, by the current ODNB editor, Lawrence Goldman. The Queen Mother does not escape censure in Sarah Bradford's Princess Margaret. Some analogies, if popularist, seem far-fetched. ‘Like Pip at the end of the film of Great expectations (1946)’, writes Colin Matthew of Victoria's successor, ‘Edward VII tore down the drapes of the Victorian court and let the light flood in.’ Richard Davenport-Hines, particularly prone to colourful (and sometimes formulaic) expression, concludes his short biography of William Hichens, public servant and industrialist (1874–1940) with this paean: ‘his opinions were worth hearing … He was self-confident, candid, affectionate, cheerful, and steadfast. He lived according to Christian ideals. He deplored pusillanimity, double-dealing, or disloyalty: his honesty was inexpugnable.’Footnote ³⁰

Nevertheless, the editors and managers of an undertaking of such scope and organizational enormity explicitly anticipated that errors, inconsistencies, prejudices, and controversies would result from publication. The electronic capabilities that expose mistakes also facilitate revision – however minor. Many revisions to the 2004 articles have been technical and typographical. Thus the only revision to the long article on Richard (II) Fitzalan, third earl of Arundel (c. 1313–76) seems to be to correct ‘counsellor’ to ‘councillor’. Slightly more telling is the adjustment to the lineage of King Cnut (d. 1035). The death dates of family members and others who are mentioned, when still alive, in more modern lives can also be added (testing though it will be for ODNB editors to monitor this).

Corrections can be made (with all due caution) to biographies indifferently received on publication in 2004. Take, for example, the essay on Florence Nightingale, the subject of early consternation.Footnote ³¹ The revisions made will probably not satisfy the critic who complained that the ‘entry on Florence Nightingale … represents the furthest point on the revisionist pendulum and thus fixes an interpretation which is unrepresentative of scholarship’, but post-publication changes are significant. Nightingale's first post is now superintendent to the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness, not (as in 2004) the Institute for Sick Governesses in Distressed Circumstances. No longer does Nightingale suggest that Dante's words ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’ be inscribed over the Turkish barracks at Scutari. After contracting ‘Crimea fever’ in 1855, Nightingale is no longer ‘nursed by the devoted Selina Bracebridge’; Longfellow's verse with the line ‘A lady with a lamp’ is re-dated and given its proper title; and the revised article acknowledges the first seven volumes of the Collected works of Florence Nightingale published between 2001 and 2004.

The many ODNB entries already revised since 2004 publication include Henry III, John of Gaunt, Thomas Cranmer, Elizabeth I, Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, the 1st duke of Marlborough, Christopher Wren, Anthony Trollope, Mahatma Gandhi, Charlie Chaplin, Peggy Ashcroft, Alfred (Tom) Denning, and the Kray brothers. Such revisions are a strength not a weakness of ODNB. This reviewer awaits the corrections to errors identified in the lives of Daniel Defoe and Thomas LongmanFootnote ³² – and various oddities will continue to be reported. Why, to add another cavil, is Matilda (1102–69) by Marjorie Chibnall, no longer said to be also once known as ‘Maud’, the alternative (there in DNB) dropped without explanation? Just as important is the relative ease with which bibliographies can be updated and sources revised (archives are sometimes withdrawn as well as opened).

The rewritten DNB lives will continue to invite particular scrutiny, and especially given that the ODNB on-line edition allows readers to call-up the original DNB text. Some rewrites were essential. Thomas Seccombe's 1901 life of Oscar Wilde, for example, was coyly captive to its time. Opinions will be more various about other rewrites. John Gross bemoaned a comparatively lacklustre ODNB article (by Hilary Clare) for Angela Brazil (1868–1947), writer of stories for girls.Footnote ³³ But the original DNB life of Brazil, by Arthur Marshall and applauded by Gross, might also be read as a deliberately camp in-joke.Footnote ³⁴ Marshall on Brazil (like Sidney Lee's book-length article on Victoria, C. H. Firth on Cromwell, and, notoriously, Stephen – dismissively – on Dickens) are historic pieces in their own right, and fully retrievable by the ODNB ‘archive’ facility. With infectious enthusiasm, Marilyn Butler's new Jane Austen implores you to read Lionel Trilling's memorable essay on Mansfield Park.

The re-writes invite one further consideration. An electronic search enables the listing of all articles by each contributor, and a fine bound volume lists all 9,804 2004 ODNB authors, the 2,746 DNB authors, and their subject articles. Nothing, however, is revealed about those contributors.Footnote ³⁵ Perhaps contributors should be given an identification tag (institutional affiliation, most relevant publication, or some other) to assist readers in further study. Some, for example, might seek clues to the assumption by the author of Shakespeare (Peter Holland) that the Bible and Shakespeare remained for Neil Kinnock's speech-writers ‘the twin bedrocks of working-class culture’. Readers might wish to know how many of the lives (notably including some landed gentry and manufacturers) were written by their descendants, or why various asides against late twentieth-century politicians such as Keith Joseph and Michael Portillo garnish the texts of completely different lives.Footnote ³⁶

In a further, welcome innovation, more than 10,000 ODNB entries include an image of the subject and about one in five have portraits from the National Portrait Gallery. The selection of many of these portraits has been questioned, and a surprisingly large proportion of modern lives do not have photographs.Footnote ³⁷ Image searches are also possible, on the artist, archive, institution, and year. Each article provides a list of other likenesses of the subject; in many cases the decision to include only one image seems unduly conservative. The American national biography, by contrast, contains 2,500 illustrations, but only (like the ODNB's colour illustrations) available on-line. The earlier lives of ODNB are among its most revelatory, in many cases transforming the DNB standard, and fine images enhance many of them. Examples from the illustrated early lives range from the marvellous representations of CnutFootnote ³⁸ and Henry IFootnote ³⁹ to reproductions of the seals of Simon de Montfort and Robert Bruce.Footnote ⁴⁰ Other adornments include photographs of the striking Fontevrault tomb effigies of Henry II and Eleanor of Acquitaine, and drawings of Matilda/Maud, Chaucer, James II of Scotland, and the confrontation between Wat Tyler and Richard II (to name a few of hundreds).Footnote ⁴¹

The other most obvious (and problematic) textual innovations in ODNB are the group and family articles, offered in addition to co-subjects (individuals included within the entry for another but retrievable in their own right by the ODNB searches). Three further item types appear under ‘themes’: reference groups, reference lists, and feature essays, all with cross-references to ODNB biographies. H. W. C. Davis, an editor of the early-twentieth-century DNB, wrote in 1917 that ‘the tendency after the war will be towards the study of Movements and Developments rather than of pure biography’.Footnote ⁴² Almost a century later, the ODNB transforms the established format of its predecessor, by offering more than 400 group articles, family entries, and feature essays. Foremost are landed families, including the Atterburys (c. 1270–1475), the Saviles (c. 1369–1528), and the Bedingfields (c. 1476–1760), and business dynasties, such as the bookseller Rivingtons (1710 – c. 1960), the mustard-maker Colmans (1814–98), the hardware manufacturer Kenricks (1785–1926), and the brewer Keenes (1785–1926). Certain family entries enable the further inclusion of women. Among less predictable group entries is an essay on the Cooper family of folksingers (1865–2000). Families and groups do include some inscrutable selections, from the White Conduit Cricket Club (c. 1785–8) to ‘Women traders and artisans in London c. 1200–1500’.

The feature essays introduce an even greater eclecticism, ranging from ‘Chaucer and the growth of vernacular literature c. 1350–1500’, ‘Scotland in 1406: a kingdom in crisis’ and ‘Early modern women: the rediscovery of public and private life’ to ‘The Isle of Man’ and ‘Music in Britain in 1905 and after’. Like several such essays, Jane Garnett's feature on ‘Women and religion in the Oxford DNB’ illuminates much about the construction and ambition of its host dictionary. Features and group essays will doubtless increase. As of October 2006, there was only one feature essay under the heading ‘sport’, and although a feature appears for ‘Nonjuring Bishops 1689–1710’, no article considers ‘the Seven Bishops’ who so potently dissented from James II's second declaration of indulgence in May 1688 (and five of whom were to be among the nine episcopal nonjurors). By including living persons, the reference lists also chip away at another boundary of former historical biographical dictionaries. The lists also highlight omissions from the main dictionary – all deceased directors of the National Gallery feature in their own right save for Sir Augustus Moore Daniel (1866–1950), director 1929–33.

