Only five non-white people of national importance died in 2013? Really? So what about Nelson Mandela?Life would be much the poorer without a national biography,a collection of the lives of people who hold “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 primary. The dictionary is an edited collection, or 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, and 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 worthy men for inclusion in the early 1880s, though even then the thought of including the biographies of 1400 hymn-writers was considered excessive. The updates, originally every decade,reveal a gentle drift away from the church, worthy landowners and generals as sculptors of the nation’s values, and towards other pillars of public life,the permanent government of Whitehall mandarins, Nobel prize winners and the occasional film star.
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Source: theguardian.com