General Preface and Life of Dr John North (review)

Abstract

Reviews Roger North, General Preface and Life of Dr John North, edited by Peter Millard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Pp. χ + 214. The publication of this edition of Roger North's "General Preface" and his "Life of Dr. John North" is an important event for students of biography and of eighteenth century literature. It contains the first complete edition of North's pioneering "General Preface" and a newly edited version of "Life of Dr. John North." Both works represent valuable additions to our understanding of North's role as one of the most important early biographers in English. North's "General Preface" had never been published at all until James Clifford printed excerpts in Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1560-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 27-37. Clifford's selections stressed those ideas which seemed to anticipate Boswell and Johnson. And indeed North's anticipation of them is remarkable, for he particularly stressed the value of detailed lives of ordinary people; he rejected the notion that "low" details would lack interest or value for readers, or that only persons of great public importance should become the subjects of biography. He also insisted on the importance of the biographer's knowing his subject personally and on a rigid adherence to truth. All of these points may also be found in Johnson's Rambler, No. 60. As revealing as they were, Clifford's selections represent only about 25% of the whole, and there are bountiful rewards in having the complete version. However, because North was a digressive stylist, unable to resist an attractive "excursion" from the topic, the full text does not always represent new material on biography. Sometimes , one finds additional statements which merely reinforce, though in striking ways, the ideas familiar from Clifford's version. For example, we find North further explaining his notions of truth in biography; he knows that truth, if deprived of the proper context, can appear to be mere "romance" "and that pieces or scraps of truth are not in strictness truth, but rather enigmas." Thus North, a successful lawyer, concludes that, "if in biography one would not mislead folks into extravagancies, it is required that the truth be unfolded just as in a legal testimony, whole, sole, and nothing else" (p. 70). REVIEWS 177 Other passages not in Clifford are valuable for providing examples of North's satiric wit, which was often directed at his own time. His witty thrusts are important to understanding North as a biographer, for his impulse to write the lives of his brothers stems partly from his indignation at the treatment they received from their contemporaries. His writings are designed to redress the balance. And North, a staunch Tory, was frequently outraged during the Whig triumph of the early 18th century . He sardonically argues that "antique histories" are irrelevant as guides to modern morals because of changes in manners: "to give one instance, public spirit was the glory of the ancient grandees or heroes; now that is the character of a fool" (p. 63). Some of the most interesting of the "new" passages in the "General Preface" show North's attempts to place his new sort of biography—of private men, with attention to their everyday deeds and their domestic qualities—into the moral and artistic contexts of his age. A stern moralist, North naturally considered the moral effect of the "private " biographies he was advocating upon their readers, and this process led him to make a number of suggestive comparisons. He sees the effect of biography as similar to the educational events of travel, "in which method all the good that is gathered is historical," but unlike travel, biographies avoid the evils of "vicious company"—those "scoundrels and hang-bys that are leaguer [in seige] in every place, like spiders watching to seize upon raw gentlemen who come near their web" (p. 57). Unlike them, North maintains, "Books are always friendly, because they are not calculated to anyone 's particular humour, to meet with his foible, as rascally company, with their flatteries and treacherous insinuations" (pp. 57-59). North seeks to establish the value of biography by associating it with this ancient and popular...