Stephen was thoroughly convinced of the importance of these minor articles. Looking back on his editorial work he said: ‘The judicious critic is well aware that it is not upon the lives of the great men that the value of the book really depends. It is the second-rate people—the people whose lives have to be reconstructed from obituary notices or from references in memoirs or collections of letters; or sought in prefaces to posthumous works; or sometimes painfully dug out of collections of manuscripts; and who really become generally accessible through the Dictionary alone—that provide the really useful reading. Nobody need look at Addison or Byron or Milton in a dictionary. He can find fuller and better notices in any library; and the biographer must be satisfied if he has put together a useful compendium of all the relevant literature.’[1]
Stephen’s articles on the men he named show what excellence such a compendium might attain. Many of the 878 articles which he contributed were of this kind. Lee’s 870 articles included a far larger proportion of lives of second-rate people in which research was required. The wide range of the articles which Lee contributed to the early volumes of the Dictionary is remarkable. They begin with Prince Arthur and some fourteenth-century bishops, and end with nineteenth-century politicians; but the best of them are those dealing with men of the Tudor times such as Ascham and Caxton. Their merit was at once recognized. R. C. Christie in an elaborate review of the first ten volumes of the Dictionary, after praising Stephen’s Byron as unsurpassable, added: ‘There is no contributor whose initials we are more glad to see than Mr. S. L. Lee. We may always depend upon his accuracy and research. … Mr. Lee’s bibliographical information and his references to authorities leave nothing to be desired.’[2]
As contributors they made an admirable team. Stephen’s great lives and Lee’s minor lives, Lee’s knowledge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Stephen’s knowledge of the eighteenth and nineteenth, supplemented each other. They divided the editorial work between them. Stephen, who disliked proof-correcting and did it badly, dealt with the original manuscripts, and Lee with the proofs. ‘My greatest worry’, wrote Stephen in April 1884, ‘is struggling against the insane verbosity of the average contributor. I never knew before how many words might be used to express a given fact. I read piles of MS., cutting right and left, and reducing some copy to a third of its original mass.’[3] In a circular to the contributors in April 1888, he complained that the average length of lives was increasing, and urged writers to condense their own articles. ‘If they find—as may probably be the case—that he has been more ruthless than formerly in the excision of superfluous words (or of words which to him appear to be superfluous) they may be comforted by remembering that such work is even more annoying to the Editor than to his victims; and is in fact by many degrees the most irksome part of his duty, He only discharges it under a sense of necessity, and can say conscientiously that he does not spare his own manuscripts more than those of his contributors.’
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