# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Memoir of Sir Sidney Lee

MEMOIR OF SIR SIDNEY LEE
The present volume of the Dictionary includes the biographies of persons of note who died in the period 1912-1921. It therefore contains no life of Sir Sidney Lee, who died 3 March 1926. An article upon him will be included in the next decennial volume, which is intended to appear about 1935.
It seemed to the present editors that as a memoir of George Smith, the founder of the Dictionary, was prefixed to the First Supplement, although he died some months later than the date fixed as the limit of that work, so it was desirable to preface this volume with some account of the second Editor of the Dictionary. It also seemed desirable that this preface should take the form of an explanation of the nature of the task which occupied so large a part of Lee’s life, and of its connexion with his writings in general.
Sidney Lee was born 5 December 1859. His father, Lazarus Lee, was a London merchant. He was educated at the City of London School under Dr. Edwin Abbott, obtained an exhibition at Balliol College, Oxford, and matriculated in October 1878. He was awarded a third class in classical moderations in 1880, and a second class in modern history in Trinity Term 1882. He matriculated and took his degree as Solomon Lazarus Lee, but subsequently changed the first name and dropped the second altogether. Whilst still an undergraduate he wrote two articles on Shakespearian subjects which attracted the attention of scholars. One, entitled ° The Original of Shylock’, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1880, was an attempt to show that the trial of Dr. Lopez in 1594 for a plot against Queen Elizabeth suggested the study of Jewish character which Shakespeare embodied in The Merchant of Venice. The other was a new study of Love's Labour's Lost, printed in the same periodical for October 1880. Through these articles he became known to Dr. Furnivall, who commissioned him to edit the romance of Huon of Bordeaux (translated from the French by Lord Berners about 1580) for the Early English Text Society; the first volume of this appeared in 1883. Lee was thinking of applying for a lectureship in English which was about to be established at the university of Groningen, when the foundation of this Dictionary afforded him an opportunity for employment in England.
There was great need of such a Dictionary. The present generation scarcely realizes the difficulties which the lack of such a tool imposed upon scholars. Standard foreign collections of universal biography gave very unsatisfactory lives of Englishmen. English collections of the same kind—those of Chalmers and Rose for example—were obsolete or very imperfect. As for a collection of national biography, the seven folio volumes of Biographia Britannica, published in 1747-1766, were long out of date, and the ​attempt of Dr. Kippis to produce a revised and enlarged edition of that work came to an untimely end with the letter F in 1793. Mr. John Murray, about 1856, had announced a new ‘Biographia Britannica’, compiled by various writers and edited by Dr. William Smith, but the project ended with the list of names to be included under the letter A. It was, therefore, very fortunate that in 1882 a publisher of great enterprise, genuine interest in literature, and ample means conceived the scheme which developed into the Dictionary of National Biography. Mr. George Smith’s first idea was a Dictionary of Universal Biography, with many editors and contributors, English and foreign. ‘From that wild attempt’, said he, ‘I was saved by the knowledge and sound judgement of Mr. Leslie Stephen.’ In November 1882 Stephen was appointed editor, and on 23 December he published in the Athenæum the announcement of ‘A New Biographia Britannica’. It was a very clear and concise statement of the editor’s programme.
‘Apart from precedent’, Stephen wrote, ‘one or two principles are clear. We should aim at giving the greatest possible amount of information in a thoroughly business-like form. Dates and facts should be given abundantly and precisely; it is of primary importance to give in all cases, and upon a uniform plan, a clear reference to the primary authorities; and in the case of literary biographies it is important to give a full bibliographical notice. It would, however, be easy to ensure failure by attempting too much. We must exclude much if the Dictionary is not to break down under its own weight. We must in the first place exclude (with certain exceptions) names which are only names. A biographical dictionary must be a collection of biographies, and cannot be a full catalogue of names. This, I may add, implies a limit to the bibliographical part of the work....’
‘We shall have to deal with a great mass of information. Biographies of this kind may err by being too diffuse or too meagre.... We must of course aim at being condensed. Philosophical and critical disquisition, picturesque description, and so forth, are obviously out of place and must be rigorously excised.... On the other hand, it is a mistake to economise space by omitting any useful information. And when we ask what information comes under that head, it is not easy to draw the line. Elaborate analysis of character or exposition of critical theories is irrelevant; but a reader may fairly ask to have characteristic anecdotes in their most authentic form, and a clear statement of the view taken by a statesman of political controversies or of the position in the history of literature of a remarkable poem....’