More problematic still is the national cast of ODNB. The scope of the nineteenth-century DNB, reduced from Smith's universal ambitions, brought to fruition a project for national biography evident since the 1747–66 publication of the Biographia Britannica: or, the lives of the most eminent persons who have flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, the first systematic alphabetic dictionary of its subject. When the DNB appeared from 1885, it joined a repertoire of cultural support for nation and empire, ranging from the National Portrait Gallery (founded in 1856) to the national enterprise of the Historical Manuscripts Commission (begun in 1869), and the Oxford English dictionary (founded in 1879 with the first edition appearing between 1884 and 1928). With its unpredictable boundaries, the DNB offered any successor a challenge in the interpretation of a ‘national’ subject, and this, as all European DNBs continue to discover, will always be problematic, and ultimately unsatisfactory. In the case of ODNB, as of 2006, greater inclusion should probably be attempted of individuals and families prominent in the Angevin dominions and other mainland European territories of the medieval English Crown.

ODNB is more adventurous in more modern geo-politics. The DNB included certain inhabitants of British overseas territories who never set foot in Britain and numerous individuals whose lives had mainly been spent abroad, as well as certain foreigners who lived in Britain. ODNB coverage has now been extended to ‘foreigners whose visits to Britain may have been short, but whose observations may have been influential’. Selection is hit-and-miss. Browsers of ODNB will find articles on Voltaire (in London 1726–8), Benjamin Franklin (in London 1724–6, 1757–62, and, with intervals, 1764–75), Giuseppe Mazzini (resident 1837–48, 1850–72); Karl Marx (resident 1849–83), Hippolyte Taine (three visits to England totalling some eleven weeks), and Indira Gandhi (a brief sojourn at Somerville College, Oxford). Browsers will not find Chateaubriand (in exile in England 1793–1800 and resident as ambassador 1822–3), Louis-Philippe (exiled 1800–9 and again from 1848 until his death in England in 1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne (consul in Liverpool 1853–7), or Giuseppe Garibaldi (whose celebrated 1864 visit does feature in more than a dozen ODNB lives of supporters and members of his welcoming committeeFootnote ⁴³). One game that might be hosted by the ODNB website is ‘Spot the ODNB foreigner.’ A sample round might ask who of the following gets a life:

• Gaius Julius Caesar, invader, 55–54 bc

• Prince Louis, later Louis VIII of France, occupier of large parts of England from May 1216 until late 1217

• Metacom, known as ‘King Philip’ (c. 1630–76) and his second son Massasoit (c. 1600–61), neither of whom set foot in Britain but led the Algonquian peoples of modern-day Rhode Island

• Napoleon III (b. 1808), exiled in England from 1871 until his death in 1873

•   Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) who spent three years in England, 1888–91

•   Robert Frost (1874–1963), in England 1912–15

•   Joe (Yossel Mashel) Slovo (1926–95), Secretary General of the South African Communist Party and later government minister, and his wife and fellow anti-apartheid campaigner (Heloise) Ruth First (1925–82), both in exile in England 1963–77.Footnote ⁴⁴

Royalty exiled or educated in Britain suggest a variant game: Farouk of Egypt (1920–65), student at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich 1935–6, does appear in ODNB, but Hussein of Jordan (1935–99), Harrow, and Sandhurst, and a confirmed anglophile (with important political consequences), does not. Notoriously, in 1945 the British government declared suite 212 of Claridges Hotel Yugoslav territory during the birth of Alexander, current head of the Yugoslav royal family. Both that extended family and other deposed royals (Greek, Romanian, Iranian, and others) must have claim to at least a group essay in ODNB.

