This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer. Richard Holmes
growing popularity was broadly recognised, and was already receiving some study, though not necessarily favourable. Coleridge wrote about it in his journal The Friend (1810), calling it the product of ‘emphatically an Age of Personality’; and Wordsworth attacked the use of ungentlemanly revelations in a contemporary Life of Burns (1828). But in fact Romanticism embraced the ideas of both ‘personality’ and of personal ‘revelations’. In 1813 Robert Southey clinched his appointment as Poet Laureate by writing a short and wonderfully vivid biography of Nelson, which eventually became by far the most successful work he ever published. It enshrined the dead wartime naval commander as a new kind of national hero, a people’s hero with the common touch, flawed of course (Emma Hamilton), but open-hearted and irresistibly courageous, and above all familiar: ‘The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend.’
Similarly, in 1818 Mary Shelley chose to educate Frankenstein’s monster in the complex ways of human civilisation by making him read biography (‘a volume of Plutarch’s Lives’) as well as Goethe’s fashionable novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and Milton’s Paradise Lost. While fiction seems to emphasise the creature’s isolation and sense of exclusion, biography consoles him. Hidden in his woodshed, the monster reflects: ‘I learned from Werther’s imaginations despondency and gloom: but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me beyond the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages.’
One cannot help wondering which exemplary biography Mary Shelley would have chosen to give the monster for uplift and study today. Currently some 3,500 new titles are published in Britain a year. (However, this figure includes autobiography, ghosted books, and many pictorial show-business biographies which are surely closer to the older forms of hagiography or demonology.) Virtually all bookshops have a Biography section which is larger than any other non-fiction genre, and is still quite separate from History. This seems to emphasise the continuing notion of a popular pantheon, a kind of intimate collective memory of ‘common human kind’, which offers ever-expanding possibilities for serious study.
Yet commercially the genre of biography is still regarded as ephemeral and utilitarian, rather than a permanent art form. It is strongly content-orientated, and it is shelved alphabetically by subject, not by author. Even Boswell is shelved under ‘J’, for Johnson. This seems to imply that most biographies are defined crucially by their subject-matter, and don’t really have a significant authorial status for the reading public. Essentially, biographies are understood to write themselves, self-generated (like methane clouds) by their dead subjects. This popular misconception still affects much contemporary newspaper reviewing of new biography, which tends to consist of a lively critical précis of the whole life, with perhaps one brief mention of the actual author of the book, tucked away somewhere in the penultimate paragraph.
Yet, if biography is to provide a genuine academic course, it must surely concern itself primarily with the outstanding biographers, as literary artists, and their place in the changing history of the form. This would imply an agreed canon of classic works, and of classic biographical authors, as it does in the novel. But has such a canon ever been put forward or generally accepted? Does biography have a widely acknowledged Great Tradition, in the same way that the novel does?
There has been a considerable growth in modern biographical theory, especially since Leon Edel’s Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984). But surprisingly little has been written about the specific question of a canon, between Harold Nicolson’s The Development of English Biography of 1927 and Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography of 1999. Indeed, Backscheider concludes that the need to establish and teach a canon is a paramount requirement for the future evolution of the genre as a whole: ‘If biography is to come closer to reaching its potential either as an art or a cultural force, then readers must demand art, collect the books, think in terms of canons and schools, and biographers must have the daring to accept the calling.’
But what about the daring to propose a canon? Leaving aside classical and Renaissance precursors, and concentrating on the early modern English tradition only, there are perhaps fewer than half a dozen names which would immediately spring to mind. These might be Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Johnson, Mrs Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë, and Strachey’s Eminent Victorians – though technical objections can be made to all of them as ‘impure’ biography. Johnson, it could be argued, was writing critical essays; Boswell a dramatised memoir; Mrs Gaskell a romantic novel; and Strachey a social satire.
However, let me propose for argument’s sake a possible canon of twenty-seven classic English works written between 1670 and 1970, which might form the basis for postgraduate study. I give abbreviated working titles, though the full original versions are often revealing, as when Godwin omits to mention his wife’s name but describes her only as ‘the Author’ of her most controversial book.
Izaak Walton, Lives of John Donne and George Herbert (1640, revised 1670)
John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1670–88, first published selection 1813)
John Dryden, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (translations edited 1683–86)
Daniel Defoe, The History of John Sheppard (attributed, 1724)
Samuel Johnson, The Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744)
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791)
William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)
Robert Southey, Life of Nelson (1813)
William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (pen portraits, 1825)
Thomas Moore, Life and Letters of Lord Byron (1830)
John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837–38)
Thomas Carlyle, Life of John Sterling (1851)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
G.H. Lewes, Life of Goethe (1855, revised 1863)
Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1863)
John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74)
David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1855, revised 1880)
J.A. Froude, Life of Thomas Carlyle (1882–84)
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)
Geoffrey Scott, Portrait of Zélide (1925)
A.J.A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo (1934)
Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (1950)
Leon Edel, Henry James (1953–72)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959, revised 1982)
George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (1959, 1965)
Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (1967–68, revised 1994)
All these books could be justified on grounds of literary quality, the historic pictures they achieve of their subjects, and their significance within the development of the form. Yet one is immediately aware of several objections to their place in a canon for study. First, there is the simple problem of length, upon which Virginia Woolf expatiated with such eloquent irony in Orlando (1928): ‘documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads’.
This is particularly evident in the nineteenth-century convention of inflating a chronological narrative with enormous excerpts from original letters and diaries, which