‘I have been asked whether anything in the way of “literary style” is to be admitted. If style means superfluous ornament, I say emphatically, no. But style, and even high literary ability, is required for lucid and condensed narrative, and of such style I shall be anxious to get as much as I can. A biography written with a single eye to giving all the information presumably desirable by an intelligent reader may be not only useful, but intensely interesting, and even a model of literary art....’
‘Finally I have one remark to add. The editor of such a work must, by the necessity of the case, be autocratic. He will do his best to be a considerate autocrat.’
​The next thing to be done was to find a good sub-editor. Stephen said that he wanted ‘a man of knowledge, good at abstracting, looking up authorities, and so forth, and an efficient whip in regard both to printers and contributors’. Various candidates for the post were considered, but Furnivall, who, as a Trinity Hall man had influence with Stephen, strongly recommended Lee, and after an interview Lee was chosen. In him Stephen found more than he had demanded: an assistant whose zeal never flagged, and whose ability was greater than he expected; a subordinate whose loyalty to his editor laid the foundation of a lasting friendship.
Lee began his duties in March 1888. ‘The Dictionary’, wrote Stephen about that time, ‘is more or less launched and, like other work, so far as my experience has gone, it is rather a humbug; that is, one talks a great deal and lets other people talk more about the immensity of the task, and after all one finds it to be really simple when it is once got a little into order.’ A system was devised and gradually elaborated by the light of experience. The first task was the compilation of a list of the names to be included. Up to the beginning of the letter M this was done by Mr. Thompson Cooper, one of the authors of Athenæ Cantabrigienses, whose collection of biographical data proved of great service. ‘An ideal Dictionary’, said Stephen, ‘would be a complete codification or summary of all the previously existing collections.... It is bound first of all to include all the names which have appeared in any respectable collection of lives, and in the next place to supplement this by including a great many names which for one reason or another have dropped out, but which appear to be approximately of the same rank.’ Lists compiled in this way appeared at intervals in the Athenæum from June 1888 onwards. Eventually they came out twice a year, each consisting of the 900 or 1,000 names which it was meant to include in the next two volumes of the Dictionary. Readers were invited to suggest additions, and in order that the editor might judge the value of their suggestions, to refer him at the same time to the sources of information available. By this means the co-operation of scholars was ensured, and the number of omissions greatly reduced. The revised lists, printed in pamphlet form, were sent to intending contributors, who were asked to say what articles they would undertake. As soon as their offers were received, the editor assigned the articles, and when there were several applicants for the same article decided between them. In the first list it was stated ‘that the editor, in assigning articles to contributors, would ‘inform them what space can be allowed for each name’. But that plan was soon abandoned: it became the exception, not the rule. In the case of the ‘great lives’, Stephen told a contributor, ‘I have found it best to suggest a limit, not of course quite absolute, but as the amount to be aimed at.’ The scale was fixed by comparison; if so-and-so could be adequately dealt with in twenty pages, twenty or at most twenty-five would suffice for a man of equal rank. But this method could not be applied to the minor lives. Often the editor could not know till the article came in what there was to say about the man; and so instead of fixing a limit beforehand he cut down the article to the size which the facts justified him in allowing.
​Stephen was thoroughly convinced of the importance of these minor articles. Looking back on his editorial work he said: ‘The judicious critic is well aware that it is not upon the lives of the great men that the value of the book really depends. It is the second-rate people—the people whose lives have to be reconstructed from obituary notices or from references in memoirs or collections of letters; or sought in prefaces to posthumous works; or sometimes painfully dug out of collections of manuscripts; and who really become generally accessible through the Dictionary alone—that provide the really useful reading. Nobody need look at Addison or Byron or Milton in a dictionary. He can find fuller and better notices in any library; and the biographer must be satisfied if he has put together a useful compendium of all the relevant literature.’
Stephen’s articles on the men he named show what excellence such a compendium might attain. Many of the 878 articles which he contributed were of this kind. Lee’s 870 articles included a far larger proportion of lives of second-rate people in which research was required. The wide range of the articles which Lee contributed to the early volumes of the Dictionary is remarkable. They begin with Prince Arthur and some fourteenth-century bishops, and end with nineteenth-century politicians; but the best of them are those dealing with men of the Tudor times such as Ascham and Caxton. Their merit was at once recognized. R. C. Christie in an elaborate review of the first ten volumes of the Dictionary, after praising Stephen’s Byron as unsurpassable, added: ‘There is no contributor whose initials we are more glad to see than Mr. S. L. Lee. We may always depend upon his accuracy and research. … Mr. Lee’s bibliographical information and his references to authorities leave nothing to be desired.’
As contributors they made an admirable team. Stephen’s great lives and Lee’s minor lives, Lee’s knowledge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Stephen’s knowledge of the eighteenth and nineteenth, supplemented each other. They divided the editorial work between them. Stephen, who disliked proof-correcting and did it badly, dealt with the original manuscripts, and Lee with the proofs. ‘My greatest worry’, wrote Stephen in April 1884, ‘is struggling against the insane verbosity of the average contributor. I never knew before how many words might be used to express a given fact. I read piles of MS., cutting right and left, and reducing some copy to a third of its original mass.’ In a circular to the contributors in April 1888, he complained that the average length of lives was increasing, and urged writers to condense their own articles. ‘If they find—as may probably be the case—that he has been more ruthless than formerly in the excision of superfluous words (or of words which to him appear to be superfluous) they may be comforted by remembering that such work is even more annoying to the Editor than to his victims; and is in fact by many degrees the most irksome part of his duty, He only discharges it under a sense of necessity, and can say conscientiously that he does not spare his own manuscripts more than those of his contributors.’
​Meanwhile Lee’s small clear handwriting—clearer then than it became afterwards—became familiar to contributors on the margin of the proofs returned to them. He made corrections, verified or queried doubtful statements, inserted fresh information, and as far as possible enforced uniformity in minor matters of method. The printed list of about a hundred and twenty of the commonest books of reference in the form in which it was desirable to cite them was probably devised by him. For, as Professor A. F. Pollard observes: ‘Detail was more congenial to him than to his chief’, and ‘he had a passion for precision.’
A more difficult part of Lee's business was to keep the contributors up to time. To the general public the most remarkable feature of the Dictionary of National Biography was the regularity with which the quarterly volumes appeared. Its publication was to have commenced in October 1884, but the first issue had to be postponed till January 1885. After that there was no failure, and to secure this continuous flow of printed matter was Lee’s special function. The dilatoriness of contributors was the earliest obstacle. By a printed circular in April 1886 they were reminded that the default of a few contributors might compel the postponement of a volume. Henceforth an article must be sent in within six months from the date of its assignment, and if it had not been delivered within a year from the assignment, the editor considered that he was free to make a new arrangement. It was Lee’s business to see to the observance of this rule, to remind delinquents of their crime, and to keep the editor informed of the result. The price of punctuality was eternal vigilance.
The struggle to produce the Dictionary told upon Stephen, who was unused to office life, and found the continuous drudgery a greater strain than did the younger man. He grew nervous and depressed under his burden, and it became too heavy for him. ‘That damned thing goes on’, he wrote in January 1888, ‘like a diabolical piece of machinery, always gaping for more copy, and I fancy at times that I shall be dragged into it and crushed out into slips.’ Shortly afterwards he fell ill, and in the autumn of 1889 he had a more serious breakdown. On each occasion he was absent from the office for three months or longer. Lee had to do the editor’s work as well as his own, and to take great responsibility without possessing adequate authority. ‘I feel always’, wrote Stephen, ‘that the credit of getting on with such punctuality is due to you.’ For a moment Stephen thought of proposing to drop one quarterly issue on account of his illness, but decided to make an arrangement which would diminish his labour. He told a friend that he had put the Dictionary ‘into commission’, and done it ‘upon such terms that if I have to retire, it will, I think, be able to go on under the present management’ (December 1889). Lee’s name as joint editor appeared with that of Stephen on the title page of the volume issued in March 1890, and of the four following volumes. Then, on 14 May 1891, he told Lee: ‘For the future you must say editor and not editors, and my name must be removed from the title page of the next volume.’ From volume xxvii onwards Lee’s name appeared alone.
