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There is a new British Dictionary of National Biography. I love this type of book. Here is a bit from The Guardian article, followed by a selection of entries. - Perdita
Pytheas, Diana, the singing postman - John Ezard, September 23, 2004
They launched a new reference book in London yesterday, but it was more like the flotation of one of the last great Edwardian ocean liners. The new Dictionary of National Biography rolled down the slipway into bookshops and libraries with the mightiest of thuds - 61,440 pages long, stretching to 60 volumes, a snip at £7,500 (reduced to £6,500 on Amazon).
It can virtually claim - as the News of the World once did - that all human life is here, all British life at least. It offers contributions by 10,000 mostly learned contributors of 50,000 distinguished or celebrated dead people across 2,400 years of history. Its span reaches from Pytheas, the 4th century BC Greek explorer who was the first to describe Britain, which he called Prettania, to the singing postman Allan Smethurst. Smethurst, who died shortly before the project's deadline two years ago, was briefly renowned for his Norfolk dialect record, Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?'.
In between these two dates, the dictionary takes a cool look at the still heated topic of Diana, Princess of Wales. ... And it revives the reputation of one of the most vilified 20th century politicians, Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister accused of risking Britain's survival by appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1939.
...
The new DNB is the first revised edition for 117 years. The original volumes were edited by Sir Leslie Stephen, father of the novelist Virginia Woolf, with extra names added every 10 years. They became a world-famous cornerstone of British scholarship and culture, a trusted source for learning and education, with the prestige of the country's learned societies and great museums.
...
One of his favourite entries is Sir Charles Isham, thought to have invented the British garden gnome. The project director Robert Faber's favourite is the Norwich-born Victorian black circus performer and proprietor Pablo Fanque, "proficient in tumbling, posturing, leaping, rope-dancing and riding". Mr Faber says the entry has at last thrown light for him on the meaning of a line in John Lennon's song Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite. The line goes:
The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque's fair.
Sometimes it takes the legacy of 100 years of scholarship to explain such things.
--------------------------------------------------
Roy Jenkins on Harold Wilson:
Wilson was the dominating politician from 1963 to 1976 ... He was often accused of lacking any lodestar of political belief, although he was far from unique among prime ministers in that respect. He believed in governing, in making the Labour party the dominating party of government, and in trying to keep it so. And he thought governing should, subject to the exigencies of party, be done moderately and pragmatically, nudging his way around events rather than pursuing some Manichaean aim. He also wanted it to be done amelioratively to those who most needed protection. While he could be suspicious, he was a kind, if not a warm, man who liked being nice to people, important and unimportant. He was not inspirational and he left little ideological legacy. His name occurs less often in the Labour hymn-sheet than does that of Attlee or Bevan. But he was a very considerable servant of the state. He kept the train of government on the rails over difficult stretches of country.
Nick Ross on the murdered television presenter Jill Dando (1961-99):
Over the next six years on Breakfast Time Dando grew in stature and popularity. She was a televisual natural, extremely capable, unflappable, equally at ease with serious news and lightweight features - a "professional chameleon", as she put it herself - and with a radiating screen presence. She often presented The Six O'Clock News and became the "Golden Girl" of British television (the Times, April 27 1999), though one of her attractions was that she retained her modesty, was unfailingly generous to colleagues, and seemed genuinely surprised that she should be so popular and successful. In the early 1990s one of the BBC's top-rated series, Holiday, needed a new presenter and Dando quickly made the show her own, full of fun and sunshine, flattering and flattered by the camera, building audiences of up to nine million.
Michael T Thornhill on Sid Vicious (Simon John Beverley, 1957-59):
Vicious took some heroin from his mother's purse and injected himself with what proved to be a lethal dose ... Sid Vicious's death at 21 was worldwide news and instantly elevated him to the "live fast, die young" hall of fame. Iconic status was ensured. At the Sex Pistols' peak, elements of the establishment regarded the band as a treasonous threat - best seen in Julian Temple's documentary film The Filth and the Fury (2000). But even then Vicious's contribution owed more to the fantasy of rock martyrdom than to any serious questioning of society's values. His drawn-out drug-induced demise turned punk rebellion into a revolt against the self. By 1979 punk was just another product and his death prompted one last surge of hype.
Patrick Wormald on King Alfred (Alfred the Great, 848/9-899):
It is needless to endorse all that has been thought of Alfred as history transmuted into myth. The historical record plainly establishes that he was among the most remarkable rulers in the annals of human government. Posterity required what it seeks of any national hero: a figure matching the preoccupations of the moment ... He met "with triumph and disaster", and treated "those two impostors just the same". The story of Alfred and the cakes is one of the best known in English history.
