History of Biography - Carole Angier
[alert-success] Biography - Life Writings - I MA - Unit I
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The history of biography which orders the facts and traces are called, according to Henry James, ‘the pattern in the carpet’. This pattern was first picked out by Harold Nicolson in 1927, in The Development of English Biography which has shaped accounts of biography ever since. The two recent history of biography: Biography: A Brief History (2007) written by Nigel Hamilton and Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009) by Hermione Lee’s has the same overall shape as Nicolson’s.
Beginnings
The oldest biographical stories are well-known historical stories of societies and religions, such as the Old Testament and Ancient Greece, as well as the lives of Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, Romulus and Remus, Beowulf, and Cuchulainn. The Epic of Gilgamesh, is considered to be the oldest of all, chronicles the tragic reign of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in Assyria around 2600 BCE.
However, the origins of biography can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. There are biographies of Socrates and Aristotle. Theophrastus, wrote an important set of portraits called Characters. Roman historian Tacitus authored a biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, and Suetonius, his contemporary, composed the first literary biographies: The Lives of the Caesars and De viris Illustribus, Of Famous Men.
But the most important early biographer was Plutarch, who lived from 46 to 120 AD. Plutarch was the pioneer in distinguishing biography from history, stating in his Life of Alexander, "It is not Histories I am writing, but Lives". Since its 1579 English translation, His Lives had a profound impact not only on English biography but also on English literature.
Shakespeare derived inspiration for all of his Roman plays from Plutarch's Lives. For the Renaissance and the contemporary world, Plutarch is the primary source of Greco-Roman standards of conduct: temperance, public service, and bravery. His objective is to depict the ideal Roman citizen, not specific individuals, for the purpose of enlightening readers and instructing their leaders.
Plutarch's Lives are frequently referred to as the Parallel Lives due to their construction based on the principle of comparison and contrast. Their objective is to analyze public accomplishments, and their rationale is to commemorate successes rather than comprehend failures. Plutarch's Lives provide an ode to the encomium, which refers to the eulogizing funerary oration or speech or writing of praise. Plutarch is thus the father of a the biographical lineage.
Middle Ages
With the fall of the Roman Empire comes the end of the first Golden Age of biography. Certain mythological precursors, including Beowulf from the eighth century and the Norse Eddas, are discovered during this long period. The main ancestral genre, however, was hagiography, or the biographies of saints. Certain works, including Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert from the eighth century, stand out.
The most interesting of all is the tenth-century Lives of the Saints by Aelfric. These narratives were initially composed in the vernacular as opposed to Latin; a significant number of them depicted common individuals; and in every case, they were dramatic and well-constructed. Nonetheless, from start to finish, hagiography was firmly in the idealizing mode.
From about the ninth to the twelfth century is also the period of chronicles and annals – that is, accounts of secular rulers instead of saints, the most famous of which are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, initiated by King Alfred in the ninth century. There are also some good individual lives: Eadmer’s Life of Anselm in the twelfth century.
But then, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries we are in the biographical Slough of Despond. There were popular collections of saints’ lives, such as the fourteenth century Legenda aurea, the source for Piero della Francesca’s famous frescoes (wall painting) in Arezzo. However, the genre failed to progress, and it declined after the fifteenth century.
The Renaissance
The revival of biography originated in Italy in 1550 with the publication of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. There are approximately 166 brief biographies in total, ranging from sketches to full-length portraits, culminating in Michelangelo, who gets one hundred and twenty pages.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists adheres closely to the Plutarchian tradition of public accomplishments and types. It is devoid of personal information and focuses on imparting lessons to the reader. Vasari established an analytic tradition that has persisted since the nineteenth century.
The late 1500s in Britain established the groundwork for biography as a prominent literary genre. 1577 saw the publication of Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, an Anglo-Saxon Chronicles descendant. Theophrastus' Greek works were translated to Latin in the 1590s. English translations of other seminal classical texts followed in the 1580s and beyond: Plutarch in 1579, Tacitus' Agricola in 1591, and Suetonius in 1606.