​To both men their eight years’ collaboration had been a great advantage. ‘My greatest piece of good fortune’, said Stephen, ‘was that from the first I had the co-operation of Mr. Sidney Lee as my sub-editor. Always calm and confident when I was tearing my hair over the delay of some article urgently required for the timely production of our next volume, always ready to undertake any amount of thankless drudgery, and most thoroughly conscientious in his work, he was an invaluable helpmate. When he succeeded to my post after a third of the task was done I felt assured that the Dictionary would at least not lose by the exchange. He had moreover more aptitude for many parts of the work than I can boast of, for there were moments at which my gorge rose against the unappetizing, but I sorrowfully admit the desirable, masses of minute information which I had to insert. I improved a little under the antiquarian critics who cried for more concessions to Dryasdust, but Mr. Lee had no such defect of sympathy to overcome.’ Lee always expressed his obligations to Stephen with equal emphasis. ‘Leslie Stephen’, he said at Cambridge in 1911, ‘was the master under whom I served my literary apprenticeship, and it was as his pupil that I grew to be his colleague and his friend. He gave me my earliest lessons in the writing of biography, and in speaking of its principles I am guided by his teaching.’ This was not a mere figure of speech: Stephen’s doctrine and Stephen’s practice were continually referred to in Lee’s writings and conversation. Their friendship continued till Stephen’s death in 1904.
At the time when Lee became editor the initial difficulties of the enterprise had been overcome. The arrangements for the production of the Dictionary had been systematized, the machinery worked with less friction, and the output was better and more uniform in quality. A review of the first twenty-two volumes of the Dictionary, published in October 1890, showed that in the opinion of good judges there had been a marked improvement since the start. ‘There is a steady advance in brevity and conciseness.... There is a high average of methodical and scholarly work’, said the reviewer. Some other biographical dictionaries which began well fell off as they approached their conclusion. Editors and proprietors revealed their desire to bring the work to an end as soon as possible, and to omit all the names that could decently be omitted. The Dictionary was saved from this fate by the unwearied industry of Lee, and the resolve of Mr. Smith to spare no expenditure necessary to produce a book of lasting value. The result was that the Dictionary continued to improve, and it is an axiom with those who habitually use it that in accuracy and fullness the lives in the later volumes are superior to those in the early part.
But this improvement was purchased at an increasing cost. Originally it was intended that the Dictionary should be completed in fifty volumes. At first this seemed feasible. In April 1886 Stephen announced that the letters A and B would not exceed their proper proportion by more than 100 pages. In April 1888 he sounded an alarm. The average length of ​the lives had increased. ‘The explanation seems to be the satisfactory one, that more information has been given, not that a greater number of words has been employed to give the same amount of information. The fact, however, makes some difference in calculations as to the probable length of the whole work.’ Accordingly he begged contributors to condense their articles. In 1890 the two editors repeated the appeal, and suggested various expedients for saving space. In 1895, when the letter P had been reached, Lee perceived clearly that not less than sixty volumes would be necessary.
‘While I gratefully acknowledge the zeal and ability which contributors have brought to the service of the Dictionary, I cannot ignore a tendency on the part of some writers to expand their manuscripts beyond reasonable limits. Every effort is made in the Editor’s office to remove superfluous detail before the articles are published, but greater condensation might possibly be secured if some writers co-operated rather more actively in the work of abridgement. I would invite contributors, after completing an article, to peruse it carefully with a view to determining whether each of the facts recorded is fairly certain to be useful to those who may be expected to consult the Dictionary. . . . The practice of introducing the last scrap of information that patient research can reveal is not to be condemned lightly, but if the Dictionary is to be confined within manageable bounds information of trivial interest must be sacrificed. To present the essential facts in the career of the subject of the memoir so as to suggest readily to the reader the character and value of his achievements, is the only practicable aim.’
Lee was himself too much inclined to the fault he mentioned to be a very effective preacher. Stephen was pleased to receive a new scrap of information and to take it into account in an article. Lee liked to hunt for one and to put it in. He had also a tendency to give a somewhat excessive number of bibliographical details. Nor did his own style ever attain the conciseness which marked Stephen’s. But the expansion of the Dictionary was mainly due to other causes: to the exertions of the staff and the contributors.
The home of the Dictionary was the top floor of No. 14, Waterloo Place, next door to the premises of Smith, Elder, & Co., which were No. 15, and connected with the publisher’s office by a speaking tube. The small back room of the flat was the editor’s sanctum. The large front room looking into Waterloo Place was the workshop; several large tables, many ink-pots, piles of proofs and manuscript on chairs and tables, a little pyramid of Stephen’s pipes at one end of the chimney piece, a little pyramid of Lee’s pipes at the other end. The narrow side room opening out of it held on its shelves a fine assortment of reference books, sets of the Gentleman’s Magazine and of Notes and Queries, Wood, Le Neve, and other biographical collections.
