There is nothing "strange" about the assumption, or at least the hope, "that the Dictionary should be definitive": that is what we all attempted to make it, within the human and time-bound limits of the term, and no "routine" prefatory admission that "a work of these dimensions... must also contain errors" can excuse the sheer volume of them. Your readers have already pointed out many, usually from the vantage point of knowing more about the subject than the ODNB writer, or claiming to do so: such complaints may sometimes be explained, as Goldman suggests, by "dissatisfaction" based on rivalry or conflicting opinion. But I myself, in the last four months of reading strictly for the purpose of research on figures I knew little about, have come upon howlers - ie, mistakes that would corrupt or vitiate any secondary work based upon them - in more than forty of the (say) 150 articles I examined.
That, I submit, is - in terms of proportion - simply too much, and it is time that the Emperor takes stock of his tailors. Most of my reading was in "minor" literary and historical biographies of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, perhaps an area some would regard as one of "minor" responsibility for the work as a whole. But, in fact, that is precisely where we must count most on the Dictionary, since with major personalities (eg, Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen) there is usually available a whole biographical literature, not to say history of controversy in interpretation. Where else but ODNB would you go to learn about the separatist Samuel Eaton, and find that in 1637-9, "after settling in New Haven, Eaton preached regularly at Harvard University, but became estranged from others who wished to restrict public offices solely to members of the New Haven church"? Where would you seek to discriminate the two seventeenth-century Thomas Scots, and learn that the impenetrably obscure animal-fable poem Philomythie (1616) is "a political libel... principally concerned with the Essex divorce scandal"?
Books, indeed, are often a problem in ODNB, perhaps because the full lists of publications provided in DNB were outlawed from the start (as in practice redundant), and some contributors saw no reason to examine them individually. But the poet-playwright Thomas Lodge's "first entry into print", an Epitaph on the Lady Anne Lodge (1579) is a forged attribution by John Payne Collier, exposed in 1960, and Alexander Dyce's "first book" of 1818 was in fact written and published fifty years later, while special mention must go to a confident description of William Chetwood's General History of the Stage (1749), as "his most important and best-known work... a multi-volume work which attempts to record the entire history of the stage from the ancient Greeks onward". This is actually a deceptively titled single volume printed in octavo (no prizes for guessing how the biographer interpreted "8vo"), of whose 250 pages just twenty are devoted to the drama and stage before Chetwood's own time: "best-known" indeed! Other titles are wonderfully "antiqued" or miscopied: Henry Peacham's Valley of Varietie (1638) becomes "Vallie of Varietee", and Plantagenets Tragicall Story, which Thomas Weaver did not write, becomes "Plantagenets True Story", with a high-sounding but enigmatical citation as "Wing, STC, 672". I could go on and on.
Among more seriously corrupt articles, which thoroughly misrepresent their subjects, are those on the sixteenth-century reformer-poet John Huntington (here and elsewhere the old DNB, while in need of an update, is vastly better), the seventeenth-century essayist Daniel Tuvill (who is coolly deprived of his five most significant writings), and the nineteenth-century journalist-poet John Ross Dix (blamed for "forgeries" he did not commit). Recycled pieces on Peter Cunningham and Edward Rimbault, nineteenth-century scholars, on the other hand, skip cheerfully past the darker sides of their well-documented careers, and this I found to be true elsewhere, in spite of the broad claim that ODNB does not follow DNB in sanitizing its portraits.
