The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons

This new volume of the DNB records the lives of 1,086 men and women who for a variety of reasons were omitted from the original version. This volume is intended as a "catch-up" volume, adding a substantial number of individuals to the record of British history. The choice of entrants is of special interest since it not only rectifies some earlier oversights but also reflects scholarly developments in British history as well as more general changes in social outlook over the period since first publication. Thus, for example there are proportionately nearly four times as many women in this volume as in the original DNB, while a richer concentration of representatives from the developing worlds of commerce and finance, industry and science from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries points to areas of relatively recent attention by historians of the period. Similarly, the selection of some religious radicals of the seventeenth century singles out individuals whose significance has now been uncovered by modern scholarship. Among those no longer missing are: Thomas Traherne, Sylvia Plath, Francis Kilvert, Joe Ackerley, Lillie Langtry, and J.C. Merrick (The Elephant Man).