The number and composition of the editor’s staff varied at different dates. When Stephen fell ill more help was needed, so Mr. C. L. Kingsford and Mr. W. A. J. Archbold became in succession assistant sub-editors. Later Mr. Thomas Seccombe replaced Mr. Archbold, and in January 1893 ​Mr. A. F. Pollard began work in the office. Mr. E. I. Carlyle became an additional sub-editor in 1896, and Mr. H. E. Murray was clerk in charge of the Dictionary throughout its publication. When Lee became editor he introduced stricter rules about attendance. ‘The rule for assistant editors was three hours each morning at the Museum and four each afternoon in Waterloo Place,’ with proof-reading at home in the evenings when it was required. They wrote a considerable number of articles themselves. Their work upon the articles of other people was not confined to the elimination of verbiage and the correction of erroneous statements; they inserted fresh biographical facts, information about portraits, and bibliographical details. Some articles were partially rewritten; a paragraph or a column was often added; once the assistant editors increased a three-page life to nine pages. To another life Lee added about ten pages, and his initials appeared at the end beside those of the original author. An article which was completely rewritten in the office became anonymous, and anonymity was also the custom when an author found the alterations more than he was willing to accept. These improvements, while they brought the Dictionary nearer to Lee’s ideal standard, swelled its bulk considerably.
The zeal of the contributors worked towards the same result. The Dictionary had given a great stimulus to research, which was reflected in their articles. Nearly three-quarters of the work was written by about a hundred regular contributors. They were most of them specialists studying some particular branch of knowledge or some particular period of history. They learnt more and more about their subjects as the Dictionary went on, and put more and more learning into their articles. They felt personally interested in the success of the undertaking. ‘It was a curious fact’, said Mr. Smith in 1894, ‘that everybody who had taken part in the production of the Dictionary had manifested a strong liking for it. Editors, assistant editors, contributors, all seemed to have formed a kind of comradeship with the common object of making the work as perfect as possible; and this affection for the work was not a transitory one, it was the same under Mr. Sidney Lee as it was under Mr. Leslie Stephen. In truth they all liked the Dictionary and were proud of it.’
The contributors fostered their esprit de corps by dining together. Some of these entertainments were festivities like college gaudies. There was a dinner at Richmond at the Star and Garter in July 1888. Mr. Smith entertained the contributors by fifties at his home in Park Lane in 1892, and to the number of 200 at the Whitehall Rooms in 1897. The contributors entertained Mr. Smith at the Westminster Palace Hotel in 1894. Finally, the Lord Mayor gave a dinner at the Mansion House on 30 June 1900, to celebrate the conclusion of the Dictionary. At these gatherings the usual toasts were the proprietor, the editor, and the contributors. The speakers jested about their trade like the grave-diggers in Hamlet. Canon Ainger told them that the editor’s motto was ‘ No flowers, by request.’ Sir E. Maunde Thompson compared his brother contributors to the Murderers’ Club in De Quincey: each man looked at his neighbour ​and said, ‘Shall I have your life or will you have mine?’ The proprietor reassured them all by declaring that provision had been made for carrying on the Dictionary ‘in the event of my—may I say, lamented—demise’.
Mr. Smith was not sorry when the Dictionary ended, but the contributors felt as if the whole Round Table were dissolved. They were vexed, too, that no public honour was bestowed upon Smith by the government, and were much gratified subsequently when his picture was placed in the National Portrait Gallery. Both editors had been ‘considerate autocrats’: a testimonial from the contributors had been presented to Stephen in 1891; Lee received a presentation of silver in 1900. These mutual congratulations were justified. The verdict of a foreign scholar is that the Dictionary is ‘la meilleure, sans contredit, des Biographies nationales’. Neither Stephen nor Lee could keep the work to the intended scale, but it preserved nevertheless a certain harmony and consistency of character; it was not a fortuitous concourse of articles, but bore evidence of design throughout. It reflected the aims of the three men responsible for its making; Smith’s bold plan for a comprehensive national record, Stephen’s desire to summarize lucidly and concisely whatever of importance was already known, Lee’s zeal for adding to knowledge.
