Burke's Peerage
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk , England | |
Website | burkespeerage |
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Burke's Peerage Limited is a British
. His first publication, a Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom, was updated sporadically until 1847, when the company began publishing new editions every year as Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage (often shortened and known as Burke's Peerage).Other books followed, including
History
The firm was established in 1826 by
Apart from the Burke family, editors have included
From 1974 to 1983,
Last published in 2003 as Burke's Peerage & Baronetage, the Burke's titles (including Burke's Landed Gentry) have since been reunified and the present ownership plans to next publish an updated book-form bicentenary edition in 2026.
Criticism
In 1877, the Oxford professor Edward Augustus Freeman criticised the accuracy of Burke's and said that it contained pedigrees that were
purely mythical – if indeed mythical is not too respectable a name for what must be in many cases the work of deliberate invention [... and] all but invariably false. As a rule, it is not only false, but impossible [...] not merely fictions, but exactly that kind of fiction which is, in its beginning, deliberate and interested falsehood.[4]
Oscar Wilde in the play A Woman of No Importance wrote: "You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done!" In 1901, the historian J. Horace Round wrote of Burke's "old fables" and "grotesquely impossible tales".[5]
More recent editions have been more scrupulously checked and rewritten for accuracy, notably under the chief editorship, from 1949 to 1959, of L. G. Pine and Hugh Massingberd (1971–1983).[2][6] Pine was particularly sceptical regarding many families' claims to antiquity, saying: "If everybody who claims to have come over with the Conqueror were right, William must have landed with 200,000 men-at-arms instead of about 12,000."[7]
See also
- Almanach de Gotha
- The Complete Peerage
- Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage
- Social Register
- Carnet Mondain
- International Register of Arms, formerly Burke's Peerage & Gentry International Register of Arms
References
- ^ Noel Gerard, "Bursting out of the closet", The Spectator, 22 November 2006, accessed 27 January 2021
- ^ ISBN 9781904027508.
- ^ "Burke's Peerage – History", Burke's Peerage, accessed 27 January 2021
- ^ Freeman, Edward A. (June 1877), "Pedigrees and Pedigree-Makers", Contemporary Review, vol. XXX, pp. 11 to 41
- ISBN 0-8063-0426-X, retrieved 25 March 2018)
{{citation}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ Burke's Landed Gentry 18th Edition (1972), editorial preface, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd
- ^ "Twentieth Century Squires", Time, 10 December 1951
External links
Online editions
- 1st edition – 1826 – Hathitrust
- 3rd edition – 1830 – Hathitrust
- 4th edition – 1832 – Vol 1 – Hathitrust
- 4th edition – 1832 – Vol 2 – Hathitrust
- 4th edition – 1832 – Vol 2 – Google Books
- 4th edition – corrected to 1833 – Vol 2 – Hathitrust
- 5th edition – 1838 – Google Books
- 6th edition – 1839 – Hathitrust
- 7th edition – 1843 – Vol 2 – Hathitrust
- 10th edition – 1848 – Hathitrust
- 12th edition – 1850 – Hathitrust
- 20th edition – 1858 – Hathitrust
- 22nd edition – 1860 – Hathitrust
- 23rd edition – 1861 – Hathitrust
- 27th edition – 1865 – Google Books
- 30th edition – 1868 – Google Books
- 30th edition – 1868 – Vol 1 – Hathitrust
- 30th edition – 1868 – Vol 2 – Hathitrust
- 31st edition – 1869 – Vol 1 – Hathitrust
- 31st edition – 1869 – Vol 2 – Hathitrust
- 37th edition – 1875 – Vol 2 – Hathitrust
- 40th edition – 1878 – Hathitrust
- 48th edition – 1886 – University of Dusseldorf
- 53rd edition – 1891 – University of Dusseldorf
- 74th edition – 1912 – Archive.org
- 76th edition – 1914 (to page 1274) – Archive.org
- 77th edition – 1915 – Archive.org
- 92nd edition - 1934 - Google Books
- Media related to Burke's Peerage at Wikimedia Commons