BIOGRAPHY

Academic Collection

The Burnett Collection

Brunel University has the Burnett Collection of working-class biographies. The core material was collected by John Burnett, David Mayall, and David Vincent for their The Autobiography of The Working Class (1984-9).

Location: Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH

See Also: CLASS Working Class

Website: www.brunel.ac.uk/life/library/Special-Collections/Burnett-Archive-of-Working-Class-Autobiographies

John Aubrey

Thomas Hobbes decided to write his own biography. He asked John Aubrey to assist him. This Aubrey did in 1680. The book was published in 1680 after Hobbes had died and could suffer no repercussions for his views or past actions. By then Aubrey had developed a taste for biographical writing.

Brief Lives was a series of mini-biographies of men and women who had lived during the late Tudor and Stuart eras.

Aubrey assisted Anthony Wood in the creation of Athenae Oxonienses, a biographical collection about writers and bishops who had been educated at the University of Oxford. This included some information that Aubrey had submitted about the 1st Earl of Clarendon having accepted bribes. The peer's son sued Wood. The offending material was burned publicly.

Brief Lives

The actor Roy Dotrice (1923-2017) performed as Judge Shallow in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II when it was staged in 1964 by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of its Wars of The Roses cycle. The director Patrick Garland appreciated the study of decrepitude that the actor brought to the role and cast him as John Aubrey in the Brief Lives (1967) one-man show that he had devised. It opened at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1967 and then transferred to Broadway before going to the West End. Dotrice went on to perform the role 1782 times over 40 years. At the end of the first act Aubrey would fall asleep. There would then be the interval which he slept through. At the start of the second act he would awaken.

Banality

Sylvia Smith (1945-2013) was a secretary who lived in East London. Misadventures (2001) was an artless account of her banal life. Following the book's publication there was speculation about whether or not it might be a sophisticated literary hoax.

The Biographers' Club

The Biographers Club

Website: https://thebiographersclub.com

Fantasy

Goodwin Wharton (1653-1704) wrote a fantastical autobiography that was half a million words long.

Location: Long Acre, WC2E 9LP (orange, white)

Michael Holroyd

The Heinemann editor James Michie (1927-2007) signed Michael Holroyd to write 70,000 words on Lytton Strachey for an advance of 50. The manuscript was to be delivered within a year. Many years later, the two volumes totalled 500,000 words.

A record for publishing a biography had been set when Hamish Hamilton had paid 100,000 for the rights to Richard Ellmann's (1918-1987) life of Oscar Wilde. In 1987 the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein (1926-2012) of A.P. Watt invited publishers to submit sealed bids for Holroyd's biography of Shaw. At Carmen Callil's prompting Chatto & Windus paid 625,000. The deal marked a point at which the British publishing world began to treat non-fiction with a greater degree of respect. Chatto recouped its outlay, selling on the paperback rights to Penguin.

Location: 51 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PN (blue, red)

Dr Samuel Johnson

The novel and the biography were both very much fruits of the same tree. Both literary forms emerged in their modern form in the England during the 1740s. They both were concerned with studying the conduct and motivation of people. The printer Samuel Richardson wrote his novel Pamela in 1740 and the man of letters Samuel Johnson his biography Life of Savage in 1744. Savage was a fellow Grub Street hack. It was technically the most advanced biography to have been written in English up until that time.

Johnson was commissioned to write Lives of The Poets (1779-81) by a group of publishers who issuing an edition of English poetry.

In 1763 the bookseller Thomas Davies introduced Johnson to James Boswell. In the eight years that followed Johnson s death there were eight biographies. Hesther Thrale Piozzi's Anecdotes of The Late Samuel Johnson (1786) Boswell s biography and pioneered a number of techniques that were to be attributed to him, such as reporting conversation and addressing the private life. Boswell and Thrale were rivals. In 1791 his The Life of Samuel Johnson was published. It was the one that has continued to be read. Sir John Hawkins s 1787 one was particularly tedious.