The enlarged scope of the ODNB inevitably prompts concerns about omissions and inconsistencies. New ‘missing persons’ (or missing minutiae) made easy headlines after the launch of ODNB – and claims on behalf of the omitted or maltreated will continue to surface in literary reviews and academic journals. The more telling point is that if the editorial decision has been made to embrace inclusiveness – however exotic and marginal the case – then the ‘living resource’ argument should encourage even greater boldness. This could be demonstrated in various areas of human endeavour – or mischance. We can compare, for example, current ODNB coverage of ‘murder victims’ and contrast this with that of the victims of miscarriages of justice. Entries for the lives of Stephen Lawrence (1974–93) and for Jamie (James Patrick) Bulger (1990–3), steer the ODNB further away from the world of Who was who and towards an interest in wrongs not gongs. For the dictionary's editors, the chronicling of achievement is clearly not all. The two-year-old Bulger hardly qualifies as achieving eminence in his own right and the biographer he shares with nineteen-year-old Lawrence (and 143 other ODNB subjects), Richard Davenport-Hines, declares that ‘there was nothing exceptional about Stephen Lawrence’. Lord Bingham, in the course of an on-line ODNB essay, defends the Bulger entry because ‘he influenced, indirectly, the course of English legal procedure’ and, from the grave, will shape the future conduct of any trial of a ten-year-old defendant.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Davenport-Hines observes in his summary of the life and killing of Lawrence, ‘its consequences for police methods and for social policy were extensive’. Technically, however, the lives of young Bulger and Lawrence were innocent subjects of the crimes and both appear in ODNB because they are dead. The still-living agents (and alleged agents) of the crimes cannot be included.

The broader justification for such inclusions seems grounded in Colin Matthew's insistence that ‘[Leslie] Stephen disliked the concept of absolute worth as a criterion for inclusion, sensibly preferring utility, interest, readers' demand, variety of coverage, spice, liveliness and individuality.’Footnote ⁴⁶ The murders of Bulger and Lawrence (in the same year) became subjects of extensive, and often lurid, national news coverage. But the selection of murder victims seems especially problematic. Presumably, ODNB updates will have to include entries for Jessica Chapman (1991–2002) and Holly Wells (1991–2002), the two victims of the Soham murders in 2002 that obsessed British media in a manner out of all proportion to other, equally terrible, killings of the same period. In each case, the inclusion of such innocents, whose own lives have nothing to offer a register of achievement, seems simply to allow coverage of an infamous episode, frequently spiced by grand guignol and otherwise constrained by the uncomfortable fact that the main instigators are living and therefore ineligible for their own ODNB entries. One might grimly reflect that for most such cases this editorial tack is unnecessary in the United States, China, and other countries retaining the death penalty.

Further problems appear with the enlarged coverage of the history of crime. ODNB ignores numerous cases of innocent deaths, comparable to Bulger and Lawrence, that brought public outrage and wide-ranging consequences. There is, for example, no ODNB entry for Lesley Whittle (1958–75), heiress and victim of Dennis Nielsen, the ‘Black Panther’, where vexed argument followed botched police tactics. There is no entry for WPC Yvonne Fletcher (1959–84), the first policewoman to be murdered while on duty in Britain. The shooting of Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy resulted in an eleven-day police siege of the embassy and the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Libya. The successful campaign by Michael Winner to commemorate the policewoman prompted further public commotion (and the twenty-year anniversary memorial service coincided with the launch of ODNB). There is no ODNB entry for PC Keith Blakelock (1945–85), notorious victim of a rampaging mob on the Broadwater Farm estate, Tottenham. His name gained nationwide and enduring recognition, as did that of Winston Silcott, whose conviction for Blakelock's murder was overturned in 1991.Footnote ⁴⁷

An entry on Blakelock would invite consideration of racism, the origins of ‘sink’ estates, police riot tactics, newspaper and television presentation, police investigative methods, judicial process, and various other contributions to late twentieth-century social, political, and cultural history. Given ODNB's stated intention of social outreach, the neglect of Blakelock (encompassing the still-living Silcott) is striking – but so also is the absence of an entry for (Clement) Blair Peach (1946–79), another sensational and consequential ‘victim-life’. The death of Peach, special needs primary-school teacher, following police violence during public demonstrations at Southall in 1979, resulted in a prolonged and agonizing examination of police conduct, civil liberties, and news presentation. A primary school in Southall is named after him, yet he has escaped ODNB attention.