The sixty-third and last volume of the Dictionary appeared in October 1900; but Lee had several more labours to perform. As soon as the main work was published, what is known as the First Supplement was taken in hand, and the last of the three volumes composing it was issued in October 1901. It contained the lives of some 200 persons whose names had been accidentally omitted from the original lists, and of a much larger number who had died while the Dictionary was coming out. The practice of the editors during those fifteen years had been to include lives of the latter class whenever their place in the alphabet permitted. Sometimes the printing of the volume in hand was suspended in order to insert the memoir of an eminent man suddenly deceased. For instance, Roundell Palmer, Earl of Selborne, died on 4 May 1895. A four-page article upon him by Mr. J. M. Rigg was included in volume xliii, which appeared at the end of June. But John Bright, who died in March 1889, and Gladstone, who died in May 1898, had to wait for the Supplement because the letter B had been concluded in 1886 and G in 1890. About eight hundred articles of this class were now added. In the list of authorities given at the end of them the words ‘personal knowledge’ and ‘private information’ frequently appear. Part of Lee’s skill as an editor lay in the judicious selection of writers who possessed this knowledge or could procure this information. His acquaintance not only with men of letters but with men of mark in all walks was unusually wide, and as editor he had acquired a reputation for trustworthiness and discretion which secured him access to private papers and confidences from public men. These qualifications stood him in good stead when he came to the most difficult part of his task.
It had been intended that the limit of the Dictionary should be the last day of the year 1900, but the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901 furnished a better historical landmark. At the earnest request of Mr. Smith, Lee undertook to write the Queen’s life for the Supplement. Fate ​also imposed upon him the duty of writing the life of Mr. Smith himself, who died on 6 April 1901. So while the life of the founder served as a preface to the three volumes, that of the Queen formed the epilogue.
Lee had known Mr. Smith for nearly eighteen years, there were fragments of an autobiography available, and the family supplied all the additional facts required. He grouped round the figure of the publisher the great writers whose books he had printed, and made the story of his career a chapter in the history of Victorian literature.
The article on the Queen presented problems far less easy to handle, and Lee undertook it with many misgivings. The life of a constitutional sovereign is a long series of external events minutely chronicled, behind which the will and character of the individual lie concealed. The reticence of living witnesses and the absence of documentary materials increased the obscurity. Neither the Queen’s letters nor the portions of her diary, since published, were then available. ‘The only part of the Queen’s career which has been fully dealt with is her married life’, wrote Lee. Information about her part in political events, her private opinions, and her feelings during the last forty years of her reign was scanty or lacking altogether. Lee sought help from private sources, and employed the reminiscences he obtained to eke out and interpret his imperfect materials. He claimed to have stated facts accurately, to have judged them with sympathy as well as candour, and to have respected alike public interests and private feelings. The article was published as a book in 1902, and reached a third edition in 1904. Its production in 1901 was a remarkable feat.
The completion of the Supplement made it possible to plan and produce what was originally entitled the Index and Errata, and is now styled the Concise D.N.B. It appeared about March 1908. During the summer of 1904 it was followed by the volume of Errata, presented gratis to all subscribers to the Dictionary. The three hundred pages of small print which it contains show what scrupulous care Lee devoted to maintaining the accuracy of the Dictionary. There were inevitably many real errors besides accidental misprints. Stephen accepted the fact philosophically. ‘A book of which it is the essence that every page should bristle with facts and dates is certain to have errors by the thousand.’ Lee’s attitude was more apologetic. He industriously accumulated the corrections made in reviews and periodicals, and those sent to him by critical readers, penitent contributors, or aggrieved relatives. This often involved correspondence with the author of the article as well as with the critic. The validity of each objection had to be examined, and proof required, before any alteration was made. Lee repeatedly pledged himself that all proved errors of fact should be corrected as soon as opportunity offered. Some were corrected in reissues from the stereotyped plates; more, when the sixty-six volumes of Dictionary and Supplement were compressed into twenty-two in the edition of 1908-1909. These small but continuous repairs in the fabric of the Dictionary—the process of reparation Lee called it—were all that it was possible to do without resetting the type. Lee was conscious that time, the progress of historical research, and the publication of new historical materials would eventually render a new edition necessary. When that ​would be undertaken he could not pretend to know, and he returned with fresh ardour to his study of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age as soon as the Dictionary and the Supplement were issued.
