Frederic Boase’s Modern English Biography is an indispensable reference work containing concise biographies of thousands of notable British figures who died between 1850 and 1900. This second volume covers surnames from Ibbetson to Q — a vast array of politicians, soldiers, artists, scientists, writers, clergy, and adventurers who shaped the Victorian and Edwardian world.

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Modern English Biography, Volume 2

A monumental biographical dictionary of notable British figures from the 19th century, covering surnames I through Q — an essential reference work for Victorian and Edwardian British history.

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📚 About the Work

Originally published in 1897, Modern English Biography is one of the most comprehensive biographical dictionaries of its era. Frederic Boase compiled thousands of entries on British figures who died between 1850 and 1900, including many individuals not found in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Each entry includes dates of birth and death, education, career highlights, publications, and source references. Volume 2 covers surnames from Ibbetson through Quick — a vast alphabetical span that includes some of the most influential figures of the Victorian age alongside minor but fascinating characters preserved nowhere else.

The work remains an invaluable resource for historians, genealogists, and anyone interested in 19th-century British history.

🧭 What the Volume Covers

Because Volumes 1 through 4 span the entire alphabet, Volume 2 (I–Q) functions both as a self-contained reference and as part of a larger whole. The surnames it covers — Ibbetson to Quick — include many of the most consequential British lives of the era. Within these pages you will find Victorian prime ministers and cabinet ministers, empire builders and colonial governors, artists of the Royal Academy, novelists and poets, pioneering engineers and industrialists, scientists and surgeons, bishops and missionaries, military commanders, and mercantile magnates whose fortunes built the cities of modern Britain.

The real value of Boase, however, lies in the obscure figures he recorded and that no other reference work preserved. Where a work like the Dictionary of National Biography concentrated on the famous, Boase went far broader — documenting local notables, minor civil servants, provincial doctors and lawyers, churchmen of small parishes, inventors who died forgotten, and travellers whose published accounts survive only because he catalogued them. For researchers, this breadth is gold: it is frequently the only place a particular person appears anywhere in print.

Each entry is also remarkably disciplined for a nineteenth-century compilation. Boase aimed for reliability over flourish, and his entries typically give dates, family background, education, the offices or posts held, principal publications or achievements, and often a source citation. This makes the work useful not only for its biographical content but as a research tool — a map that tells you where to look next.

🏛️ Historical Context of the Work

Modern English Biography was compiled at the end of the Victorian era, a moment when Britain was taking stock of its own recent past. The people Boase documented — men and women who died between 1850 and 1900 — had lived through the railway revolution, industrialization, the expansion of the British Empire at its height, the growth of a professional civil service, and dramatic changes in science, medicine, and the arts. A reference work built to capture all of them was itself a characteristically Victorian project: encyclopedic, systematic, and confident in the value of ordering knowledge.

Boase was not a scholar in the university mold but a Cornish banker and man of letters who devoted decades to compiling his dictionary as a private project. His method — assembling printed biographies, obituaries, and other records and cross-referencing them into compact entries — anticipated the editorial practices of later reference publishing. That unusual background helps explain both the work’s idiosyncrasies and its extraordinary reach: no committee could have recorded so wide a sweep of minor lives.

For modern readers, the work’s deepest interest lies in what it reveals about how the Victorians saw themselves. Scanning thousands of entries is, in effect, a census of Victorian achievement and self-regard — what careers were admired, what kind of lives were deemed worth recording, how the empire kept its own rosters. It is a window onto an entire culture’s sense of its own significance, one that complements the more narrative treatment found in other classic biographies.

🎓 Why Boase Still Matters Today

Today Modern English Biography is prized by a startlingly wide range of users. Genealogists turn to it constantly to identify ancestors who never made it into standard biographies — the volume is a standard stop for anyone tracing Victorian British families. Local and family historians use its entries to build context around the communities they research. Writers and researchers of Victorian Britain use it to verify dates, relationships, careers, and publications that are surprisingly hard to confirm elsewhere. Even historical novelists and screenwriters find it invaluable for grounding fictional characters in credible period detail.

What makes the work so durable is that no digital database has fully replaced it. While many other Victorian reference sets have been superseded, Boase’s collection of minor lives remains, in large part, unrivaled. Thousands of his entries simply exist in no other source. That is why the work is a staple of research libraries more than a century after publication — and why a clean, searchable edition is genuinely useful rather than a curiosity.

The DodaBooks edition makes this bulk of material navigable. A complete table of contents lets you jump straight to the surname you need, and a searchable digital text removes the labor of scanning thousands of pages looking for a single name — the frustrating part of using a work of this size in print. For a companion look at how Victorian-era reference and record-keeping captured everyday lives, our guide to the 2006 CIA World Factbook is an interesting mirror: a national reference organized on a very different principle.

📖 How to Use This Edition

Approach Modern English Biography as a reference rather than a book to be read cover to cover. If you are researching a specific person, start with the table of contents to locate the surname range, then scan entries within that range. The digital format lets you search directly by name, which is far faster than flipping pages.

If you are using the work for broader research — understanding a profession, a region, or an era — treat it as a directory of leads. Each entry is compact, so a single browsing session can survey dozens of lives and suggest fruitful directions for deeper research elsewhere. Because the entries include dates and sources, they also act as a verification layer: check a biographical claim against Boase and you will often settle the matter quickly.

This volume pairs well with other primary-source reference works available in the same library. For American history, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin documents the self-made man across the Atlantic, while Bidwell’s Travels offers a very different kind of Victorian-era life — a true-crime memoir by a man who nearly broke the Bank of England. Together they give a vivid sense of the era’s broader currents.

✨ What Makes the DodaBooks Edition Special

This edition presents Boase’s essential reference work in a clean, distraction-free format.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

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📚 Read the Victorian Reference Classic

Modern English Biography, Volume 2 is an essential reference work for anyone researching 19th-century British history. The DodaBooks edition presents Boase’s classic in a clean, distraction-free format:

• ✅ Complete entries from I–Q — thousands of detailed biographies
• ✒️ Smart typography — curly quotes, em-dashes, proper ellipsis
• 📜 Full table of contents with section navigation
• 🔒 DRM-free — read on any device, anytime
• 📥 Instant download — EPUB format

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