Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:08:53.813Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2021

Cara Murray Open the ORCID record for Cara Murray [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, was one of Britain's biggest cyclopedia projects. The rampant expansion of the nation's archives, private collections, and museums produced an abundance of materials that frustrated the dictionary's editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, especially because methodologies for making order of such materials were underdeveloped. Adding to their frustration was the sense of impending doom felt generally in Britain after the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in 1859. Entropy put an end to the presiding belief in the infinite energy that fueled Britain's economic development and therefore challenged Victorian biography's premise that the capacity for self-development was boundless. Like the physicists of the era, these dictionary makers searched for ways to circumvent entropy's deadening force and reenergize their world. This project would not actually be achieved, however, until the twentieth century when Claude Shannon published his “Information Theory” in 1948. I argue that in an attempt to get out from under the chaos of information overload, the editors of the DNB invented new methods to organize information that anticipated Shannon's revolutionary theory and changed the way that we think, write, and work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 87 - 116
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Atkinson, Juliette. Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beer, Gillian. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Burks, Arthur W. Review of The Mathematical Theory of Communications, by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver. Philosophical Review 60, no 3. (1951): 398–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byfield, Ted. “Information.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Fuller, Matthew, 125–32. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Campbell, Jeremy. Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.Google Scholar
Casson, Herbert Newton. The History of the Telephone. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910.Google Scholar
Chiu, Eugene, Lin, Jocelyn, Mcferron, Brok, Petigara, Noshirwan, and Seshasai, Satwiksai. Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon: A Study of the Style and Context of His Work up to the Genesis of Information Theory. http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/Shannon1.pdf.Google Scholar
Clarke, Bruce. “From Thermodynamics to Virtuality.” In From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, edited by Clarke, Bruce and Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 17–33. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delbourgo, James. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2017.Google Scholar
Fenwick, Gillian. The Contributors’ Index to the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1901. Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1989.Google Scholar
Firth, C. H. “Memoir of Sidney Lee.” Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920.Google Scholar
Firth, C. H.. Review of The Dictionary of National Biography, by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. English Historical Review 5, no. 20 (1890): 783–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Vintage, 2011.Google Scholar
Gold, Barri J. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayles, Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Kolata, Gina. “Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA.” New York Times, July 12, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/film-clip-stored-in-dna.html.Google Scholar
Lee, Sidney. “The Dictionary of National Biography, a Statistical Account.” In Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 63. London: Oxford University Press, 1900.Google Scholar
Lee, Sidney. “National Biography: A Lecture.” Cornhill Magazine 26 (March 1896): 258–77. HathiTrust, Hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112118707824.Google Scholar
Levitin, Daniel J. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. New York: Plume, 2015.Google Scholar
MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature and the Ecological Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth, 1906.Google Scholar
Maxwell, James Clerk. Letter to John William Strutt, December 6, 1870. In The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 2., edited by Harman, P. M.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Maxwell, James Clerk. Letter to Peter Guthrie Tait, December 11, 1867. In The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 2., edited by Harman, P. M.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Maxwell, James Clerk. “Rede Lecture on ‘the Telephone.’” In The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 3., edited by Harman, P. M.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Meyers, Greg. “Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy.” In Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, edited by Brantlinger, Patrick, 307–38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Nadel, Ira Bruce. Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.Google Scholar
“Ninety Miles of ‘Home, Sweet Home.’” Dundee Courier & Argus, April 27, 1877. British Library Newspapers, Part II: 1800–1900.Google Scholar
Shannon, Claude E., and Weaver, Warren. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Stephen, Leslie. “Biography.” National Review 22, no. 127 (September 1893): 171–83. HathiTrust, hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101067625192.Google Scholar
Stephen, Leslie. “Dryasdust.” The Speaker 23 (June 1900): 331–32.Google Scholar
Stephen, Leslie. “National Biography.” National Review 27, no. 157 (March 1896): 51–65. HathiTrust, hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101067625051.Google Scholar
Stephen, Leslie. “A New ‘Biographia Britannica.’” The Athenaeum 2, no. 2873 (December 23, 1882): 850.Google Scholar
Stephen, Leslie. Some Early Impressions. London: Hogarth Press, 1924.Google Scholar
Strunk, William Jr., and White, E. B.. The Elements of Style. New York: Macmillan, 1979.Google Scholar
Wiener, Norbert. “Communication Theory.” Review of The Mathematical Theory of Communications, by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver. Physics Today 3, no. 9 (September 1950): 31–32.Google Scholar
Worth, Aaron. Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014.Google Scholar