Sidney Lee was one of the last Victorian men of letters and one of the first of a new breed of literary critics in the first quarter of the twentieth century. He worked on the Dictionary of National Biography from its prepublication beginnings in 1883 until 1917, first as subeditor and later as editor, and he was a major contributor of articles on various subjects. All his life he worked on books and book-related projects. He was a scholar, a respected Shakespearean critic and editor, the pioneer of a new type of royal biography, and an active proponent of the new field of English literary studies in schools, colleges, and universities.

Lee was born in London on 5 December 1859, the son of a Jewish merchant, Lazarus Lee, and his wife, Jessie Davis. He was named Solomon Lazarus Lee, although by the time he was an undergraduate in 1880 he had changed his...