Marilyn Butler on Jane Austen (1775-1817):
Later in the second half of the 20th century, as women's studies and feminist studies challenged and to a considerable extent rerouted the priority formerly given to male writers, Austen was for the first time perceived as part of a wave of late 18th century women writers who addressed a growing readership of women. In the 1790s authors such as Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and Wollstonecraft were already using the conventions of the popular courtship romance to criticise the legal and economic barriers that society erected against women. Though averse to entering London or Bath literary circles, Austen from her schooldays actively availed herself of structures - reviews, magazines, and circulating libraries - that could disseminate the productions of the book trade through the countryside as well as the town. As a reader she disliked "preaching", and as a writer she kept close to the conventions of comedy - witty, satirical, and sentimental - as practised in the theatre of her day. She cleverly varied the style of her heroines, yet made each of them, including even Catherine Morland, loyal and eventually self-reliant. By her frequent cross-references to other women-centred plays and novels, Austen was fully part of the stimulating conversation conducted by the literate women of her day.
Bruce A Bailey on the probable father of the garden gnome Sir Charles Isham (1819-1903):
Isham grew interested in tiny beings he thought lived underground. "In an extraordinary way this interest manifested itself in the acquisition of hand-modelled tiny gnomes while on a visit to Nuremberg. He placed these little beings, wielding spades and pick-axes and pushing wheelbarrows, in the rockery, as though they were mining it, and for some he made banners protesting that they were on strike. Some of these figures he adorned with entertaining doggerel verses for occasions when the Ishams held fetes at Lamport for local orphanages. They seem to have been well established by the 1860s, and so may well be the first appearance of such figures as garden decoration."
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan on Marged ferch Ifan (bap. 1696, d. 1793), Welsh woman harpist and wrestler:
Oral tradition has preserved many tales which grew up around her, many of them no less attractive for being impossible to verify. All sources, however, describe her as a large and exceptionally strong woman, a great weightlifter who could wrestle any man to the ground, so that even when she was 70 years old the young men of the district treated her with respect. Her husband, the harpist Richard Morris (d. 1786), was much slighter and no match for her, which suggests that it was she who courted him, for few suitors dared approach her. She is said to have given Richard Morris two severe beatings: after the first he married her ... and after the second he joined the Methodists.
full article on the new dictionary
Pytheas, Diana, the singing postman - John Ezard, September 23, 2004
They launched a new reference book in London yesterday, but it was more like the flotation of one of the last great Edwardian ocean liners. The new Dictionary of National Biography rolled down the slipway into bookshops and libraries with the mightiest of thuds - 61,440 pages long, stretching to 60 volumes, a snip at £7,500 (reduced to £6,500 on Amazon).
It can virtually claim - as the News of the World once did - that all human life is here, all British life at least. It offers contributions by 10,000 mostly learned contributors of 50,000 distinguished or celebrated dead people across 2,400 years of history. Its span reaches from Pytheas, the 4th century BC Greek explorer who was the first to describe Britain, which he called Prettania, to the singing postman Allan Smethurst. Smethurst, who died shortly before the project's deadline two years ago, was briefly renowned for his Norfolk dialect record, Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?'.
In between these two dates, the dictionary takes a cool look at the still heated topic of Diana, Princess of Wales. ... And it revives the reputation of one of the most vilified 20th century politicians, Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister accused of risking Britain's survival by appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1939.
...
The new DNB is the first revised edition for 117 years. The original volumes were edited by Sir Leslie Stephen, father of the novelist Virginia Woolf, with extra names added every 10 years. They became a world-famous cornerstone of British scholarship and culture, a trusted source for learning and education, with the prestige of the country's learned societies and great museums.
...
One of his favourite entries is Sir Charles Isham, thought to have invented the British garden gnome. The project director Robert Faber's favourite is the Norwich-born Victorian black circus performer and proprietor Pablo Fanque, "proficient in tumbling, posturing, leaping, rope-dancing and riding". Mr Faber says the entry has at last thrown light for him on the meaning of a line in John Lennon's song Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite. The line goes:
The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque's fair.
Sometimes it takes the legacy of 100 years of scholarship to explain such things.
