ABSTRACT
The present-day importance of state-funded humanities research masks the scale of the humanities research that has been organized and published independently of the state, most notably by commercial publishing firms. It was an enterprising publisher, George Smith (of Smith, Elder), who funded the Dictionary of National Biography [DNB]. Macmillan created the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (4 volumes 1878–89, rising to 29 volumes in its seventh edition of 2001); to this the firm added the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art in 1996. The Oxford University Press [OUP] promoted outstanding humanities research both directly and indirectly, and did not confine its twentieth-century scholarly role to publishing: it was itself a powerful research engine, directly funding and organizing the huge Oxford English Dictionary. Then after the Smith family gave it the DNB in 1917, 2 the OUP published periodic supplements on the newly deceased. From its own resources came six-sevenths of the funding for the total revision of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography from 1992 to 2004, 3 and it has funded the continuous revision of its online version thereafter. The OUP bought from Macmillan the dictionaries of art and music in 2003 and 2004, respectively. It buttressed all this through subordinate, but still substantial, projects mobilizing twentieth-century scholars who were increasingly becoming in effect employees of the state. Such projects included the Oxford History of English Literature, the Oxford History of Modern Europe, the Oxford History of the British Empire and the Oxford History of England [OHE].
