In a lecture Lee examined the different kinds of bias which a biographer had to guard against, the family bias, the official bias, the ethical bias, hero-worship, and most insidious of all, the historical bias. This last was a tendency to forget the distinction between history and biography, and to drown the man’s life in the story of his times, under pretence of showing the influence of his environment on him. It was the business of the historian, not of the biographer, to determine the man’s importance to his time. The biographer recorded the man’s deeds; he was the witness not the judge, and he was not called upon to anticipate the historian’s verdict.
At first sight the frequent lack of documentary evidence seems a more serious objection. For political reasons the papers of statesmen and diplomatists are often kept private for a long period of years. Disraeli’s correspondence was held back for more than thirty years after his death, Peel’s for more than forty years. Of late, however, there has been a tendency to shorten the interval between the death of a public man and the appearance of the official biography with its copious extracts from his diaries and letters. Morley’s Life of Gladstone appeared five years after Gladstone’s death. Three Victorian statesmen died between 1906 and 1908: Gathorne-Hardy, Goschen, and the eighth Duke of Devonshire; their biographies were published in time to be used in the articles in the second Supplement. The objection therefore affected only a limited number of the particular class of lives it touched. Lee rightly held that an event so uncertain as the date when documents become accessible should not be made an argument either for postponement or omission.
The difficulty caused by the lack of documents does not affect ‘recent biography’ only. It is a perennial difficulty, and affects the biographies of men who died centuries ago. The Dictionary contains lives of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son Robert, of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and of William, Lord Grenville. When those articles were written neither the Cecil papers at Hatfield, nor the Harley papers at Welbeck, nor the Grenville papers at Dropmore had been calendared by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and all need revision by the light of this new evidence. The historian does not abstain from writing the history of a reign because some of the documents which he wants are not accessible. The biographer is often in a similar position. Each does the best he can with the materials he is able to obtain, knowing that part of what he writes is merely provisional.
For the editor of a biographical dictionary the solution of the problem was simple. The Dictionary was an indispensable aid for workers of every kind; it was an instrument for the advancement of knowledge, to be perfected as more became known, not to be held back till all was known. By disregarding superstitions in order to facilitate the study of our own time Lee did a great service to historical scholarship.
Lee continued to act as editor of the Dictionary for four years after the completion of the Second Supplement, that is, to conduct the necessary correspondence and to supervise the reissue of volumes when required. Owing to the death of Mr. Reginald Smith in December 1916, the firm of Smith, Elder, & Co. was dissolved early in the following year, and in June 1917 the heirs of the founder presented the copyright and stock of
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