4. National Biography

Lee, Hermione

doi:10.1093/actrade/9780199533541.003.0004

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“…38 Lee admits China's achievement, only to belittle it, intimating that the excessive size of China's cyclopedias is precisely what makes China so "barbaric." 39 Unlike Britain, Lee suggests, China lacks the technology of concision.…”

Section: Making the Dictionary Of National Biographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lee approached the subject by comparing the Dictionary to a pyramid, a statue, and a mausoleum, stating that it too should speak to posterity. 62 The problem lay in how it should speak-not like these monuments whose message could be hard to decipher-but "perspicuously," a term that Lee took pains to define: "by 'perspicuous' I mean that it should take such a shape as to leave no room for doubt in the mind of posterity what was the nature of the achievements or characteristics that generated in the nation the desire of commemoration. It should, in fact, offer for future ages a plain justification for its existence."…”

Section: Claritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…63 When it came to giving an example, Lee faltered because he believed that there was no genre that could outshine the Dictionary in perspicuousness. 64 Stephen shared Lee's ideal but chose a different way to express it. For Stephen, the DNB should be clear like a telephone, and the task of the national biographer should be to "put us in direct communication with the man himself."…”

Section: Claritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because Pittsburgh preserves "no memories of William Pitt" it fails to convey its message and fails in perspicuousness. 77 Lee conceives of the DNB as an instrument capable of preserving memories in the face of corrosive agents like time.…”

Section: Claritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lee was especially emphatic in his desire to differentiate national biography from individual biography, explaining that biography is like a painting, but national biography is like a map. 34 Not only does Lee conceive of national biography as a different genre from individual biography but as a different technology altogetherone that has concision at its core. It is telling that Lee borrows his definition of concision from a chemist, namely, the discoverer of oxygen, Joseph Priestly, who described the goal of scientific writing as "to comprise as much knowledge as possible in the smallest compass."…”

Section: Concisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of theDictionary of National Biography

Murray¹

2021

Victorian Literature and Culture

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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.

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Section: Making the Dictionary Of National Biographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Claritymentioning

confidence: 99%