Recreating Our Past: Geography and the Rewriting of the Dictionary of National Biography

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The twenty-two volume Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), published 1894-1902, is a monument to the nineteenth-century conception of the nation state as the fundament of world order and high point of civilization, and of history as 'the essence of innumerable biographies'.' The integrity of DNB's editors and the scholarship of its contributors were such that it could never have become a parade of the great and the good, a selective Whig trawl of past centuries to create a national past fit to buttress contemporary claims to world pre-eminence. There is a good sprinkling of the criminal, the devious and the simply bizarre, to balance deferentially fulsome lives of royalty and heroic accounts of generals. Nonetheless, none would deny that the new edition of the DNB, beginning at the University of Oxford, is timely. Scholarship has proven facts to be wrong, emphases ill judged, omissions unjustifiable. The conception of the national life has changed: business people not soldiers are the new heroes; doctors and scientists not priests claim moral leadership; women and men contest the boundary between public and private life. The geography of the nation has changed, both in fact, with the partition of Ireland and the loss of dominions, and in perception, with the domination of the English rightly contested. The question of cultural ascendency is epitomized in the geographical problem of place names (English or Celtic?) since, as Translations, Brian Friel's play about the ordnance survey in nineteenth-century Ireland, shows, in naming a place we define our relationship to it.2 Geography in the DNB