In a way that might, then, surprise those familiar with the dictionary's high-command, entries for modern Britain make the editorial directors of the ODNB seem more Telegraph than Guardian reading. This is further demonstrated in relation to the lives of victims, by the neglect of notorious victims of injustice and wrongful conviction. Derek Bentley (1933–53) appears as ‘victim of a miscarriage of justice’, but there is no entry for Stefan Kiszko (1951–92), tax clerk in Rochdale and falsely convicted of the murder of an eleven-year-old girl in July 1976. The Kiszko case is one of numbing pathos, and one that offers compelling insights into the British justice system of the late twentieth century. Kiszko spent sixteen years in prison; the police collected 6,000 statements but their prosecution of Kiszko, vulnerable and child-like, was unscrupulous. Remarkably, Kiszko was defended (badly) by a future home secretary (David Waddington) whose appointment to the Home Office was later to delay the appeal. Counsel for the prosecution was Peter Taylor, who later became lord chief justice on the very day that Kiszko's appeal was allowed. Mentally and physically broken by his imprisonment, Kiszko died eighteenth months after his release. Kiszko's mother, a pitiable figure who became her son's steadfast champion on nightly news broadcasts, died six months after that. The Court of Appeal decision has never been formally reported. None of this reaches the ODNB.

Modern medical history in ODNB also falters. An Elizabeth Baigent entry for Anthony Nolan (1971–9) registers the resultant achievements in the manufacture of compatible bone-marrow (and offers incidental sympathy to the cause of assisted suicide in the case of Shirley Nolan), but there are no ODNB articles for the first British heart transplant patient, Frederick West (1923–68), nor for the first successful such operation in Britain, in 1979, for Keith Castle (d. 1985). Also missing (using the comparable Bulger/Lawrence gambit) is Stephen Blood (1965–95), husband of Diana Blood who fought successfully to change the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act. In 1997, the Court of Appeal established Mrs Blood's right to use her dead husband's sperm in fertility treatment, and, in 2000, following the birth of her son, the further right to have her husband named as father on the birth certificate.

Such imbalances – inevitable in a project of this range – can be addressed by additional entries. More problematic are the traps waiting for the unguarded in ODNB's much-vaunted search facilities. Electronic trawls through ODNB are undoubtedly revelatory and an important aid to historical research. In deploring the intemperate reviews on its publication, Lawrence Goldman wrote that the ODNB ‘will be a fixed point from which further biographical and historical discussion can develop’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The advanced search facilities for ‘full text’ provide opportunities to enter the user's own search terms, with delimiters, if required, from pull-down menus. The ‘people’ search section offers a menu of multiple choices by gender, life dates, profession, place, and much more besides. Twenty-five ‘fields of interest’ are offered, divided into more than 1,400 subheadings, including hymn-writers, vulcanologists, phoneticians, executioners, helminthologists, and misers. The equivalent ‘occupations and realms of renown’ of the American national biography includes ‘thieves’ (four of them), ‘chewing gum industry leaders’ (also four) and two greeting card manufacturers.

At present, however, any such searching, inviting as it is, requires health warnings. Searches by place allow the specification of birth, baptism, residence, death, and burial, but not property ownership, while a search on place also demonstrates the limitations of the full ODNB as a searchable text. The advanced search offers many categories and invites users to submit their own key words,Footnote ⁴⁹ but it will only deliver to the standards adopted in the overall compilation of the dictionary. Thus Defoe's association with Earl's Colne will not be found because his entry misspells it as ‘Earlscolne’. Current inhabitants of Wix in Essex might search ODNB to discover past villagers. If so, they will miss their pre-eminent former denizen, the religious controversialist Edmund Hickeringill (c. 1631–1708), because the village is given the earlier spelling of ‘Wickes’. Place names change. Those interested in the colonial history and biography of the Carolinas will be able to call up twenty-six lives (including the Rutledges, and Henry Laurens) as associated with ‘Charlestown’, a further twenty-three (including the Pinckneys and one (Peter) Manigault) under ‘Charles Town’, and a further three (or perhaps that should be ‘only’ three for the unawares) by typing in ‘Charleston’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The incidental discovery in this search is that Peter Manigault's father, the illustrious Gabriel (1704–81) was not thought deserving of a life.

