About the Book

The prolific biographer, first editor of the 26 volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, and father of Virginia Woolf, shares secrets of the trade in this wide-ranging collection of essays. This first of four volumes published from 1898-1902 includes “National Biography,” “The Evolution of Editors,” shorthand inventor “John Byrom,” “Johnsoniana,” “Gibbon’s Autobiography,” “Arthur Young,” and “Wordsworth’s Youth.”