What's New: November 2024

Welcome to the 116th update of the Oxford DNB, which has a special focus on lives with a global dimension, literary lives, and medical lives. This update adds twelve new biographies, spanning four centuries, and one reference group article, and also includes four revisited biographies. There are also three additional portrait likenesses.

From November 2024, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) offers biographies of 63,065 women and men who have shaped the British past, contained in 65,312 articles. 12,248 biographies include a portrait image of the subject—researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Most public libraries across the UK subscribe to the Oxford DNB, which means that you can access the complete dictionary for free via your local library. Libraries offer 'remote access' that enables you to log in at any time at home (or anywhere you have internet access). Elsewhere, the Oxford DNB is available online in schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions worldwide. Full details of participating British public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available.

View the list of entries added this month:

Balfour, Gerald William, second earl of Balfour (1853–1945), politician and psychical researcher

Brathwaite [Braithwaite], Thomas (bap. 1695, d. 1730), anatomist and surgeon

Corkran, Alice Abigail (1843–1916), children's writer and journalist

Founders of the Savile Club (act. 1868–1872)

Gurwood, John (1788–1845), army officer and editor of Wellington's dispatches

Gartside, Mary (1754/5–1819), flower painter, teacher of art, and writer on colour theory

Hitchener, Elizabeth (1783–1821), schoolmistress and poet

Hume, Peter (bap. 1640, d. 1707), literary critic and royal administrator

Kersey, John (b. c.1687, d. 1723), surgeon and anatomist

Knipe, Anthony (b. 1608, d. in or after 1665), merchant and customs official in Norway

Lind, John (1737–1781), barrister and political writer

Powell, Thomas, of Cantref (1608–1660), clergyman, writer, and translator

Reddie, Andrew (1771–1820), settler, slave owner, and ethnographer

Richardson, Charles Lenox (1833–1862), merchant and murder victim

Symonds, Joshua (b. c. 1692, d. 1731), surgeon and anatomist

Woodington, William Frederick (1806–1893), engraver, sculptor, and painter

 

November 2024: summary of new articles

Lives with a global dimension

A major commercial actor in Gothenburg, Sweden, the merchant and customs official Anthony Knipe (b. 1608 in Westmorland, d. in or after 1665) had an illustrious, though turbulent, mercantile career between the 1630s and 1650s before returning to England under the new regime of Charles II, when he exploited the knowledge and contacts he had made in Scandinavia. Born in Fife, the slaveowner and ethnographer Andrew Reddie (1771–1820) settled in Hanover, Jamaica, where he successfully integrated himself into the planter class. He had literary ambitions, and his significance lies in his ethnographic ‘sketch’ of the Igbo people of West Africa, who composed the largest community among the local enslaved population, but whom he depicted in terms that conformed to his pro-slavery politics. In 1862, the London-born merchant Charles Lenox Richardson (1833–1862) was buried in the foreigners’ cemetery near Yokohama, Japan, after a fatal altercation involving the father of the daimyō of Satsuma and his entourage along the high road between Edo and Kyoto. Accounts of what led to Richardson’s murder differ, but his death serves as a window onto debates about the origins and nature of the Meiji restoration.

Anatomists and Surgeons of London

This release adds the lives of three anatomists active in London in the early eighteenth century, who contributed to the city’s eminence in the field. All three were implicated in the practice of body-snatching. The surgeon and anatomist John Kersey (b. c. 1687, d. 1723) arranged with a colleague, Thomas Brathwaite, for a body to be stolen from the New Churchyard, London, intending to dissect it during their lectures in Oxford. Though the plan was thwarted, Kersey’s pursuit of body-snatching ensured his importance as an anatomy teacher and contributed to London’s eminence in the field, even if he sacrificed his wider career in the process. Like John Kersey and Thomas Brathwaite, the surgeon and anatomist Joshua Symonds (b. c. 1692, d. 1731), born in Surrey, was an alumnus of St Thomas’s Hospital. It is unclear if Symonds was partnered with these men when, in 1717, he published Syllabus partium corporis humani, a syllabus for a course of thirty human anatomy lectures. The book accompanied popular demonstrations wherein Symonds led a group of surgeons who lectured upon anatomical wax models. Although expelled from St Thomas’s owing to further body-snatching allegations—reports suggest that he may have been scapegoated to protect a wider group of anatomists—the surgeon and anatomist Thomas Brathwaite (bap. 1695, d. 1730), born in Middlesex, continued his education through a series of specialized apprenticeships, earning limited posthumous status as a luminary. Nevertheless, details of Braithwaite’s life and career remained unknown to historians until the twenty-first century.

