Why I Love the ODNB

Occasionally I take a break from eating french toast to actually do a bit of work. This is, after all, what I'm getting paid for. Sort of. I'm a pretty self-motivating kind of fellow, but without deadlines or time pressure or even much of a regular schedule that would force me to squeeze in a specific amount of research-work per week, it's difficult to make much headway. And then what headway I make is very hazy and ill-defined: one of the drawbacks of being an academic is that, apart from the teaching (and frequently even then), we don't produce much in the way of deliverables. Which is to say that we very rarely see tangible, quantifiable products arise from our labor in the way that, say, a newspaper editor might, or an assembly-line worker. It took me about eight years to produce my first book (which still hasn't been published, though I'm assured it will appear soon), and that was with something like three years in which I was technically doing nothing, or nearly nothing, other than working on it. Heaven knows how long it'll take to produce the next one, what with all the teaching and committee work I'll be doing, to say nothing of the country band Kate and I will be starting once we arrive in Nashville.

But that's not really what I want to talk about this morning.

My current project involves, in part, investigating the lives and careers of the men who ran the British Empire. The overall project is a sort of comparative thingy looking at how the British state understood and responded to communal violence in Ireland and South Asia (that's how I put it in my fellowship proposals, anyway). This means looking at who was governing a particular spot where rioting was taking place, what their prior experiences would have been before they arrived there, and, crucially, whether any of the administrators in India had any experience in Ireland (or vice versa). Knowing this would help me understand what sort of ideological baggage these guys brought to their duties, whether they were trying to apply any supposed "lessons" from one part of the empire to another part, and, more broadly, how the different parts of the empire interacted with one another. The idea is to see the British Empire - and, by extension, imperialism generally - not as a top-down system in which the center imposes its will upon the periphery, but rather as a decentralized, improvised, and slightly unstable system with a whole bunch of (occasionally interlocking, occasionally colliding) moving parts. Sort of like a sixth-grade band recital.

This need to understand the lives of Britain's imperial administrators has brought me into close communion with one of the great towering achievements (alongside Jaffa Cakes and Monty Python's Life of Brian) of British civilization: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Haven't read the ODNB yet? Don't feel bad: it contains biographical sketches of over 56,000 figures from British history (or, as they put it, "Remarkable people in any walk of life who were connected with the British Isles"), from the ancient Romans all the way up to people who died in 2005.* You can access it online, but you have to have a subscription, or the library you're using has to have a subscription, which almost all UK public libraries and most good American university libraries will. You can also buy it as a 60-volume set for $6,500 (Amazon also has a used set for a mere $2099.97), but honestly, who has the space? There's also a free podcast (one life every two weeks), an RSS feed, a life-a-day email, and a few freebies on the website as well, all of which you should probably try out before you commit to buying the whole thing.

I love the ODNB for many reasons, perhaps the most important (and least interesting) of which is that it's a wonderful, quick reference for me as I do my research. All I have to do, when I come across an unfamiliar name, is type it into the search engine and see if there's anything on the dude (and, for what I'm doing, it's almost always a dude) I'm curious about. If there is, I've suddenly got a lot of insight that I didn't previously have into what went on at a very remote place in a very remote time. If there's not, I shrug and move on. The articles also contain lots of information about the archives in which a person's papers are held, the most significant secondary sources that discuss the person's life and career, and (somewhat perplexingly) the person's wealth at time of death.

But the real fun starts when I let myself get distracted by the contents of the articles. Usually I just skim them for salient career information, family history, attitudes toward specific political issues, etc., but I often come across a sentence like the following, from Anthony Clayton's biography of Lord Francis George Montagu Douglas Scott (1879-1952), and then I'm hooked: "From 1905 to 1910 Scott served as aide-de-camp to the viceroy of India, the earl of Minto, combining his duties with his two principal sporting interests, cricket and pig-sticking." Pig-sticking! Genius.

Or maybe something like the following, from David Matless's biography of Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942): "His marriage lacked emotional depth: Helen Younghusband led a quiet and melancholy home life (from 1921 to 1937 at Westerham, Kent), while her husband ranged around the country and the globe. In 1939 he met Madeline Lees, thirty-two years his junior and mother of seven children, with whom he conducted a passionately mystical affair until his death." How can I not go back and read the whole article after something like that?

