How I used the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a student

‘They court the notice of a future age/ Those twinkling tiny lustres of the land’.

Today’s users of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are members of the ‘future age’ that William Cowper talks of in his poem ‘On Observing Some Names Of Little Note Recorded In The Biographia Britannica’. For students, this makes the ODNB a treasure trove. On any given topic, movement or episode of history—be it the Crusades, the first women lawyers, or the Romantic poets—we can find in the ODNB elegant and informative entries about the people behind it. These people might be kings and queens, but they are often ‘tiny lustres’: individuals who lived in quieter ways, but who nonetheless shaped the course of British history.

I started using the ODNB when I was a student of English Literature in 2018-2022. Undergraduate and postgraduate student life is, as many will attest, busy, and this made the ODNB an invaluable resource: a long-form biography might take too much time to read during term, but an ODNB entry is both detailed and short. I used the dictionary to locate in-depth research in an accessible, engaging, concise format, but also as a reading list of sorts: it pointed me towards further material about people I was researching (in my case, these were mostly authors). A given entry might contain both primary sources (diaries, manuscripts, books by the subject, podcasts and film) and further secondary material (full-length biographies, books of criticism) that can form a starting point when researching biographical information about a given person.

But what did this look like in practice? Here’s one example. In my second year, one of our set texts was Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. I didn’t know much about Defoe’s background when I began this module, so I went to the ODNB for a concise overview of his life. I was also able to do a keyword search within the entry to immediately identify specific information about Moll Flanders, which came in handy when writing my tutorial essay. The entry contained quotations from seminal works of criticism (such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel) as well as responses to the work from other authors, both in Defoe’s lifetime and later (like James Joyce, who called Defoe the ‘father of the English novel’). What’s more, the list of sources at the end of the entry provided an accessible and manageable means of navigating criticism around Defoe when I returned to the topic when revising for Finals.

From then on, the ODNB became an essential tool in my undergraduate and postgraduate research. I used it as a starting point to devise my own reading list in preparation for my BA dissertation on Virginia Woolf: indeed, reading the entry on her convinced me to choose this subject for my thesis. The ODNB helped me to discover Woolf’s circle, too: it contains entries about other members of the Bloomsbury group, from her sister Vanessa Bell to the painter and curator Roger Fry.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography allows each user to embark on their own path of discovery. A friend, when writing her history dissertation about Members of Parliament in the eighteenth-century, used the dictionary’s ‘group entries’ to gather sources and discover additional figures related to her project. The ODNB’s coverage stretches all the way back to Roman officers and their wives stationed at the fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall in first century AD, and to the associates of William the Conqueror, who planned the invasion of England in 1066. History is made by ‘tiny lustres’, and this resource equips us to roam across the vast range of individual contributions to national life. Next time you come across a name you don’t recognize in your research, I encourage you to try looking them up in the ODNB: it might just spark a new idea.

^{Featured image by Zoshua Colah via Unsplash.}