Biography and Domestic Life

Abstract

For Johnson, biography should reveal the ‘domestick privacies’ of the great man. This chapter proposes that a helpful way to understand biography, as it developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is as an ideologically driven representation and publication of domestic life. It looks at the work of Johnson and Boswell in conjunction with collective female biographies, by Mary Hays and others, in the context of the development of a middle‐class domestic ideology. Boswell's Life of Johnson was received as gossip – a discourse that transgressed boundaries of class and gender by moving disconcertingly between public and private life. Collective female biography presented a more overtly ideological vision of domestic life. The chapter concludes by looking at how the expansion of publishing from the,1780s, and the market success of biography, contributed to a shift in thinking about what it meant to be ‘published’ as a biographical subject.