For the next eight years Lee’s time was almost exclusively devoted to those two subjects. The article on Shakespeare which he had contributed to volume li of the Dictionary had expanded into the Life of Shakespeare, published in 1898. The book reached its sixth edition in 1908, and was rewritten and enlarged to twice its original size in 1915. The history of Shakespeare’s native town, which Lee had originally published in 1885, was similarly revised and enlarged in 1906. A visit to America in 1908 resulted in the volume of lectures, entitled Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century, in which he attempted to show the working of the spirit of the Renaissance in English life. He wrote also, for an American periodical, a series of articles entitled, ‘The Call of the West’, which traced the influence of the discovery of America on thought and action in England. Lee also turned his attention to the text of Shakespeare. He published a facsimile reproduction of the first folio of Shakespeare’s Plays in 1902, and similar reproductions of the Poems and the Sonnets in 1905, followed in 1910 by an edition of Shakespeare in twenty volumes, to which he contributed annotations throughout, prefaces to some of the plays, and a general introduction. At the same time he took up with vigour the study of comparative literature, writing a history of the Sonnet in Italy and France and an account of the development of that form of composition in Elizabethan literature. Last of all, in a series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1909, entitled The French Renaissance in England, he showed in detail the debt of Tudor writers to French authors with regard both to form and ideas.
In 1910 the time came for the preparation of a second Supplement. Mr. Smith regarded the Dictionary not as an enterprise completed once for all, but as a work which was to be permanently maintained and continued. In Lee’s phrase it was to be ‘a living organism’. At stated intervals new biographies were to be added to commemorate those worthy of inclusion in the national record who had died since its last issue. To carry out her husband’s wishes Mrs. George Smith undertook to defray the cost of three more volumes to include persons deceased between January 1901 and December 1911.
Lee was engaged on the production of the Second Supplement from October 1910 to December 1912. It was a more laborious business than the first Supplement, for the three volumes dealt with 1,635 names instead of about 1,000, and contained over 2,200 pages as against 1,400. The editor’s labour was increased by the fact that he no longer had his old staff to help him. He had to find new assistants and to train them while the work was actually in progress. Of the regular contributors who had written about three-quarters of the original Dictionary, few were still available. About a score of them are commemorated in the Dictionary or the Supplements, and the list of the dead included men like Joseph ​Knight who had written over 500 articles on dramatists or actors, and Sir Alexander Arbuthnot who wrote most of the articles on Anglo-Indian officials. Specialists on earlier periods were frequently reluctant to undertake lives of nineteenth-century personages, and two who had each written about a volume for the original Dictionary contributed only one article apiece to the Supplement. Fortunately Sir John Laughton was able to continue his series of naval articles, and Colonels Vetch and Lloyd their military series, and other old contributors were available. But there were many new hands, and therefore Lee reissued the rules for contributors in an enlarged form, and made his ten commandments into twelve. Lee himself wrote the lives of several Shakespearian scholars, and of some of his old contributors, besides an article upon Leslie Stephen which would have earned Stephen’s approval. But his chief contribution was a life of King Edward VII, sixty pages in length, marked by the same qualities as his account of Queen Victoria. It was sufficiently critical in its views to rouse some controversy, but it was so obviously honest that the King’s own papers were subsequently placed at Lee’s disposal for the purpose of writing a fuller biography. Without adequate evidence that he was in error he would alter nothing; objections raised to statements in the article would be duly considered when the book was written.
Lee was also called upon to answer people who objected to the Supplements on principle. They said that lives of persons so recently deceased were premature; that they were impressions, not considered verdicts, lacked historical perspective, and must be based on insufficient documentary evidence. However, the only rule laid down by Stephen in the original prospectus was that the eminent man should be dead; he was not required to have been dead for a generation, or some convenient number of years. Stephen’s practice conformed to his principle. Henry Fawcett died 6 November 1884, and Stephen published the life of his friend in 1885. Stephen’s brother Fitzjames died 11 March 1894, and the preface to Leslie’s life of him is dated 1 May 1895. Neither friendship, nor blood, nor nearness of time, affected the justice of his account of the two men. Time would have made the lives no better; it might have dimmed the clearness of his memories; it might have prevented the lives from being written, since he died in 1904. In Stephen’s view the danger was in delay, not in haste. ‘Any one’, wrote Stephen, ‘who like me has had much to do with biography must have been painfully impressed by the singular rapidity with which its materials vanish. Again and again I have had to lament the fact.’ Stephen’s view was Lee’s too. In defending what he termed ‘recent biography’ he asserted that the first-hand evidence of living contemporaries was ‘the most essential ingredient’ in any biography. He instanced Boswell’s Johnson and Lockhart’s Scott to prove that the earliest biographies were the best, and quoted Johnson’s warning against postponement. ‘If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but obtain little intelligence.’
