Dictionary of National Biography

The Dictionary of National Biography is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history.

Following the example of national biographical collections published in separate nations of Europe, the publisher George Smith (1824 - 1901) planned an equivalent UK work from 1882 with the consultant assistance of Mr (afterwards Sir) Leslie Stephen. An early working title was the Biographia Britannica, the name of an earlier nineteenth-century reference work. The first volume of the Dictionary of National Biography apppeared on 1 January 1885, under Stephen’s editorship. Successive volumes appeared quarterly with complete punctuality until Midsummer 1900, when volume 63 closed the first series of the work, soon extended by the issue of three supplementary volumes.

In May 1891 Leslie Stephen resigned the editorship. Sidney Lee succeeded him as editor and brought the work up to the death of Queen Victoria. Throughout the twentieth century, further volumes were published for those deceased in each decade. The dictionary was transferred from its original publishers, Smith, Elder and Co., to Oxford University Press in 1917. In 1993, a further volume entitled "Missing Persons" was published containing about 1,000 notable people who had been omitted from previous editions. The Dictionary of National Biography contains the lives of more than 30,000 persons (approximately 36,000 including the supplements published in the twentieth century) and has elucidated the private annals of the British.

Apart from a large number of minor changes made when the main body of the dictionary was republished in 23 volumes in 1908-9, the dictionary went unrevised throughout the twentieth century. In the early 1990s Oxford University Press committed themselves to compiling a new dictionary of national biography. Work began in 1992 under the editorship of Colin Matthew, professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. Matthew decided that no subjects from the old dictionary would be excluded, however insignificant the subjects appeared to a late twentieth-century eye; that a minority of shorter articles from the original dictionary would remain in the new in revised form; and that room would be made for about 14,000 new subjects. Following Matthew's death in October 1999, he was succeeded as editor by another Oxford history professor, Brian Harrison, in January 2000.

The new dictionary, now known as The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, was published on 23 September 2004 in 60 volumes in print at a price of £7,500, and in an online edition for subscribers. It has 50,113 biographical articles covering 54,922 lives, including all those in the first edition. The online edition will be continually updated, from October 2004 under the aegis of the new dictionary's third editor, another Oxford history don, Lawrence Goldman.

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