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H.C.G.
Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds)
THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY
OUP, £7,500, 60 vols, 61,472pp,
0 19 861411 X
THE
NEW, three-and-a-half shelf-metre, 62.5
million-word Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (ODNB) brings to mind what Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (q.v.) once wrote about
Top, his pet wombat (d. 1870): it is ‘a
joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness’.
In
sixty volumes, the ODNB covers 54,922
lives in 50,113 biographical articles
ranging in length from brief notes of
a few dozen words to 37,400 (the longest,
on Shakespeare). It is the work of approximately
10,000 contributors and advisers (302
of them Australian), and an Oxford team
of 362 associate editors. The huge task
of correcting and augmenting mineral water
tycoon George Smith, Leslie Stephen and
Sidney Lee’s original DNB (1885–1900);
revising and incorporating the twentieth-century
supplements, and collating the lists of
errata, which for a century have been
patiently and optimistically accumulated
at the Institute for Historical Research
— to say nothing of the task of writing
16,315 new lives, and replacing nearly
as many old ones — all of this was
achieved in just twelve years, and on
schedule. The online version, which will
incorporate corrections, is equipped with
a powerful search engine, which, for better
or worse, stands in for an index volume.
(A sixty-first volume, listing all the
contributors and their subjects, may be
purchased separately.) By any measure,
it is an amazing, colossal achievement.
The literary style is occasionally brilliant,
but more often necessarily spare, dry
and at times hilarious — ‘Merlin
[Myrddin] (supp. fl. 6th cent.), poet
and seer, is a figure whose historicity
is not proven’ (you can say that
again). But the point is that this huge
collection of lives is for exploration,
browsing and reading, not only for archaeological
excavation, data retrieval, or bio-bibliographical
first aid. As maybe the last giant book
in English, the ODNB is a work of panoramic
beauty. Time for a second mortgage.
The
dictionary’s scope is ‘from
the earliest times to the year 2000’,
and two credentials form the basic entry
visa. ‘National’ here means
British in the widest possible sense:
that is, having to do with England, Scotland,
Wales, Ireland and the rest of the little
archipelago (Norman Davies calls it simply
‘the isles’), and/or having
to do with ‘Britain in the world’.
Mostly this means lives led or originating
in, or destined for, British colonies,
embracing everything from the colonial
Americas to late twentieth-century Hong
Kong. This unapologetically imperial sense
of ‘national’ clearly also embraces
people from elsewhere who have had an
extraordinary impact, or left an indelible
mark, on the ‘global Britain’
thus defined, e.g. Joseph Conrad, Anna
Pavlova, Henry James, Truganini. And the
ODNB does its best not to exclude lives
that reflect any other plausible sphere
of British influence (back and forth):
Cromer’s Egypt, for example, or modern
Canada, South Africa and Australasia.
The second credential is mortality. The
ODNB is a club of the strictly dead. But
nobody, not even people who turn out not
to have existed at all, has been excised
from the core of the old DNB, which has
been revised but not culled, a welcome
gesture of historiographical continuity.
The current principles of selection exhibit
a boldly Victorian taste for vastness,
breadth and volume. Everybody from Pytheas
(the fourth-century B.C. Greek explorer
who left the earliest written account
of the British isles) to Leigh Bowery
(though Meg Russell’s article about
him is far too long) has been admitted,
if not welcomed with open arms.
With
the ODNB, conventional reviewing methods
are impossible. One can only take soundings.
I have spent several months imagining
the picture of Australia and her peoples
that a reader in Delhi or Halifax or Milton
Keynes or Aberdeen or New Haven, Connecticut,
might piece together from the host of
relevant lives in the ODNB. Is the coverage
fair and accurate? Yes, as far as I can
see. Have they got the balance right —
First Fleet, exploration, gold rush, Federation,
the world wars, the Depression? I think
so. Anybody missing? Inevitably, but let’s
look at who is there. The great and the
good are well covered: explorers and navigators,
soldiers and sailors, colonial bishops,
governors and politicians, men of capital,
pioneer women, artists and writers, scientists
and engineers. Most governors-general
and all Australian prime ministers up
to Robert Menzies (the majority with good
photographs) are represented, except for
James Scullin and Earle Page (hardly a
surprising omission). In Scullin’s
case, however, nine useful references
crop up after a keyword search, one in
each of the articles on Frank Anstey,
Ben Chifley, John Curtin, H.V. Evatt,
John Latham, Joe Lyons, Douglas Mawson,
Menzies and Keith Murdoch. Page, meanwhile,
has a walk-on part in the articles about
Stanley Bruce, Billy Hughes, Lyons and
Latham as before, and that of his boss
at Yarralumla, the Earl of Gowrie. The
search engine picks up numerous references
to other missing persons, though prudent
cross-checking confirms that the John
G. Gorton who wrote A Solution of that
Great Scriptural Difficulty the Genealogy
of Jesus was not the same likeable Liberal
senator for Victoria who became prime
minister in 1968. Nor was our Harold Holt
the sturdy brass founder of Bury and father-in-law
to Bishop Stopford of London.