Location: Davies s Bookshop, 8 Russell Street, WC2B 5HZ. (Long gone.) (red, pink)

Website: www.johnsonsocietyoflondon.org

Keeping It In The Family

Richard Beard, Helen MacDonald, and Rebecca Stott wrote intimate studies of close relatives.

T.E. Lawrence

Charlotte Shaw (n e Payne-Townshend) (1857-1943) was intellectually close to T.E. Lawrence. She edited and revised his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Location: 29 Fitzroy Square, W1T 6LQ (orange, pink)

The Memoir Club

The Memoir Club was established in 1920 by Molly McCarthy. Its rules were derived from the Apostles. They required that the material should be absolutely candid. There were a dozen initial members. In 1928 it was reinvigorated by Virginia Woolf's Old Bloomsbury. 125 memoirs were generated.

Obscenity

The 2^nd Earl of Rochester was a Restoration poet-rake. His poems tended to be obscene. Only three of them were published during his lifetime. Graham Green wrote Lord Rochester's Monkey, a biography of him, in the early 1930s. The subject's life had been so scandalous that a publisher only felt able issue the book in 1974.

Laetitia Pilkington

Laetitia van Lewen (d.1750) was born and raised in Ireland. She grew to be 4ft.-tall. At the age of sixteen she married Matthew Pilkington, who was of a similar height. The couple became favourites of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Following the marriage's collapse she settled in St James s, London. She was taken up by the members of White's Club. Following her return to Ireland she wrote her Memoirs, which was published in two volumes. At the time, autobiography was virtually an unknown literary form

Location: White s, 37-38 St James's Street, SW1A IJG (blue, purple)

The Plath Legacy

Olwyn Hughes (1928-2016) was the sister of Ted Hughes. Following his success as a poet, he invited her to act as his agent. She went on to develop a reputation as a tough negotiator and a formidable gatekeeper.

Hughes used her position to involve herself in the writing of Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989). As a result, some regarded the result as being almost a work of dual authorship . Janet Malcolm's book The Silent Woman (1994) was about the Plath legacy. It describes the writing of Bitter Fame.

Location: 3 Chalcot Square, NW1 8YB (blue, yellow)

23 Fitzroy Road, NW1 8TP (blue, red)

Siegfried Sassoon

The arrival of Modernism made Siegfried Sassoon feel outmoded as a poet. He turned to prose and wrote Memoirs of A Foxhunting Man (1928).

Sassoon had a disastrous affair with the aesthete Stephen Tennant. The latter ended the relationship. In 1935 Sasson married Hester Gatty.

Location: 23 Campden Hill Square, W8 7JY

Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey lampooned the reverential style of biography by deflating the reputations of four secular saints in his book Eminent Victorians (1918). He himself was the subject of a major biography.

Location: 51 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PN (blue, red)

A.J.A. Symons

(Alphonse) A.J.A. Symons's (1900-1941) The Quest for Corvo (1934) was also about the research process as the ostensible subject.

Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913)

Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton lived in Chancery Lane from 1627 to 1644. He worshipped at the Church of St Dunstan-in-the-West. The poet John Donne was one of the church's incumbents. The two men became great friends. By 1650 the ironmonger had retired to live at Clerkenwell Green.

Walton s literary output was dominated by biographies. He wrote ones of Donne, George Herbert, Richard Hooker, Bishop Robert Sanderson, and Sir Henry Wotton. The Compleat Angler (1653) was written during the English Republic, a period during which it was safer not to speculate publicly upon the character of the actions of public men. The book was primarily a celebration of rural life; fishing was but a constituent part of it.

In 1670 Isaak Walton wrote the first life of Donne. The poet's father was a Warden of Ironmongers Company in the City of London.

Location: Chancery Lane, WC2A 1PU. The Compleat Angler was published by Richard Marriott, a bookseller who had premises on the ground floor of the (now demolished) The King's Head Tavern in Chancery Lane (the building was demolished in 1799 so that Chancery Lane could be widened). (orange, pink)

Oscar Wilde's Opinion Upon The Form

Biography lends to death a new terror.

David Backhouse 2024