British Biography

Who's Who
Latest in Perkins Reference, earlier volumes in Perkins Stacks DA28 .W6
Library has 1853, 1898-1903, 1905-present.  Annual volumes with brief biographies of important people.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Online version
Perkins Reference DA28 .O95 2004 (60 vols). Includes over 50,000 biographies, of non-living people only.  Includes all content from previous editions (some entries rewritten) but with a new focus on women and people from colonial areas.

Burke's Peerage
Perkins Reference CS420 .G464 (2 vols., 106th edition.)  Older editions also available.

Burke's Landed Gentry
Perkins Reference CS425 .B8 1965 (3 vols.)  Older editions also available.

Boase's Modern English Biography
Perkins Reference CT773 .B6 1962 (6 volumes).  Persons who died after 1850.

The rest of the pages of this guide focus on special sources for British Biography, many of which are not obviously biographical resources but nevertheless are valuable, espevially for less well-known persons.  Some of the sources listed provide information dating from the earliest periods to the present, but this bibliography is primarily useful for the nineteenth, and later eighteenth centuries.  Although the bibliography is divided into sections, readers should know that the entries in the various sections are not mutually exclusive. Information about Scots, for example, is available in many sections, not just the one for books and periodicals specializing in Scotland. 

This guide was originally researched and prepared by William R. Erwin, Jr. in 1976.