Life would be much the poorer without a national biography, a collection of the lives of people who have “left their mark on an aspect of national life, worldwide”. The public spirited endeavour of the Oxford University Press that first revised and now regularly updates the Victorian concept of a Dictionary of National Biography can only be cheered. But its very value makes the question of who is included so important. The dictionary is an edited collection, a portrait not a mirror, a dictionary not Wikipedia. It is the product of choice, not random coincidence. It is an educated judgment: a description in life stories of who we are. In a way no single biography could be, its breadth and range makes it a public measure of national values.
Naturally, this judgment is very different now from when Leslie Stephen first started inviting eminent Victorians to submit lists of great men for inclusion in the early 1880s, though even then the idea of including the biographies of 1,400 hymn-writers was considered excessive. The updates, originally every decade, reveal a gentle drift away from the church, great landowners and generals as sculptors of the nation’s values, towards other pillars of public life, the permanent government of Whitehall mandarins, Nobel prize winners and the occasional film star.
In the digital era, the pace has accelerated and so has the breadth of vision. The first 63-volume dictionary, completed in 1900 at the expense of a single backer, was a compendium of 30,000 lives compiled by only 650 writers and editors. When it was overhauled and digitised, a vast undertaking completed in 2004, there were 10,000 contributors, all experts in their field.
The editors’ opinion not only of who counts but who still counts, and how much, shifts too. The entries on Queen Victoria and Churchill are shrinking. The painful, slow business of confronting the grimmer aspects of our island story, so often avoided, is under way in these pages. Last October, the process of updating not the newly dead but the newly significant led to the inclusion of some prominent slave owners and some of their opponents in the abolitionist movement – and also Britain’s first black mayor, Dr Allan Glaisyer Minns, who in 1904 was elected by the people of Thetford in Norfolk.
This week, the latest batch of the elect, the biographies of people of significance who died in 2013, were released. That was the year that Margaret Thatcher died, and her contemporary pre-eminence is reflected in a 30,000 word biography, longer than anyone’s except Shakespeare and Elizabeth I (possibly because all publications value an American audience). She is one of just 59 women, 25% of the total. In its defence, the editors argue that most of the new entrants were born between the wars, in the 1920s and 1930s. As David Cannadine, who is now editor-in-chief of the DNoB, once noted, often the secret to inclusion is to work harder and live longer than your rivals. All the same it is striking that a mere 2% of the 235 new names – just five people – are non-white. They do include the community rights activist and publisher Jessica Huntley, and the Trinidadian airman and judge Ulric Cross; but curiously there is space too for Ronnie Biggs, the great train robber, and the businessman and politician Boris Berezovsky, who appeared to have killed himself in his Berkshire home but who some believe was murdered for his outspoken opposition to Vladimir Putin.
Lists are probably the quickest way to provoke an argument, and arguing over who has shaped national life is part of the business of establishing what it should like. Biggs and Berzovsky may look questionable; but neither looks anywhere near as questionable as a single man left out. There is no Nelson Mandela. No matter that he was not a Briton, nor ever lived here. For millions of white Britons, he redefined what it meant to be black; he reshaped attitudes to apartheid; and the story of the life he lived is a vivid influence on the unfinished business of how Britons think about the history of empire.