What no one in the ODNB hierarchy has yet addressed, to my knowledge, is the obvious question of why so many errors have occurred (even those which the hastiest proofreading eye can still catch) in the text of a work so laboriously planned and supposedly checked and rechecked. As an "insider", and at the risk of seeming a grass, I would point to what I consider two serious administrative mistakes. First (as Nicolas Barker mentioned in his review of December 10, but all too gently), the editorial decision to refuse to put contributors in touch with each other, when treating matters which crossed lines between their subjects. I am told that this was imposed through fear of our dithering, and in some instances the editors may have relented, or suggested accommodation. But no such luck attended the authors of flatly contradictory articles (I am putting the correct one second), such as Robert Drury and William Crashaw on the authorship of The Fatal Vesper (1623), Richard Rice and Anthony Scoloker on the authorship of The Right Institution of Baptism (1548), John Ramsay and Peter Moone on the authorship of an anti-Mass pamphlet published at Ipswich (also 1548), nor countless others that conflict on questions of precedence, responsibility and influence. This kind of confusion (or simple error, when it is) could easily have been reduced, if not eliminated, in the last stages at the Press, if only the large editorial staff had had more time to subject the whole text to systematic cross-checks for internal consistency, and had been somewhat better at entering returned proof corrections: contributors were in fact asked to reread their proofs a final time on the internet, but many (I believe) could not or did not. As it is, place names vary wildly, as do forms of citation in the references, inconsistencies which one would think could be resolved by the use of the very machinery that ODNB now provides for its online readers, allowing the entire sixty-volume text to be searched for any unusual word or confined phrase.
That such critical fine-tuning was not systematically pursued may be deduced from one last cautionary tale: the name of Edmond Malone, the great eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholar, was misspelled "Edmund" in old DNB, and as such he has been repeatedly misidentified ever after. The distinction is not altogether trivial, for Malone's father (also in both Dictionaries) was "Edmund", and Edmond clearly preferred not to be known as "the younger". But every time that we, and other contributors, attempted to spell "Edmond" right, our editors would insist otherwise, on the grounds (we were told) that too many reference works had adopted the mistake, and networking facilities would be unable to cope with the change. We, and no doubt many of our colleagues, continued to argue that a new standard work like ODNB should prefer truth to convenience, and rather late in the day ODNB agreed to see it that way: so that you may now read the biography of "Edmond Malone", and by inserting those words in the appropriate search box you will find him so cited in thirty-five other main-text entries for other persons. But, if you happen to think that it's odd for Malone not to be mentioned in articles on (say) William Hogarth, John Philip Kemble, Isaac Reed, Joseph Ritson, or Edward Capell, try "Edmund Malone" as well - and you will find no fewer than fifteen more entries, none of them indexed in the ODNB database through the correct form of the name! So perhaps the fears of the initial policymakers in re Edmond/Edmund were justified by the resulting botch, though it could hardly have taken more than a few minutes with the excellent ODNB search engine - before publication - to set everything straight. One wonders if the bulk of the mechanical errors were not owing to a panicky insistence by the Oxford University Press on keeping to the announced publication deadline for the entire work - despite the unforeseen and lamented death of its original general editor.
Of course ODNB is a monumental achievement, and no one can seriously suggest that the world of learning is not better off with it than without it; its excellencies obviously far outweigh its demerits. But a little less self-congratulation by "those who produced the Dictionary" (as Lawrence Goldman describes the principals, "now engaged in demonstrations and lectures for local historical societies") might be appropriate, at least for the moment, when the applause isn't deafening. And if, as he states, corrections of errors "have been, and are being brought to our attention", may one ask how these will be incorporated in the text? For the online version the revision may be automatic - or so one hopes - rather than made as errata notices in the four-monthly supplements of added material, to be issued "cumulatively" in print. For readers who paid £5,500 or so for hard copy, even the "businesses for their boardrooms" (!), the prospect of juggling volumes may seem less appealing, and in the meantime they will be obliged to subscribe to the online version if they wish to remain up to date on errata. In any event, OUP will be charging for such services, and presumably thus profiting from them, so that if ODNB expects readers to flock to it with corrective suggestions, should they not offer to pay for those they accept? Original contributors (as all of us will testify) could barely cover their research expenses with the fees offered, but at least they received a byline, which the next wave of volunteers probably won't.
ARTHUR FREEMAN
5 Bryanston Square, London Wl.