Memory Studies primarily focuses on the period within living memory, from World War 2 onwards. This paper argues that its frameworks are just as relevant to earlier periods, and that in nineteenth-century contemporary-history-writing we see representations of the recent past as history in ways that disregard Jan Vansina's "floating gap" (1985).
The nineteenth century was a heyday of collective biographical dictionaries: compilations of lives in the form of short entries. This paper examines two very different examples to reveal surprising convergences: Men of the Time (1852–99) exclusively represented living people, aimed to be cosmopolitan, and superseded itself every three years with a new edition; The Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900; hereafter DNB) was a 63-volume national project that only represented deceased individuals and which was intended to be definitive.
I show that despite their very different institutional contexts, both works had similar trouble in maintaining their promised objectivity. Men of the Time's first editions were woefully inaccurate, but when they tried to improve this by consulting the people they depicted (a practice still applied by Who's Who) it was accused of puffery. DNB asserted more scientific objectivity, but where it drew on autobiographies, traces of those are visible in the entries' structures. More widely, over 450 entries on subjects who had died since 1850 were written by contributors who remembered them personally. Again, this had surprising results, sometimes producing determinedly stilted and distanced accounts as contributors attempted to fit a professional persona.
Both works sought to be complete, but knew this was impossible. Each edition of Men of the Time emphasised how up-to-date it was in contrast to the previous edition, but elided the obvious corollary that the same would soon be true of itself, in a concertina-like pattern that sequentially ignored and highlighted temporal change. Meanwhile, DNB had to release a 3-volume "supplement" in 1901 to add entries on Queen Victoria and others who had died during the publication process.
Both works rejected any notion of a "floating gap" between communicative and cultural memory (Assmann, 1995, 2008). They boldly defied the nineteenth-century's increased emphasis on professional distanciation and represented very proximate people and events as history, but struggled with the challenges that entailed. In these works, communicative and cultural memory converge and become instead an overlap.
