John Aubrey’s Brief Lives: the edition we have been waiting for

Abstract

Brief Lives is undoubtedly John Aubrey's most significant work. It is for this that he has become widely known in modern times - and deservedly so, since through it we gain an insight into his era that is quite simply unparalleled. Indeed, work is without compare not only in Aubrey's own period in any other, and it has been acclaimed accordingly. As novelist, Anthony Powell, whose John Aubrey and His Friends (1948) remains definitive biography of Aubrey, put it:To question, What are English like? worse answers might be given than: Read Aubrey's Lives and you will see; for there, loosely woven together, is a kind of tapestry of good and evil; ingenuity and folly; integrity and hypocrisy; eccentricity, melancholy, and greatness of English race.1In view of another commentator, Lytton Strachey:A biography should either be as long as Boswell 's or as short as Aubrey 's. The method of enormous and elaborate accretion which produced Life of Johnson is excellent, no doubt; but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have pure essentials - a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations, transitions, commentaries, or padding. This is what Aubrey gives us.2Such adulation of Brief Lives does not mean, of course, that Aubrey lacks significance in other respects, not least as a pioneer of modern archaeology, as has been argued perhaps most forcibly by Alain Schnapp.3 Aubrey's Monumenta Britannica was first English book that can be described as archaeological in a modern sense, bringing together unwritten, tangible relics of past so that they acquired a significance in their own right as subject of comparative study, rather than merely forming appendages to narratives based on written sources that preoccupied his antiquarian contemporaries. Aubrey's novel, technologically oriented view of past was a kind of backward extension of his involvement in science in context of early Royal Society, including a heady optimism about potential for intellectual progress, and this aspect of him, too, has attracted attention in recent years.4 was also a pioneer in other fields, not least in study of folklore and in analysis of place-names and other relics of linguistic change, from which he realized that more significant conclusions might be drawn than had previously been realized.5 In addition, he wrote books on various other subjects, including An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen, which is full of shrewd advice based on his own and others' experience; a comedy, The Countrey Revell, which he addressed to dramatist, Thomas Shadwell; and collections on natural history, topography, astrology and architecture. was a true virtuoso.Yet Brief Lives transcends all these other works, which to some extent it encapsulates through range of people and topics that Aubrey thought it appropriate to memorialize. Not only does it reflect wide range of interests seen in his other writings; in addition, details that Aubrey gives of people who appear in it display same vivid, tactile quality that is reflected in his antiquarian writings. described divine, John Tombes, for instance, as but a little man, neat limbed, a little quick searching Eie, sad gray, while of Samuel Butler, author of Hudibras, he wrote: He is of a middle stature, strong sett, high coloured a kind of Sorrell haire. a severe and sound judgement. a good fellowe.6 Brief Lives can also be seen to reflect Aubrey's social role and his relations with his milieu, as Kate Bennett brilliantly illustrates in lengthy introduction to her new edition of work. For one thing, social institutions of Restoration London, and particularly coffee-houses that had proliferated since mid-seventeenth century, provided unprecedented opportunities for social interchange. Aubrey himself was acutely aware of the moderne advantage of Coffee-howses in this great Citie; before which, men knew not how to be acquainted, with their owne Relations, or Societies. …