Notwithstanding the cautions, these searches and the provision of essays and other strictly non-biographical features in ODNB alter fundamentally the definition and role of the collective biographical dictionary. ODNB begins to appear more as encyclopaedia than as dictionary of lives, with its various publicity-seeking enhancements inviting further radical thought about its future development. Given that innocent child-victims, arbitrary ‘groups’, and (especially) mythological figures are admitted, is it too fanciful to suggest, for example, that the ODNB be extended to include entries for animals significant to British history? Numerous animals do appear in ODNB lives, including the pet tortoise of Sir Thomas Browne, geologist and dean of Westminster (1605–82), and Caesar, ‘scruffy fox terrier’ pet of Edward VII,Footnote ⁵¹ but a case (with excellent promotional potential) might be made for a few animal entries in their own right. Gelert, the dog said to have been given by King John to Llywelyn the Great, prince of Gwynedd (1173–1240), lived on in legend as the cause of Llywelyn's muteness after he slaughtered the hound in the mistaken belief that it had killed his son. There is no reference to this in the ODNB's Llywelyn (ap Iorwerth) although Gelert does appear as the subject of a 1857 painting mentioned in the life of the Victorian animal painter, Gourlay Steele (1819–94). A striking memorial to the dog stands in the village of Beddgelert (‘grave of Gelert’).

Diverse social and political history might feature in essays on other historic canines, including Nipper (1884–95) the terrier-icon of His Master's Voice gramophone company, Mick the Miller (1926–39), the first great greyhound to race in England, and Dempsey (1986–2003), the pit bull terrier at the centre of a series of high-profile cases under the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991. Several revisionist historians would surely welcome a short tribute to Sorrel, ‘the Jacobite horse’ (previous owner, Sir John Fenwick, condemned in 1696) who stumbled in the molehill and brought about the death of William III. Wellington's horse, Copenhagen, was, according to the Aldershot Military Museum, ‘very well known and easily recognised in the horse-mounted society of that era’. Red Rum (1965–95) is celebrated as a three-times winner of the Grand National, but his life story illuminates much about the history of the presentation of sport, popular journalism, and celebrity in late twentieth-century Britain. An entry for the great dane, Rinka (master, Norman Scott), shot on Exmoor in 1975, would broaden accounts of the tumultuous events triggered by the dog's death. Of the main players in the drama leading to the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, only Peter Bessell (1921–85) and George Carman (1929–2001) gain posthumous entry to the present ODNB.Footnote ⁵²

More palatable for many ODNB users, perhaps, will be the continuation of collective biographies and themed essays. Such writing effectively amounts to exercises in condensed political and social history. We can all suggest new commissions. Could there be, for example, a feature on lost lifeboatmen ranging (at least) from the Southport and St Anne's disaster of 1886 (twenty-eight crew lost) to the Penlee disaster of 1981 (eight crew lost)? Both resulted in national mourning and scrutiny. Should articles also be commissioned on sites of sociability such as the London Library, the MCC, or some of the venerable clubs of London?

For all its group entries and the carefully crafted and concise biographies, ODNB patently remains a tool, not a part-substitute, for those writing history. Even though Colin Matthew's ‘grammar’ for each ODNB entry included an insistence on a final review of posthumous reputation and significance, such summaries do not allow extended historical reflection by bridging, for example, the entries for monarchs from Edward I to Edward IV or George I to George IV. In his superlative essay on Elizabeth I, Patrick Collinson revels in discussing her reputation (from chronicles to modern television drama) and offers a succinct final review of her achievement, but even in an ODNB contribution as sparkling and erudite as this, there is no opportunity to review Elizabeth's place in long-term historical constitutional and political change.

The addition of database links will play to the strength of the ODNB as a gateway for researching individuals and their historical context. Within practical limits, interoperability between on-line resources will offer an important pathway for future electronically aided historical research. Even cautious advances will demand vision and generosity on the part of many institutions, publishers, and database proprietors, but indications of what can be done are promising. ODNB biographies currently include more than 30,000 ‘deep links’ to the homepages of the on-line American national biography, National Portrait Gallery, National Register of Archives, and the Royal Historical Society's bibliography. The American national biography offers hyperlinks to 900 articles from the Oxford companion to United States history.

