The Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, was one of Britain's biggest cyclopedia projects. The rampant expansion of the nation's archives, private collections, and museums produced an abundance of materials that frustrated the dictionary's editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, especially because methodologies for making order of such materials were underdeveloped. Adding to their frustration was the sense of impending doom felt generally in Britain after the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in 1859. Entropy put an end to the presiding belief in the infinite energy that fueled Britain's economic development and therefore challenged Victorian biography's premise that the capacity for self-development was boundless. Like the physicists of the era, these dictionary makers searched for ways to circumvent entropy's deadening force and reenergize their world. This project would not actually be achieved, however, until the twentieth century when Claude Shannon published his “Information Theory” in 1948. I argue that in an attempt to get out from under the chaos of information overload, the editors of the DNB invented new methods to organize information that anticipated Shannon's revolutionary theory and changed the way that we think, write, and work.
Cara E. Murray, “Self-Help and the Helpless Subject: Samuel Smiles and Biography’s Objects” (pp. 481–508)
This essay examines how the changing relationship between human subjects and industrial objects in the industrial age redraws the conventions of the most influential strand of nineteenth-century biography, self-help. It argues that Samuel Smiles’s greatest contribution to biography, self-help, arises from his initial recognition of how, in an industrial age, objects shape subjects, and then from his subsequent demonstration of how subjects surmount that very phenomenon. By tracing the strides that Smiles makes in his biographical project from his earliest speeches in the mid-1840s, and then to his technical and biographical writings of the following decade, to his synthesis of these two forms in Self-Help (1859), this essay demonstrates how Smiles develops the genre of self-help out of writing about men’s changing relation to objects. It argues that Self-Help teaches the paradoxical lesson that at the height of industrialization men no longer need to depend upon machines. With this message, Self-Help invigorates biography by providing it with the ideological purpose of teaching Victorians that in the age of machines man can help himself.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.