By the end of the sixteenth century, Saints and monarchs did not receive English biographies until Sir Thomas More by William Roper and Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish. Prior to these, in 1517, was More's Life of Richard III, which was influential despite its dubious reliability. Shakespeare incorporated the name Wolsey into Henry VII, and in 2009, Hilary Mantel applied it to her Booker-winning novel Wolf Hall, characterizing it as "startlingly modern."
The Seventeenth Century
Modern biography begins to take its initial form in Seventeenth Century. The first fifty or sixty years of the
seventeenth century, biography was dominated by featureless panegyric as in Fulke
Greville’s Life of Sir Philip Sidney, (1652); or in Thomas Sprat’s Cowley (1668). The becalming of biography is due to Puritanism
and the Civil War. Puritanism harms the art of biography,
because they discourage the love of this world.
The major biographical works of this period are: Izaak Walton’s
The lives of Dr. John Donne (1640), Sir Henry
Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson.
Izaak Walton is generally recognized to be a bridge between
classical ‘ethical’ biography and modern biography.
The
Golden Age of autobiographies and diaries began with the end of Puritan rule in 1660, Evelyn and Pepys Diaries, Margaret
Cavendish’s life of her
husband, the Duke of Newcastle (1667) are some of the important biographies.
John Aubrey is considered to be the first
modern biographer. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, collected for a biographical
dictionary between 1669 and 1696, are famously indiscreet, anecdotal and
personal. They are wholly secular, about
the poets, scholars, statesmen and scientists of his age, and they include
among their more than five hundred
original portraits a good half dozen of women. The Brief Lives are full of original research, or at any rate of quirky
first-hand information. The novelist Anthony Powell, call
him ‘the first English biographer’.
The Early Eighteenth Century
In the early eighteenth
century there was an explosion of interest in the lives of outcasts and criminals: Captain Alexander Smith’s History
of the Lives of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Footpads, etc., published in
1714.
This happened equally in the early novels of this period like Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722).
There were also the biographical studies
of the house-breaker Jack Sheppard (1724) and the corrupt
thief-catcher Jonathan
Wild (1725). There was also a flourishing of the new ‘Grub Street’
school of journalism, with hundreds
of True Histories produced by such as Edmund Curll. All
this, however, is relatively minor.
The only major biographical achievement of
the early eighteenth century is generally agreed to be
Roger North’s
Lives of his three eminent brothers, written between 1715 and the 1730s and published in the 1740s. In
the Preface to Lord Keeper North, Roger
North provided the first British reflections on biography after Dryden. Roger North emphasized the importance
of private life, which reveals more about character than public
performance; and he added ideas about the interest
of ordinary lives.
The eighteenth century: the arrival of modern biography
In Europe, the great surges of democratizing, empiricizing, and secularizing ideas have swept over one another, and the age of modern biography has arrived. Our first sighting comes in 1744, with the publication of Johnson’s
Life of Savage, the first great
literary biography in English. It is
about Richard Savage who is a Son of Earl Rivers,
bastard and outcast, poet and murderer.
The Life of Savage
is a great work of literature which dramatizes
the gap between biography, history and art.
Modern biography begins, Richard Holmes
says, on 16 May 1791, with the publication of
Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Boswell outlined his strategy in Life of Johnson to allow Johnson to speak for himself whenever possible, through his letters. These conversational records span over a twenty-year period to present Johnson in all his great but fallible humanity. The
Life of Johnson is a prodigious work. It is the most famous biography of all time, and
yet it is inimitable.
The
late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century was the Romantic age,
and not surprisingly the age of
autobiography, with bold self-revelations
such as De
Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (1822), Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823) and Harriette
Wilson’s Memoirs (1825). It has also produced some excellent biographies: William Godwin’s
memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), and John Gibson
Lockhart’s Life of Scott (1837–38).