So here's the thing about the ODNB, and the reason I love it so: it's a hybrid publication, an essentially Victorian enterprise with a modern veneer. Way back in the 1880s George Smith and Leslie Stephen, with typical Victorian grandiosity, conceived a comprehensive series of biographies of every important Briton who had ever lived. With considerable expense and massive scholarly energy, the two men - one as publisher, the other as editor - began churning out biographical sketches, in alphabetical order, every three months from 1885 to 1900. Eventually the sketches comprised 63 volumes and represented the work of over 600 contributors. The press revised the volumes for a few years and then, from 1912 to 1996, they stopped producing new editions, although additional volumes on the recently deceased appeared regularly.

In the 1990s the OUP decided to publish a new edition, bringing in modern experts to revise the musty old articles with modern historiographical techniques and perspectives, as well as adding new entries on people who may have been overlooked in the original edition (women, for example). This was also a massive and expensive undertaking, and it's still ongoing. Most of the major historical figures from the first edition have been considerably reevaluated, the new contributors bringing in the most recent scholarship and asking all the right, politically correct questions about their subjects. These are usually quite insightful and engaging, and a whole lot easier to digest than the sort of 600-page, day-by-day biographies that seem to be all the rage these days.

But I love this new ODNB primarily for the lives that have fallen through the cracks, the ones that have not been revised (or at least not very heavily), the ones where the original Victorian prose still survives in all its unselfconscious, mauve-tinted glory. Most of the men I'm looking up were pretty minor figures, and so apparently haven't merited much attention from the ODNB's modern contributors. Men like Lord Elgin, a not-especially-successful Viceroy of India from 1894-99, whose letters I came across at the British Library in January and who, it seems, conducted a fairly tense correspondence with Queen Victoria on the topic of the government's relations with Muslims. Or Sir Antony MacDonnell, an Irish Catholic who served as a provincial governor in India in the 1890s before returning to Ireland to serve as Undersecretary at Dublin Castle from 1901-8. These were reasonably important men in their time but almost wholly forgotten these days, and, while the ODNB gives me a good outline of their lives, it also gives me a glimpse into how these people were regarded by their contemporaries, for it is by them that the articles about them were originally written, and many of these assessments have been left intact by the modern contributors. Much of what they say fleshes out the personalities of these men, their priorities and their culture, much better than a bare-bones encyclopedia entry could ever do.

So, for instance, we have Sir William Duke (1863-1924), an administrator in Bengal, as described by P. G. Robb: “Duke thoroughly enjoyed Indian life, especially in its outdoor aspects, was a fair shot, and acquired a good field knowledge of the fauna and flora of Bengal. An indefatigable walker, he liked to explore his districts and to get to know the villagers, by whom he was called ‘the sahib who does all his daks (journeys) on foot’.”

Then there's George Robert Canning (Lord) Harris (1851-1932), Governor of Bombay from 1890-5, described by Katherine Prior as an avid cricketer who "always regarded his official work as a distraction from cricket, albeit a necessary one..." Prior goes on to say, "after outbreaks of sectarian rioting in 1893 and 1894, Harris saw himself as an umpire in India, deploying the rules of fair play to balance the competing interests of Hindus, Muslims, and Parsis." Communal riot as cricket match, with the state as umpire? That's absolutely brilliant, is what that is, and it gives me insight into the whole phenomenon that I hadn't ever considered - a way of looking at the person and period that I, from my 21st-century, non-cricket-playing perch, would never have imagined. Plus it's also kind of amusing, and also maybe a little bit depressing.

I could give you similar examples all day, but I'll restrain myself.

The wonderful thing about ODNB, then, is not only that it's amusing (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), but also that - in many instances - it illuminates its subjects from two very different vantage points. It gives you the modern, sophisticated, well-researched version of a person's life, the sort of thing that is both fairly objective but also somewhat distant, far-removed from the era in which he (or, occasionally, she) lived, and therefore a perspective that's slightly out of sympathy with these people. But it also gives you - in the lives of the relatively minor figures - traces of an older way of doing history, a more subjective point of view that, in the case of the Victorian imperial administrators who were actually alive during the ODNB's first publication run, is much closer to the lives it describes. At its best, it can give you the impression of sitting around a fireplace listening to people tell stories about someone they knew, rather than sitting in a lecture hall while some slick young professor reads you her latest peer-reviewed journal article.

As for me, I'm now considering a chapter on pig-sticking.

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*One of the principles for inclusion in the ODNB is that you have to be dead - so, for instance, John Lennon and George Harrison have entries but Paul and Ringo do not.