English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Account. By ALLAN PRITCHARD.

Abstract

In his English Biography in the Seventeenth Century , Allan Pritchard offers an overview of this neglected subject in an accessible style. He begins with a chapter on ‘The Growth of Biographical Writing’; proceeding to chapters on lives of ‘Protestant Saints’ , on ‘Patterns in Religious Biography’ and on Izaak Walton's Lives , to lives of ‘public figures’ such as Thomas Ball's The Life of the Renowned Doctor Preston. He goes on to examine ‘Lives of Writers: Scientists and Antiquaries’, then lives of poets, then Thomas Fuller's Worthies of England and Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses , before turning to Aubrey's Brief Lives , and concluding with ‘Biography as Family History’ and Roger North's Lives of members of the North family. This division of the subject is well thought through. But its immense range proves a weakness. The essential problem is that to achieve what Pritchard sets himself requires a deep understanding of the multiple contexts and circumstances of a vast range of different writings, as well as their relation to the facts of the lives of their historical subjects, combined with a power to select and illustrate which derives from that understanding. Pritchard has clearly not researched any area of his subject to the required level. There are promising lines of enquiry—he offers evidence of Aubrey's influence on the intimate form of biography produced by the virtuoso Roger North, e.g.—but they are disappointingly under-argued. It is proclaimed on the dust-jacket that the book fills a ‘scholarly void’: for, as Pritchard argues in the Preface, ‘little has been done to follow up’ Donald Stauffer's English Biography Before 1700 (1930) (p. 3). Sadly, what Pritchard offers is not ‘scholarly’, but a belles-lettriste survey, full of errors of fact and careless readings, which has the appearance of a work written quite some time ago that has not been re-cast or re-thought. He cites no articles in the bibliography; and seems quite unaware of much recent work in this area (such as the Clarendon Bacon), still less of related movements in critical and scholarly thinking. Thus all he has to say of Jessica Martin's Walton ' s Lives (2001), which he mentions only in a brief footnote, is that it ‘provides approaches and views different from my own’, with which he is not prepared to engage (p. 243). As ‘evidence’ of this ‘neglect’, he points to ‘the lack of good editions of seventeenth-century biographies’ and maintains that ‘no editor has thus far attempted to deal with’ the complex textual history of Walton's Lives (p. 4). This is untrue, and unfair to the successive editors of the Clarendon Walton, whose strenuous editorial labours deserve, at the very least, the status of ‘attempts’; and he has missed an article or two in which I describe work in progress on the Clarendon edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives .