Victorian Biography: A Collection of Essays from the Period (review)

Abstract

366 biography Vol. 10, No. 4 the self-denigrating and wry caution psychoanalysts, and one might add now psychohistorians , give themselves: "Do not generalize from one case," they will say, "generalize from two." Steven Weiland University of Minnesota NOTES 1. Richard Ellmann, "Freud and Literary Autobiography." The American Scholar 54 (1985), 465-79. Peter Loewenberg's "Psychohistory: An Overview of the Field" includes extensive citations for the debate between historians and psychoanalysts (Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach [New York: Knopf, 1984]). In a recent essay, political scientist Michael Shapiro asks this question in the context of a discussion of psychobiography: "Why, one might ask, are some lives described and others not, and why are the descriptions cast in psychological versus political or other modes of writing? What do the representational or discursive practises of various historical periods tell us about what is regarded as important, authoritative and legitimate?" ("Reading Biography ," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16 [1986], 331-65.) 2. A. L. Louch, Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 223-4. 3. Thomas Kohut, "Psychohistory as History," American Historical Review 91 (1986), 336-54. Ira Bruce Nadel, ed., Victorian Biography: A Collection of Essays from the Period. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986. Unpaged. $40.00. The Victorian muse was elegant, erudite and, above all, literate. These complete essays by some of the great names in nineteenth and early twentieth-century criticism and biography are gracious, leisurely and highly intelligent. This gathering of primary material on biography from 1832 to 1911 introduces us to many of the issues seen by the Victorians as central to the genre. Without exception, these writers see the biographer's task as the depiction of a single individual's life: the essence of character, in Leslie Stephen's phrase. It should be portrayed openly and honestly, they argue, yet with sympathy. And in an age when biographies often ran to more than one volume, Sidney Lee (Leslie Stephen's assistant and then successor at the DNB) sees "discriminating brevity" as essential to proper method. In this, Lee typifies the move during the nineteenth century towards briefer biographies, more critical and selective. Most of the critics, from Thomas Carlyle (1832, 1838) to Edmund Gosse (1901), agree on the importance of letters. Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and founding editor of the DNB, considers that "while letters become less important as records of events, they preserve their full significance as revelations of character; and that is what the biographer chiefly requires." Edmund Purcell quotes with approval Cardinal Newman's judgment (itself contained in a letter) that "the true life of a man is in his letters" and that "contemporary letters are facts." Charles Whibley, more prudent, adds a cautionary note. In "The Limits of Biography" (1897), he finds the authority of letters to be suspect; removed from their original context, they too easily become "the easiest instrument of falsehood and distortion." REVIEWS 367 As the editor notes in a brief but solid introduction, Stephen was instrumental in shaping the course of nineteenth-century biography and its transition to the twentieth. His 1893 essay "Biography" defends the place of biographical dictionaries despite their limitations of space. A skillful writer can make facts imply far more than they state: "To write a life is to collect the particular heap of rubbish in which his material is contained, to sift the relevant from the superincumbent mass, and then try to smelt it and cast it into its natural mold. . . . The most interesting problem—that of the development of the human character—is generally the most inscrutable." Many of the writers urge candour rather than the suppression of damaging or sensitive information. However all are very aware of the position of trust and responsibility held by the biographer. Publisher George Bentley and novelists Margaret Oliphant and Mrs. Humphrey Ward discuss the issue. In "Sincerity in Biography" (1881), Bentley urges that Carlyle's gold "must need have some alloy," some qualifying colour to tone down an idolatrous portrait. Wilfrid Ward outlines the difference between balanced portraiture and the exaggeration of caricature. Flaws should be included, but proportion is all. Mrs. Oliphant ("The Ethics...