Abstract
Dr Johnson was famously a lover of biography. Yet in 1773 Boswell noted, ‘He did not think that the life of any literary man in England had been well written’ (Boswell, Life, v. 240). The first half of this book looks at what literary biographies Johnson was likely to be thinking of, and asks why he might have been critical of this branch of the genre. It also considers the place accorded in such writing to melancholy — the name frequently given to the most profound suffering. The first chapter explores the emergence of literary biography in the seventeenth century, arguing that the label of melancholy is nearly always a pejorative one, and that it is only religious melancholics who are accorded respect. This will increasingly come to seem ironic, when both medical and theological discourse seek to discard the term ‘religious melancholy’ from the later eighteenth century onwards.
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Notes
Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Vice and Virtue (Oxford, 1999), 15. Extracts from Plutarch’s Lives are taken from this edition and cited as Duff, Plutarch. The translation is Duff’s own.
See Richard Wendorf, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford, 1990), ch. 2.
There are exceptions. Michael Werth Gelber, in The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester, 1999), defends it against earlier criticism of its being ‘rapidly executed hack-work’ by demonstrating Dryden’s scholarship (see 202). More recently, Steven N. Zwicker, in his wide-ranging essay, ‘Considering the Ancients: Dryden and the Uses of Biography’, in Writing Lives (105–24), covers Dryden’s complete biographical writing: not just Plutarch, but Polybius, Lucian, St Evremond, Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Persius and Virgil. He comments on ‘Dryden’s own sophisticated sense of biographical argument’ in the context of a wider argument about Dryden’s use of biography ‘as mirror and perspective-glass to arrange ancient lives according to his own interests’, rather than merely as polemic (116–17).
See Jessica Martin, Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemorations and the Rise of Biography (Oxford, 2001), ch. 2, ‘Reading Plutarch, Writing Lives’.
See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991), who talks of the assumption at the time of writing of the existence of ‘a benevolent religion known usually as “moderate Anglicanism”’ (221), arguing that in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, ‘Calvinism was the doctrinal orthodoxy of the English Church’ (219).
Julia Griffen (ed.), Selected Poems of Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller and John Oldham (Harmondsworth, 1998), 32–6.
See William Johnson, Rochester, A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Rochester, 2004), 82.
A. H. Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muses’ Hannibal (London, 1931).
Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726 (Oxford, 2008), 104.
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© 2013 Jane Darcy
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Darcy, J. (2013). Early Literary Biographies: Walton’s Donne to Sprat’s Cowley. In: Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271099_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271099_2
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