--------------------------------------------------
Roy Jenkins on Harold Wilson:
Wilson was the dominating politician from 1963 to 1976 ... He was often accused of lacking any lodestar of political belief, although he was far from unique among prime ministers in that respect. He believed in governing, in making the Labour party the dominating party of government, and in trying to keep it so. And he thought governing should, subject to the exigencies of party, be done moderately and pragmatically, nudging his way around events rather than pursuing some Manichaean aim. He also wanted it to be done amelioratively to those who most needed protection. While he could be suspicious, he was a kind, if not a warm, man who liked being nice to people, important and unimportant. He was not inspirational and he left little ideological legacy. His name occurs less often in the Labour hymn-sheet than does that of Attlee or Bevan. But he was a very considerable servant of the state. He kept the train of government on the rails over difficult stretches of country.
Nick Ross on the murdered television presenter Jill Dando (1961-99):
Over the next six years on Breakfast Time Dando grew in stature and popularity. She was a televisual natural, extremely capable, unflappable, equally at ease with serious news and lightweight features - a "professional chameleon", as she put it herself - and with a radiating screen presence. She often presented The Six O'Clock News and became the "Golden Girl" of British television (the Times, April 27 1999), though one of her attractions was that she retained her modesty, was unfailingly generous to colleagues, and seemed genuinely surprised that she should be so popular and successful. In the early 1990s one of the BBC's top-rated series, Holiday, needed a new presenter and Dando quickly made the show her own, full of fun and sunshine, flattering and flattered by the camera, building audiences of up to nine million.
Michael T Thornhill on Sid Vicious (Simon John Beverley, 1957-59):
Vicious took some heroin from his mother's purse and injected himself with what proved to be a lethal dose ... Sid Vicious's death at 21 was worldwide news and instantly elevated him to the "live fast, die young" hall of fame. Iconic status was ensured. At the Sex Pistols' peak, elements of the establishment regarded the band as a treasonous threat - best seen in Julian Temple's documentary film The Filth and the Fury (2000). But even then Vicious's contribution owed more to the fantasy of rock martyrdom than to any serious questioning of society's values. His drawn-out drug-induced demise turned punk rebellion into a revolt against the self. By 1979 punk was just another product and his death prompted one last surge of hype.
Patrick Wormald on King Alfred (Alfred the Great, 848/9-899):
It is needless to endorse all that has been thought of Alfred as history transmuted into myth. The historical record plainly establishes that he was among the most remarkable rulers in the annals of human government. Posterity required what it seeks of any national hero: a figure matching the preoccupations of the moment ... He met "with triumph and disaster", and treated "those two impostors just the same". The story of Alfred and the cakes is one of the best known in English history.
Marilyn Butler on Jane Austen (1775-1817):
Later in the second half of the 20th century, as women's studies and feminist studies challenged and to a considerable extent rerouted the priority formerly given to male writers, Austen was for the first time perceived as part of a wave of late 18th century women writers who addressed a growing readership of women. In the 1790s authors such as Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and Wollstonecraft were already using the conventions of the popular courtship romance to criticise the legal and economic barriers that society erected against women. Though averse to entering London or Bath literary circles, Austen from her schooldays actively availed herself of structures - reviews, magazines, and circulating libraries - that could disseminate the productions of the book trade through the countryside as well as the town. As a reader she disliked "preaching", and as a writer she kept close to the conventions of comedy - witty, satirical, and sentimental - as practised in the theatre of her day. She cleverly varied the style of her heroines, yet made each of them, including even Catherine Morland, loyal and eventually self-reliant. By her frequent cross-references to other women-centred plays and novels, Austen was fully part of the stimulating conversation conducted by the literate women of her day.
Bruce A Bailey on the probable father of the garden gnome Sir Charles Isham (1819-1903):
Isham grew interested in tiny beings he thought lived underground. "In an extraordinary way this interest manifested itself in the acquisition of hand-modelled tiny gnomes while on a visit to Nuremberg. He placed these little beings, wielding spades and pick-axes and pushing wheelbarrows, in the rockery, as though they were mining it, and for some he made banners protesting that they were on strike. Some of these figures he adorned with entertaining doggerel verses for occasions when the Ishams held fetes at Lamport for local orphanages. They seem to have been well established by the 1860s, and so may well be the first appearance of such figures as garden decoration."
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan on Marged ferch Ifan (bap. 1696, d. 1793), Welsh woman harpist and wrestler:
Oral tradition has preserved many tales which grew up around her, many of them no less attractive for being impossible to verify. All sources, however, describe her as a large and exceptionally strong woman, a great weightlifter who could wrestle any man to the ground, so that even when she was 70 years old the young men of the district treated her with respect. Her husband, the harpist Richard Morris (d. 1786), was much slighter and no match for her, which suggests that it was she who courted him, for few suitors dared approach her. She is said to have given Richard Morris two severe beatings: after the first he married her ... and after the second he joined the Methodists.
full article on the new dictionary