Founders of the Savile Club

The November 2024 release features a group entry exploring the lives of the Founders of the Savile Club (act. 1868–1872). Of the 520 members who had been elected by the end of 1872, 223 have entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The founders included clergymen, artists and architects, barristers and lawyers, academics and teachers, civil servants, newspaper editors and journalists, writers and critics, medical doctors, scientists, army officers, and politicians.

Literary lives

Responding to the troubled atmosphere of civil war and interregnum, Thomas Powell (1608–1660), clergyman, translator, and writer, was drawn to themes of exile, ostracism, poverty, imprisonment, and the role of fortune in the life of man. Having royalist sympathies, he cited the idleness caused by his forced ejection from Cantref, Wales, as the reason he was able to write or translate at least seven books on a range of subjects in the period 1647 to 1660. He promoted orthodox Christianity in both English and Welsh. The career of the administrator and literary critic, Peter Hume (bap. 1640, d. 1707), baptized in Westminster, is well attested in records of the royal household and the treasury. His legacy endures, however, owing to his recent identification as the ‘P.H. poet-lover’ to whom Annotations upon Paradise Lost (1695) has been ascribed. The Annotations were widely used by later commentators on Milton, though often without attribution and were among the earliest extended commentaries on any work of literature in vernacular English, making Hume one of the founders of English literary critique. A new account of the life of the barrister, political writer, and associate of Jeremy Bentham John Lind (1737–1781), born in Westminster, examines how he challenged the American Revolution’s philosophical justifications in his widely-circulated pamphlet, Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress, of 1776. Four editions were printed in London before the end of the year—and 500 copies were sent across the Atlantic by the North ministry—but there is no hard evidence that Lind changed any revolutionary American minds.

A respected flower painter and art teacher, Mary Gartside (1754/5–1819), raised in or around Manchester, contributed to the history and theory of colour not only through her outstanding illustrations—Gartside’s colour blots are particularly inventive as representations of colour systems—but through the insight of her published writings. Her three books survive today only in small numbers, though they are highly sought-after by cultural institutions and private collectors. The high esteem with which Percy Bysshe Shelley regarded the schoolmistress and poet Elizabeth Hitchener (1783–1821), baptized in Sussex, is well documented, but Hitchener’s talents as a poet have gained posthumous recognition only in recent years. Often centered on domestic life and emotional reflection, Hitchener’s poetry offers a unique view of early 19th-century women’s lives as well as the complex relationship between the perception of landscape and history. Although Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, gave all the papers appearing in his dispatches final approval before they were printed, John Gurwood (1788–1845) of Hertfordshire, army officer and editor, was solely and personally responsible for the costs of the project. His achievement is the subject of a new account in this update. The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, published in twelve volumes between 1834 and 1838, were immediate best-sellers, with bookshops demanding to know when the next volume would appear. The engraver, sculptor, and painter William Frederick Woodington (1806–1893), born in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, gained commissions as a sculptor and is also the subject of a fresh appraisal. His works include the ‘Coade Stone Lions’ statues, one of which stands today at the southern approach to Westminster Bridge, and the statues of Plato, Archimedes, and Justinian for the University of London. He was successful in government-sponsored competitions, one of which was for a bronze relief depicting the Battle of The Nile, arguably his pre-eminent sculptural work, for the plinth of the Nelson monument (Nelson's Column), Trafalgar Square, London.

The wide-ranging journalistic experience of Alice Abigail Corkran (1843–1916), born in Paris, came together with her long-standing interest in writing for and about girls when, in 1898, she was invited to edit a new high-quality sixpenny girls’ magazine entitled Girl's Realm. Under Corkran’s editorship, the Girl's Realm became a leading periodical among adolescent girls, and her distinctive editorial column, ‘My chat with the girl of the period’, helped to secure its success. Newly-available documentary evidence places the life of the politician and psychical researcher, Gerald William Balfour, second earl of Balfour (1853–1945), in a new light. Brother of the educationist Eleanor Sidgwick and of the future prime minister Arthur Balfour, he promoted land reform, local government reform, and economic development as secretary for Ireland from Ireland. In retirement from politics he embarked on a decades-long collation and interpretation project involving 3,000 pieces of automatic writing—an alleged psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing—collected primarily from four automatists during the early twentieth century. Newly available correspondence from his circle of female friends sheds light both on his own preoccupations and those of elite women at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Portrait likenesses have also been added to the articles on Gerald Balfour; the lawyer and politician in India, William Hickey (1749-1827); and the portrait painter, John Collier (1850-1934).

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The Oxford DNB is updated regularly throughout the year, giving you access to the most up-to-date and accurate information available. Nearly all public libraries in England, Scotland, and Wales—and all in Northern Ireland—subscribe to the Oxford DNB. This means you can access tens of thousands of biographies, free, via your local library—anywhere, anytime. Full access to all biographies is also available by individual subscription.

Discover a full list of entries added this year.