The book that tells 60,000 stories

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a great – and little-known – resource for historical novelists. Frances Quinn found the idea for her new book, That Bonesetter Woman, there.

As anyone who’s had dealings with the publishing industry will know, one of the things it loves best is ‘the same, but different’; in other words, ‘Take what made your last book successful and put that in the next one, without telling the same story.’ So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, on discussing ideas for my second book with my editor, she suggested I do what I’d done first time round: find a little-known historical character with a fascinating life, and build the story around them.

Which was a fine idea, but I’d stumbled on the real-life inspiration for my first novel, The Smallest Man, about a boy who became a ‘court dwarf’ at the time of Charles I, quite by accident; how was I going to find another one? I could hardly just Google ‘little-known historical character who’d make a great novel’.

But as it turned out, there is a kind of Google equivalent that could have been designed for that purpose. It’s called the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), and it’s a gift to the historical novelist.

I found out about the ODNB during my increasingly frantic and fruitless search for book two inspiration, and discovered that it contains mini-biographies of over 60,000 people who in many different ways made a mark on life in Britain. Many are well-known: royalty, members of the aristocracy, politicians, assorted celebrities.

But it also carries the stories of a vast number of ordinary people who’ve slipped out of the history books, or never made it into them, but who nevertheless were known for something in their time; a particularly dastardly or audacious crime; an unusual invention; a public scandal; involvement in a particularly weird news story… You name it, someone in the ODNB has done it.

Originally just called the Dictionary of National Biography, it was first published in 1885, apparently in response to a fashion for biographical collections elsewhere in Europe. The only criteria for inclusion seems to have been that the person was dead, and their story had caught the interest of one of the team of in-house and external writers who supplied the entries – there were 653 of them, which probably explains the eclectic range of the over 29,000 people included in its pages.

Supplementary volumes featuring the more recently deceased were produced quarterly until 1900, and then less frequently after that. Oxford University Press eventually took over publishing it, and in the 1990s, decided to give it a complete overhaul and update under the editorship of Colin Matthew, professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.

He decided that no one mentioned in the original work would be excluded, even if they seemed insignificant to modern eyes, but most of the entries were rewritten, and room was made for about 14,000 new subjects, with in-house editors collating the work of over 10,000 contributors.

First published in 2004 and now called the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the modern version of the dictionary still exists as a printed book – 72 million words in 61 volumes – and also in an online edition that’s constantly updated (48 new lives were added last month alone). That online edition is so beautifully suited to historical fiction research that it could have been made for us.

First, although it’s a subscription service, most public libraries in the UK (and some elsewhere) subscribe, and you can get free access to it, from home, just by giving your library card number.

Second, you can search in all sorts of different ways. If you’ve got an idea what you’re looking for, you can use a keyword, but you can also browse subjects by criteria such as occupation, sex, location and life dates – perfect if, like me, you’re just looking for ideas and inspiration.

I knew I wanted my second book to be set in the 18th century, and I wanted the main character to be a woman. So I set my search parameters for women who lived between 1700 and 1800, and off I went, down a fascinating rabbit hole of highwaywomen and brothelkeepers, actresses and courtesans, murderesses, midwives and mathematicians.

The entries just give you the basic story of the person – sometimes a portrait as well – but it’s enough to spark an idea that you can then research further, to see if the story’s got enough in it to make a novel, or part of one.

Down that rabbit hole I found a woman called Sarah Mapp who, the ODNB told me, ‘was beefy and endowed with unusual strength’, and used those qualities to make a name for herself as a bonesetter, fixing broken limbs and dislocations for the rich and fashionable of Georgian London.

When I read on to find that she was dubbed Crazy Sally for her eccentric ways, mocked by the medical profession as a quack, and eventually pushed into a downward spiral by a Hogarth print depicting her as ‘bun-faced, distinctly boss-eyed and double-chinned, and holding a bone’, I knew I had the inspiration for my character.

And with the mention of a beautiful sister who became a famous actress, collared a Duke as a lover and eventually married him, I had the basis of a story too. Who wouldn’t wonder what that sisterly relationship was like?

Crazy Sally became Endurance Proudfoot, the heroine of That Bonesetter Woman, who, with her beautiful sister Lucinda, hits Georgian London in 1757, beginning an adventure that will see both of them win, and lose, fame and fortune.

That Bonesetter Woman isn’t Sarah Mapp’s story – poor Sarah had a sad end that I couldn’t bear to give Endurance – but it wouldn’t exist without her, and the unnamed contributor to the dictionary who read about an eccentric female bonesetter and thought “That’s interesting…”

That Bonesetter Woman by Frances Quinn was published on 21 July, 2022.

Frances Quinn grew up in Forest Gate, East London and read English at King’s College, Cambridge, realising too late that the course would require more than lying around reading novels for three years. After snatching a degree from the jaws of laziness, she became a magazine journalist, and later branched out into copywriting. Her first novel, The Smallest Man, was published in 2021. She lives in Brighton with her husband and three Tonkinese cats.

Follow Frances on Twitter as @franquinn, Instagram @franquinn21, and Facebook Frances Quinn Author.

Read Frances’s feature about the background to The Smallest Man, Henrietta Maria, a forgotten queen?

Images:

1. Volumes of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Mgoutsidou for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
2. Bandages and other equipment for setting broken legs from A General System of Surgery by Lorenz Heister, 1745: Wellcome Collection (public domain)
3. From Sarah Mapp’s entry in the online ODNB
4. Mrs Sarah Mapp, coloured etching by George Cruikshank, 1819, after William Hogarth: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
5. Lavinia Fenton, later Duchess of Bolton, by Charles Jervas: Wikimedia (public domain)