​In a lecture Lee examined the different kinds of bias which a biographer had to guard against, the family bias, the official bias, the ethical bias, hero-worship, and most insidious of all, the historical bias. This last was a tendency to forget the distinction between history and biography, and to drown the man’s life in the story of his times, under pretence of showing the influence of his environment on him. It was the business of the historian, not of the biographer, to determine the man’s importance to his time. The biographer recorded the man’s deeds; he was the witness not the judge, and he was not called upon to anticipate the historian’s verdict.
At first sight the frequent lack of documentary evidence seems a more serious objection. For political reasons the papers of statesmen and diplomatists are often kept private for a long period of years. Disraeli’s correspondence was held back for more than thirty years after his death, Peel’s for more than forty years. Of late, however, there has been a tendency to shorten the interval between the death of a public man and the appearance of the official biography with its copious extracts from his diaries and letters. Morley’s Life of Gladstone appeared five years after Gladstone’s death. Three Victorian statesmen died between 1906 and 1908: Gathorne-Hardy, Goschen, and the eighth Duke of Devonshire; their biographies were published in time to be used in the articles in the second Supplement. The objection therefore affected only a limited number of the particular class of lives it touched. Lee rightly held that an event so uncertain as the date when documents become accessible should not be made an argument either for postponement or omission.
The difficulty caused by the lack of documents does not affect ‘recent biography’ only. It is a perennial difficulty, and affects the biographies of men who died centuries ago. The Dictionary contains lives of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son Robert, of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and of William, Lord Grenville. When those articles were written neither the Cecil papers at Hatfield, nor the Harley papers at Welbeck, nor the Grenville papers at Dropmore had been calendared by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and all need revision by the light of this new evidence. The historian does not abstain from writing the history of a reign because some of the documents which he wants are not accessible. The biographer is often in a similar position. Each does the best he can with the materials he is able to obtain, knowing that part of what he writes is merely provisional.
For the editor of a biographical dictionary the solution of the problem was simple. The Dictionary was an indispensable aid for workers of every kind; it was an instrument for the advancement of knowledge, to be perfected as more became known, not to be held back till all was known. By disregarding superstitions in order to facilitate the study of our own time Lee did a great service to historical scholarship.
Lee continued to act as editor of the Dictionary for four years after the completion of the Second Supplement, that is, to conduct the necessary correspondence and to supervise the reissue of volumes when required. Owing to the death of Mr. Reginald Smith in December 1916, the firm of Smith, Elder, & Co. was dissolved early in the following year, and in June 1917 the heirs of the founder presented the copyright and stock of ​the Dictionary to the University of Oxford. With the change in its proprietorship Lee’s connexion with the undertaking came to an end.
The rest of Lee’s life was largely occupied by teaching and university administration. From 1913 to 1924 he was professor of English literature in the East London College, which formed part of the University of London. He resigned his professorship, owing to ill-health, in the summer of 1924, published the first volume of his Life of King Edward VII in March 1925, and was endeavouring to complete the second volume at the time of his death. He died on 8 March 1926, and was buried at Stratford-on-Avon.
C. H. FIRTH
* ↑ These developed into two papers printed in the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society: ‘The Topical Side of the Elizabethan Drama ’, 22 October 1886, and ‘Elizabethan England and the Jews’, 10 February 1888.
* ↑ Studies of a Biographer, 1898, p. i.
* ↑ Quarterly Review, vol. clxiv, pp. 857, 864.
* ↑ F. W. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 1906, p. 383.
* ↑ ‘Sir Sidney Lee and the Dictionary of National Biography’, in the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, June 1926, p. 5.
* ↑ Maitland, pp. 394, 401, 403.
* ↑ Maitland, ibid.
* ↑ Leslie Stephen, Some Early Impressions [ed. 1924], p. 160.
* ↑ English Historical Review, vol. v, p. 787. Compare the article on the first ten volumes in the Quarterly Review, vol. clxiv.
* ↑ Circular 9, November 1895.
* ↑ See ‘A Statistical Account’ of the Dictionary in vol. lxiii, pp. ix-x, and Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, June 1926, p. 6.
* ↑ C. V. Langlois, Manuel de Bibliographie historique.
* ↑ Some Early Impressions, p. 161.
* ↑ Published originally by the University Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1907-1910, and reissued in England as The Caxton Shakespeare in 1910.
* ↑ Some Early Impressions, p. 8.
* ↑ See ‘At a Journey’s End’ in the Nineteenth Century for December 1912, and ‘The Perspective of Biography’, published by the English Association in September 1918.
* ↑ The Rambler, No. 60.