vidual Lives and National Truths: Locating Biographies within a National Encyclopedia

Abstract

I must begin with an admission. As a historian I have long held a scepticism about the place of biography in historical studies. My sense of the role of the historian is to present the larger patterns, to paint and explain the huge social forces, the determinative cultural and political ideas, and the economic developments which forged the world of the past. Individual lives are simply the flotsam and jetsam floating above these massive historical waves. Even major political leaders or seminal thinkers need to be explained against wider social and cultural currents. In this view of the historian’s mission, dictionaries of national biography become extremely useful reference works, to check the details of particular lives. They are useful for case studies, for providing the telling example. They do not contribute in themselves to the larger generalisations about nations or eras.