Through dozens if not hundreds of euphemistic personal descriptions, you would wade, quite unable to find any admission whatsoever that the subject had been, in plain terms, fat. The project had reached the point where it was happy to describe individual subjects as “womanizers”, and to note, without euphemism, when someone was homosexual. But that doesn’t account for the whole of it, and the DNB’s attitude in this area has long ago started to seem embarrassingly dated.We like to think that we are without blind spots, and our interests are much more inclusive, our freedom to comment much wider But I doubt it will seem like that in the future. I remember reviewing a volume of a supplement to the DNB a few years ago, and being struck by the fact that there were still, evidently, aspects of people’s lives which the dictionary found unmentionable.

The small number of entries for women may, in part, be accounted for by the difficulty of women’s lives before the 20th century, and the very few fields in which they could possibly make any kind of mark. The single most notorious fact about it is that it contains a very small number of entries about women, and many of those accounted for by queens and princesses – the DNB’s treatment of even very distinguished women novelists and poets can, in many cases, seem astonishingly brief and dismissive. Famously, the entry for the lecherous homosexual don Oscar Browning straight-facedly asserts that in later life, he “assisted young Italians, as he had done young Englishmen, towards the openings they desired”.The old DNB is an amazing period piece – fascinating, but long outdated in its attitudes and usefulness. People who have contributed less than nothing to national life have been permitted coverage, such as the MP John Stonehouse. Very pleasing, too, is the vein of sly joking which has always characterised some of the DNB’s contributors, seeing what they can get past the austere editors.

Even to a man as cultured and sophisticated as Sir Leslie Stephens, founder of the DNB, the lives of artists, writers and musicians were not so obviously worthy of respect, and they come off less well. Similarly, there was, at the start, a slight sense that celebrity was not quite enough, and a certain aura of moral exemplitude hung over those whom the DNB treated at greatest length.That, happily, didn’t last long, and with the publication of the supplements – an activity which has continued until extremely recently – a laxer approach has crept in. It is utterly of its late 19th-century period, with its utter certainties of what really matters in life. Royalties, the Church, politicians and the aristocracy are given pride of place, and some of them are treated very extensively indeed – the entry for Queen Victoria is 100,000 words long, which amounts to a good-sized book.The driving force behind the old DNB was the idea that the lives of the distinguished went to make up the reality of national life. Like the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Oxford English Dictionary, the phenomenon of the department store, the Great Exhibition of 1851, or, indeed, the British Empire itself, its air of completeness is alluring and exciting, and only slowly starts to look like a ramshackle and dubious operation. In its original form, it would like us to marvel at what has been included; after a while, we start to wonder at what has been left out, and why.
The old DNB is an absolutely extraordinary thing, and a constant pleasure to consult.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is one of those huge, imperial projects of the Victorian mind which sought to bring everything that could possibly be known about a subject under one metaphorical roof. All in all, he is well placed to become the nagging wife on our virile prime minister’s back.My septic thumb (part III). I was sitting on a box in the aisle with a roll of tissue hiding the disgusting mess underneath when a lady approached me. Of course, I scowled horribly, so she wouldn’t tell me I was a health and safety hazard and had to move. “Have you hurt your thumb?” she asked, “I couldn’t help noticing you might need a plaster.” She produced a variety of plasters and neatly bound up the mess. I couldn’t help thinking that this would only have happened at a Lib Dem conference.simoncarr75 hotmail
More from Simon Carr. He has a grab bag of knee-jerk, short-term, policies that should appeal to the lowest common denominator (I mean that in a good way).