Victorian Blight
Victorian era has dominated ideas of English character which is also reflected in biography of its time. From about 1840 up to
the First World War – from Dean
Stanley’s Life of Thomas Arnold
(1844) through Samuel Smiles’ Self Help (1859) to Morley’s Gladstone (1903), we are firmly back
in the Plutarchian tradition of didactic, exemplary lives.
Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857), or J.A. Froude’s Life of Carlyle (1882–84), which was reviled at the time but is prized as the greatest Victorian
biography now. Hagiography of Trevelyan’s Life of Grey, appeared
in 1937. The Victorian era was characterized by an abundance of high-mindedness, which consequently led to hypocrisy in English biography.
The Early Twentieth Century
Then
came the period of decadence, a time of low
moral values. In December 1910 Virginia
Woolf famously said, ‘human character changed’. In biography at least it was more or less true.
In 1907 English biography changed, with Edmund Gosse’s Father
and Son. Father
and Son has all the hallmarks of
modern biography with its focus on private life, featuring the drama and artistry of a novel, and being candid about failure and weakness. It portraits a small and eccentric family of Plymouth Brethren who endorse the belief that the Holy Bible is the true Word of God.
After
Father and Son came the turning point
of the twentieth century in Europe: the First World War. Theis period was ripe for revolution;
and biography got it, in the shape of Lytton
Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.
After
Aubrey in the seventeenth century, and Johnson and Boswell in the eighteenth, Strachey is the next great father of modern
biography. He stands especially for four key modern features: candour (honest); irony and satire;
borrowing the techniques of fiction and Freudian psychology; and beauty of
language and design, ie, literary art.
Strachey is known for his innovative and
bold approach to writing biographies. He expanded the biographical method, by delving into the personal
lives and psychological motivations of the individuals he wrote about. This
approach was quite different from
traditional biographies that focused more on factual accounts of events.
One distinctive aspect of Strachey's method was his
reliance on published sources.
Between the wars
After
Strachey there was a great flowering of
experimental biography: For example, Geoffrey Scott’s Portrait of Zelide (1925), Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando (1928) and A.J.A. Symons’ The
Quest for Corvo (1934) in Britain, and the biographies of Catherine
Drinker Bowen in America. All these are the ancestors of the post-modern
biography of our day which is self-conscious and experimental. The great modernist artists – Joyce, Eliot
and the rest – have long been part of the most conservative canon; but Strachey
and his heirs are still outlaws, and the battle for ‘experimental’ biography
has to be fought anew in every generation.
The post-war period
The Stracheyan experiment
was ended by the Second World War. By then Freudian psychology had entered the
general culture. Biography
became ‘warts-and-all’ (not attractive) celebrating the entirety of human
experience, including flaws and imperfections. This departure from the
Victorian ideal of flawless heroes contributed to a more realistic and
relatable portrayal of historical figures.
The
1950s marked another significant peak in
English biography. During this period, biographers produced notable works that combined psychological
insight, artistic vision, detailed scholarship (study), and often considerable
length. Leon Edel’s Henry James (1953–72), Richard Ellmann’s
James Joyce (1959) and George Painter’s Marcel Proust (1959– 65) retained Strachey’s psychological insight and artistic
vision, but expanded his scholarship (detail studies) – and, it must be said, his length.
From
that mid-century high point, there has been no decline. In 1967
the most important British biographer of
the second half of the century arrived: Michael Holroyd, His notable
works include biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, Bernard Shaw, and
a trio of Edwardian theatrical personalities.
Holroyd’s
biographies are in the Ellmann tradition
– both artistic and scholarly, both lively and long. Holroyd is the last father
of modern biography so far.
The question is, What now? Will there
be a new Boswell or a new Strachey? Will someone make the biography still
longer and more protean, or give it another short sharp shock – or both, or
neither? For the answer that a change is coming – or has already arrived – I
refer you to Part Two: to the literary editor and critic Boyd Tonkin, to
Richard Holmes and Alexander Masters, both of whom have experimented
brilliantly themselves. In the biography’s house, there are many mansions. As long as there are books,
there will be room for us all.
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