Somewhat
surprisingly, Heather Radi’s article
about Prime Minister Bruce struck me as
fascinating. He was obviously the handsomest
and best-dressed prime minister thus far
— and is unlikely to be supplanted
any time soon. Bruce said of all his achievements
he was most pleased with his Cambridge
blue, his captaincy of the Royal and Ancient
Golf Club of St Andrews, and his Fellowship
of the Royal Society (1944). One wonders
how he found time to put pressure on Atatürk
or to run the country. Lord Bruce, the
High Commissioner in London, had been
a wealthy businessman, but when in 1968
he died at 7 Prince’s Gate in London
he left a mere £35,479. What happened?
Aboriginal
Australians are patchily represented,
and the tally of dedicated articles seems
to be (in chronological order): ‘Pemulwoy
(c. 1760–1802), Aboriginal warrior’,
by Richard Broome; ‘Bennelong (c.
1765–1813), Aboriginal visitor to
England’, by Alan Atkinson (the designation
is crazy; one might as well describe Anna
Pavlova as a ‘Russian visitor to
England’ and not a ballerina —
but the article itself is good); ‘Truganini
(c. 1812–1876), Australian Aborigine’,
and ‘William Barak (1823?–1903),
Australian Aboriginal leader’, both
by A.G.L. Shaw; ‘Albert Namatjira
(1902–1959), Aboriginal artist’,
by Sylvia Kleinert; and ‘David Unaipon
(1872–1967), writer and promoter
of Aboriginal rights’, a miniature
masterpiece by Philip Jones that doubles
as a melancholy portrait of South Australia
in the 1950s and 1960s.
A
search for ‘any life event in or
at Melbourne’ in the fields of literature,
journalism or publishing between 1900
and 2000 yields an impressive crop of
articles on Martin Boyd, Rolf Boldrewood,
Ada Cambridge, Annie Maria Dawbin, Gavan
Duffy, Madge Garland, George Johnston,
Alan Moorehead, Keith Murdoch, Henry Handel
Richardson, David Syme and Angela Thirkell,
among numerous others. There are ninety-three
articles on Australian women, including
the convict and author Margaret Catchpole;
the ‘immigration administrator’
Caroline Chisholm (naturally); the philanthropist
and evangelical Lady Victoria Buxton;
the mining speculator, proprietor of the
Sunday Times and pug breeder Alice Cornwell
(known as ‘Madame Midas’, about
whom Fiona Gruber is now writing a fully
fledged biography); the actress Coral
Browne; Dame Mabel Brookes (I am not sure
I would describe such a formidable person
as a ‘socialite’: the term seems
wrongly calibrated for Melbourne in the
1950s, but on the other hand what on earth
was she?); the Tasmanian Aboriginal Truganini
(Shaw’s account is slightly constipated);
the novelist Mrs Campbell Praed; Peggy
Ramsay; Mabel Atkinson; and Dame Nellie
Melba. This gives a good impression of
the spread. Curiously, in a book that
aims to get the fine detail exactly right,
no mention is made by T.G. Rosenthal of
the remarkable fact that Sidney Nolan,
R.A., was the only Australian (never mind
Australian artist) ever to be made both
a Companion of Honour and a member of
the Order of Merit, a really intriguing
mark of his high standing in Britain.
Unlike Stanley Bruce, Nolan died rich.
When probate was granted in 1993, his
estate was worth £2,324,118.
Should
we be troubled by the fact that in the
ODNB the lives of Australian Aborigines
and prime ministers (along with their
New Zealand, Barbadian and Malaysian counterparts)
are interleaved with British racing identities,
hangmen, misers, nuns, pamphleteers and
minor peeresses? Of course not: if the
reader in Delhi or Halifax or Milton Keynes
or Aberdeen or New Haven cares to trace
their footsteps, she will find that they,
too, criss-cross an empire that has gone
for good. The ODNB is surely its most
magnificent tombstone.
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