whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated by others.
Roger North, that subtle seventeenth-century memoir writer (not to be confused with Plutarch’s Tudor translator, Thomas North), crisply summarised the argument as follows: ‘What signifies it to us, how many battles Alexander fought. It were more to the purpose to say how often he was drunk.’ Plutarch’s chilling description of Alexander’s drunken rages, or equally of his post-battle gallantry and good humour, fully bears out this claim to peer behind the mask of public behaviour and events, into an individual ‘soul’. Who can forget the wonderfully funny and unexpected description of Alexander (after the bloody defeat of his great Persian enemy) sardonically examining the luxury fittings of Darius’s bathroom, with its ornate and ridiculous ‘waterpots, pans and ointment boxes, all of gold curiously wrought’. And then how Plutarch clinches the scene, with Alexander’s stinging jest: ‘So this, it seems, is royalty!’
John Dryden, while preparing his edition of Plutarch (1683), defined the genre similarly as ‘Biographia, or the histories of Particular Lives’. But he chose to emphasise even further its unique quality of human intimacy:
There [in works of history] you are conducted only into the Rooms of State; but here you are led into the private lodgings of the hero: you see him in his undress, and are made familiar with his most private actions and conversations. You may behold a Scipio and a Lelius gathering cockle-shells on the shore, Augustus playing at bounding-stones with boys, and Agesilaus riding on a hobby-horse among his children. The pageantry of life is taken away; you see the poor reasonable animal, as naked as ever Nature made him; are made acquainted with his passions and his follies, and find the demy-God a man.
This touching vision of ‘the poor reasonable animal’, shorn not only of divine but even of heroic status, ushered in the first great age of English biography. Intimacy is subversive of grandeur and ceremonial, though not necessarily of greatness, or indeed goodness. This notion of a popular, even a subversive discipline, which celebrates and studies a common human nature (shared by criminals as well as kings), would seem to me crucial. It is central to the claim that the English form has become progressively greater than hagiography, formal obituary, modish gossip, or historical propaganda. It suggests a profound humanist ambition, which could indeed provide the basis for true study.
Samuel Johnson gave this theoretical weight and intense personal conviction in his remarkable Rambler No. 60, ‘On Biography’ (1750). Here, arguably, is the first deliberate statement of a biographical poetics:
No species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition … I have often thought that there has rarely passed a Life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For, not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such an uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill, but is common to human kind … We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.
It is no coincidence that, in practice, the first short eighteenth-century masterpieces of English biography were about marginal and disreputable figures, not kings or kaisers. These were Daniel Defoe’s biographical study of the housebreaker and incorrigible escape-artist Jack Sheppard (1724), and Johnson’s own brilliant Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744), an account of the indigent poet and convicted murderer. Both works turn conventional moral judgements – and traditional social hierarchies – upside down, by insisting on the value and interest of common humanity, the universal ‘possibilities of good or ill’, wherever they are to be found. Johnson wrote: ‘Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumber’d away their time on the down of plenty, nor will a wise man presume to say, “Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage.”’
Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) gave this notion of common humanity the proportions of an epic – Johnson as Everyman. And the powerful idea of the marginal figure who is still representative of ‘human kind’ (in this case specifically ‘woman kind’) recurs in William Godwin’s strikingly dramatic and candid life of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798).
By the early nineteenth century, the cultural significance of biography’s 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,
