Dictionary of national biography 1885

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History of the Dictionary of National Biography

Today’s Oxford DNB has its origins in the late-Victorian Dictionary of National Biography. The first DNB was completed in 1900 and included entries on around 30,000 men and women active in the British past. Neither the original DNB nor the modern Dictionary include living subjects, all those included are deceased.

Throughout the twentieth century new volumes were added to the DNB, in a series of Supplement volumes which extended the Dictionary’s coverage of notable figures up to those who died up to the year 1990.

In 1992 work began on a completely new Dictionary, published in 2004 as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This edition offered a new biography for every person already included in the original DNB, and added first-time entries for a further 16,300 men and women from all periods of history up to those who had died in or before the year 2000. Since 2004 the Oxford DNB has continued to be extended and developed with regular online updates.

The following timeline gives a summary of the Dictionary's evolutio

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The Online Books Page

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edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee

The Dictionary of National Biography (or DNB) is a biographical reference for deceased persons notable in British history. The current edition of this work has been published online by Oxford University Press since 2004. The current electronic edition is not free, but is available through individual or library subscription. There is also a recent print edition.

Some earlier editions of this work are freely available online, and remain of historic interest. Below we link to free online volumes of the first and second editions, and some of their supplementary volumes.

First edition

The first edition was published in 63 volumes from 1885 through 1900 in London by Smith, Elder, and Co. (In the US, Macmillan also published many of the volumes in conjunction with Smith, Elder. These copies are noted in the list below with an "(M)" notation.) Various supplements, errata volumes, and indexes were published in the years to follow, prior to the second edition.

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Dictionary of National Biography

Reference on notable British figures

The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) was published on 23 September 2004 in 60 volumes and online, with 50,113 biographical articles covering 54,922 lives.

First series

Hoping to emulate national biographical collections published elsewhere in Europe, such as the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1875), in 1882 the publisher George Smith (1824–1901), of Smith, Elder & Co., planned a universal dictionary that would include biographical entries on individuals from world history. He approached Leslie Stephen, then editor of the Cornhill Magazine, owned by Smith, to become the editor. Stephen persuaded Smith that the work should focus only on subjects from the United Kingdom and its present and former colonies. An early working title was the Biographia Britannica, the name of an earlier eighteenth-century reference work