Early Literary Biographies: Walton’s Donne to Sprat’s Cowley

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.