National Biography For A Computer Age

We all nowadays expect a wealth of information at our fingertips without always realising just how novel this situation is. Only through patient and painstaking labour were the great reference books produced that we now take for granted – from Dr. Johnson’s English Dictionary onwards. Their creation owed much to a multi-layered pressure for self-improvement. Eighteenth-century dictionaries guided the socially aspiring on correct speech, early-nineteenth-century encyclopaedias nourished the educationally self-improving, the Victorian economists’ digests of statistics enthused the entrepreneur with British material progress, and books of sporting records stretched twentieth-century bodies to their limits. ‘In the space of the last twelve months’, wrote the McWhirters, introducing the 1965 edition of the Guinness Book of Records, ‘Man has travelled faster and higher, probed deeper, built larger, run and swum faster and multiplied more furiously than ever before’.