Dictionary of national biography online

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edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee

The Dictionary of National Biography (or DNB) is a biographical reference for deceased persons notable in British history. The current edition of this work has been published online by Oxford University Press since The current electronic edition is not free, but is available through individual or library subscription. There is also a recent print edition.

Some earlier editions of this work are freely available online, and remain of historic interest. Below we link to free online volumes of the first and second editions, and some of their supplementary volumes.

First edition

The first edition was published in 63 volumes from through in London by Smith, Elder, and Co. (In the US, Macmillan also published many of the volumes in conjunction with Smith, Elder. These copies are noted in the list below with an "(M)" notation.) Various supplements, errata volumes, and indexes were published in the years to follow, prior to the second edition.

Google Books has various page image formats for all of the volumes, as does the Internet Archive. (The Google Books editions might not be readable in full outside the United States.) We give links to the first edition volumes below.

Supplementary volumes for th

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Dictionary of National Biography

Reference on notable British figures

The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since The updated Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) was published on 23 September in 60 volumes and online, with 50, biographical articles covering 54, lives.

First series

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Hoping to emulate national biographical collections published elsewhere in Europe, such as the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (), in the publisher George Smith (–), of Smith, Elder & Co., planned a universal dictionary that would include biographical entries on individuals from world history. He approached Leslie Stephen, then editor of the Cornhill Magazine, owned by Smith, to become the editor. Stephen persuaded Smith that the work should focus only on subjects from the United Kingdom and its present and former colonies. An early working title was the Biographia Britannica, the name of an earlier eighteenth-century reference work.

The first volume of the Dictionary of National Biography appeared on 1 January In May Leslie Stephen resigned and Sidney Lee, Stephen's assistant editor from the beginning of the project, succeeded him as editor.^[1] A

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Dictionary of Ceremonial Biography

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