The creation of expansive, annotated, pedigrees was a stock-in-trade of Victorian biography. One of the most industrious practitioners was George Aitken, whose fulsome pursuit of very distant family history for his 1889 Life of Richard Steele drew criticism even in his own day. 1 Perhaps mindful of perceived excess, for his next biography, that of Dr John Arbuthnot, Aitken limited ancestry to several pages of text, a family pedigree, and a five-page appendix of genealogical notes. 2 The author’s labours, however, had been expansive and painstaking, and the Life was the first scholarly attempt to establish an accurate Arbuthnot genealogy. The original scholarly biographical sketch, produced by Leslie Stephen for the very...