Future linkage with other on-line resources are less constrained by technology (which runs ahead of most historical database planning), than by the financial and political implications of joined-up electronic research provision. In-house collaboration should be unproblematic. In addition to the American national biography, Oxford University Press already publishes on-line the OED, Grove music, and Grove art. More challenging but hugely enriching would be open-access links to newspaper obituaries, census databases, the proceedings of the Old Bailey, the English short-title catalogue, digitized publications databases, on-line shipping and military records, and, most tantalizing of all, audio and audio-visual resources. ESTC is now freely available via the British Library website. Direct links with ESTC alone would offer the ODNB reader the chance to review a full list of an individual's publications (1473–1800) together with extensive bibliographical and holding location information. Other potentially supportive projects (all in progress) include the British Book Trades Index, British Printed Images to 1700, and the Public Catalogue Foundation, a county-by-county series of catalogues of all major paintings in local galleries, civic buildings and universities.Footnote ⁵³

Such a wish list would prove taxing in further ways. Differences between public and private accessibility are problematic. The CCEd (Clergy of the Church of England database, 1540–1835) is in progress and aims to be freely available, but its North American equivalent has, like most British census databases, adopted a pay-as-you-go approach. Further doubts arise about the robustness of multiple interrogations which can result in conflicting or variant findings. In such cases, however, less is not more – the wider the searches, the more readily cross-checking and clues to authenticity can be provided. A basic requirement will be clarity about the state of the resource at the moment of consultation (and the ability to record this). Another necessity for ODNB will be the development of further protocols for feedback and revision.

All of this would test design. Database extension will challenge the sophistication of on-screen layout in much the same way that the printer of Bayle's Dictionnaire teased typographical conventions by his four different levels of texts and notes, with references to bibliographical editions and lettered footnotes for critical commentary. The original DNB articles closed with bibliography and sources. In ODNB these are available via the left-hand menu with (updateable) secondary sources and archival references. Why should not these serve as extensions to existing ODNB search fields and facilities for broader historical investigation? Among records that might be linked to the entries, including excerpts in sound and vision, are many already listed in the ODNB article bibliographies – the British Film Institute, the documentary, news, current affairs, party political, propaganda, and performance footage of the National Film and Television Archive, the BBC archives, including recordings of radio broadcasts and its sports archive, the sound archive of the British Library, the film collections of the British Medical Association, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and many others. The remarkable effigies reproduced as stills for so many medieval subjects might be enhanced in some cases by a moving tour of the site. ODNB already offers sound on its podcast, with selected lives read by actors (albeit in a honeyed and mannered style that must startle the original authors of the articles). To hear the voices or see in action many of the modern subjects of ODNB would be instructive. An aural dimension would also add wonderfully to such lives as Anonymous IV (fl. 1250–80) and Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–85). If there ever is an entry for Blair Peach, then perhaps we might hear the song by Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Regga Fi Peach’.

Pipe dreams, perhaps, but to date, no comparable enterprise has moved collective biography so far from Carlyle's supposition that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’. ODNB continues the challenge to the emphasis on ‘men’, and even more to that on ‘great’, but it also rethinks ‘biography’. The provision of the full-text search and the advanced searches on place, profession, archives, image, and other criteria represent a move towards something that is much more than a biographical dictionary and that has important implications for the future construction of on-line combinations of data and essay-writing, resource identification, and interpretative provision. The objection here is that the distilled biographical essay will be eclipsed by what will become more of a portal to a vast – and unordered – archival resource. Its editor urges us to understand ODNB in terms of the history of the ‘organisation, production and consumption of learning’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The difficulty for ODNB directors is that however much they protest that the dictionary is not ‘holy writ’,Footnote ⁵⁵ it will be widely regarded as such.Footnote ⁵⁶ By offering a gateway to facilitate further references, the ODNB attenuates this burden, offering avenues to continued research, and avenues which should support, not undermine, the editorial imperative of ‘the clear separation of fact from interpretation or speculation’.Footnote ⁵⁷