Biography Database 1680-1830 on CD-ROM.

Directed by John Cannon and Frank Robinson (England: Avero Publications Ltd. 1995. Personal Research Edition, Disk 1: $125.00).

In recent years, it has become increasingly common for historians of the British Isles to write about "the long eighteenth century," that era - intermittently one of stability and one of political and economic upheaval - that began with the Revolution of 1688-89 and that concluded during the years 1828-1832 with the curbing of the formal privileges of the Church of England, with the Great Reform Bill, and, for that matter, with the onset of the railway age. England's population back in 1688 is estimated at approximately five million people. Seven decades later, it had grown to little more than six million, but by 1831 it had reached thirteen million people; millions more had been born and had died in the interval. Of these many millions, how many can we identify as individuals? The Dictionary of National Biography, first published in the late nineteenth century, provided brief lives of some twelve thousand English (as well as Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and English colonial) worthies who lived during that century-and-a-half.

The compilers of the database under review - the first of a projected set of five - have identified more than 800,000 additional individual names - ninety-two percent of them men and eight percent of them women. They have done so by combining all the biographical information to be found in Gentleman's Magazine for the years 1731-1750 as well as the records of the Royal Society and the Stationers Company, more than one hundred local and national trade directories, and well over 14,000 subscription lists. The compilers thereby remind us how many books of poems, and of local history, as well as collections of sermons and even the scores of operas such George Frederic Handel's Rodelinda were published in this fashion. This CD-ROM permits us to know the name of every single subscriber. One hundred and sixteen individuals subscribed to the second edition of that opera in 1725. At about the same time, more than three thousand subscribed to the posthumous two-volume edition of Bishop Gilbert Burnet's History of My Own Times (which was the later seventeenth century). Whereas Anatomical and Mechanic Lectures Upon Dancing (1721) attracted only 30 subscribers, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) drew 198 and A Plain and Easy Treatise of Book Keeping (1755) attracted 729. Successive annual issues of The Sporting Calendar during the early 1770s proved even more popular.

The database permits the researcher to identify individuals by name, address, directory, subscription list, and date, as well as by gender, title, and occupation. The last three categories may prove particularly useful to the social historian. Thus the compilation identifies - on the basis of directory or subscription list self-identification - 181 admirals, 3,200 colonels, and 9,200 captains (although it cannot readily distinguish the military from the naval variety). It also records the names of 667 barons, 8,891 baronets, 9,200 "Honourables," and no less than 130,100 esquires. There are listed also 62,000 reverends, 423 self-described widows, and a single lonely janitor.

The fact that the CD-ROM also lists by name 3,300 dukes and 900 duchesses alerts us to a significant weakness of the database. Its compilers have not discovered a hitherto unknown cohort of coroneted peers; rather they have found it impossible and have indeed made no effort to consolidate names. Every time a person is recorded in a particular subscription list or a particular directory, he or she is identified anew. It is up to the user to figure out how to cope with the problem of duplication.

If the list of titles reminds us of the significance of England's upper classes during the long eighteenth century, then the list of occupations provides us with the (also in part duplicated) names of 1785 butchers, of more than 4,000 button-makers, of more than 2,600 cheesemongers, and of more than 3,000 coal merchants as well as of more than 14,000 sellers of clothing, 500 clockmakers, 2,500 brewers, 3,000 distillers, and 7,000 brokers and financial advisers. At the same time, only 223 dancing masters identify themselves as do 200 fanmakers, 84 composers of music, 39 chocolate makers, two cow doctors, and but a single "Encourager." The single female "historiographer" turns out, on inspection, to have been misidentified; she was no more than a subscriber to a three-volume history, and the single "cancer doctress" turns out to have been residing in Boston, Massachusetts during the 1790s. Inasmuch as the overwhelming majority of sources utilized are English, the decision by the compilers to incorporate three post-American Revolution Boston directories is not easy to justify.

The virtues of the project are clear. Assuming that the reader figures out (on the basis of careful instructions) how to install the CD-ROM on a personal computer operating under a Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 or Windows 98 program (but not on any Apple computer), then that reader will have at his or her disposal information that might previously have required a lengthy journey to a multitude of libraries. The CD-ROM also possesses powerful "Boolean" search capabilities - thereby enabling the user to combine the categories of Occupation, Gender, Address, and Extant (i.e. Time). Someone interested in learning how many female innkeepers might be found in Newcastle upon Tyne during the final decade of the eighteenth century can thus pinpoint one, a Mrs. Barras (first name unknown) who sold food and drink at Newcastle's Quay-side in 1795.

At the same time, it is well to keep in mind that, with minor exceptions (such as identifying gender and defining the meaning of obscure occupation descriptions), these primary sources have not been edited and that even obvious typographical errors have not been corrected. Occasionally, indeed, the process of scanning or transcribing has added new errors. The perhaps unavoidable duplication of individual names has been noted above. The decision as to which sources to include on the first CD-ROM of a projected five is essentially arbitrary. It is true that for $125, the interested individual social historian will gain access to a veritable library of hitherto obscure information - provided that the buyer signs a license agreement not to permit use of the material on any electronic network or to convert substantial portions of it into any other medium or to transfer the CD-ROM to any institution such as a university library (which is expected to pay approximately $3,000 for each of the five prospective CD-ROMs). It is also true that such a historian will hardly be in a position to complete a major research project on the basis of a gigantic and highly suggestive but arbitrarily selected biographical database. The cast of characters may be enormous, but the plot remains to be written.

Walter L. Arnstein University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign