Posterity in books is fickle. For the odd and unpredictable afterlives of some English classics, consider the case of John Aubrey. This gossipy gentleman-scholar, antiquarian and pioneer biographer died in 1697, after a life brushed by the wings of history. At the time of his death, his chances of being remembered must have seemed vanishingly slim. The only title published in his lifetime Miscellanies: A Collection of Hermetick Philosophy (1696) was deemed “mad”. Slowly, however, his numerous manuscripts were rediscovered, although a really substantial portion of Brief Lives did not appear in print until 1813. Finally, two centuries after Aubrey’s death, in 1898, a Church of England rector and scholar, the Rev Andrew Clark, edited a transcript of Brief Lives in a bowdlerised edition that finally established Aubrey’s name in the English canon.
Thereafter, in the 20th century, his reputation took off. Anthony Powell published John Aubrey and His Friends in 1948. A year later, Oliver Lawson Dick published the first complete scholarly edition, which alphabetised the Lives and modernised the text. Paradoxically, this updating helped revive Aubrey’s reputation once and for all, and eventually inspired Patrick Garland’s one-man play, eventually performed by Roy Dotrice, a show that ran for 40 years on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2015, Kate Bennett published a new and complete scholarly edition (Brief Lives With an Apparatus for the Lives of Our English Mathematical Writers) with OUP; in the same year, Ruth Scurr’s brilliantly imaginative John Aubrey, My Own Life came out in celebration of a national treasure – an ingenious literary man, and a writer of originality, wit and wisdom who had constructed “a paper museum” of timeless fascination.
Aubrey was a quintessentially English figure, a brilliant amateur, an inveterate gossip, a devoted antiquarian and passionate snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. “I was inclined by my genius from childhood to the love of antiquities,” he writes, “and my Fate dropt me in a countrey most suitable for such enquiries.” Aubrey delighted to collect books, manuscripts and paintings, to make notes on nature and architecture, and to jot down inscriptions, stories and anecdotes. Part of this impulse may have come as his response to some turbulent times. Aubrey’s life (1626-1697) coincided with a century of exceptional domestic instability. He was 22 when Charles I was executed, in his mid-30s at the Restoration, and an old man during the Glorious Revolution that brought William and Mary to the throne.
Brief Lives began as a collaboration with the Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood. When Aubrey was asked to write the life of the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes, he became inspired to follow the classical example of, for example, Plutarch, and compiled a list of some 55 lives, mainly drawn from contemporary English society.
Aubrey’s Brief Lives are mostly pen portraits of distinguished 17th-century Englishmen: writers (Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Andrew Marvell, John Milton), scientists (William Harvey, Robert Boyle), mathematicians (Henry Briggs, Edmund Gunter), doctors (Thomas Vaughan), theologians (John Hales), astrologers (John Dee), soldiers (Charles Danvers, Robert Moray, Thomas Morgan), sailors (Sir Kenelm Digby), lawyers (John Hoskins, Edward Coke), philosophers (Robert Hooke), Church of England divines (Thomas Goffe, William Holder) and many others.
In several instances, Aubrey’s research became an integral part of his subject’s subsequent biographical profile. Among the many details he reported of Milton’s life, it was Dryden’s recollections that have stuck:
“Temperate man, rarely drank between meales. Extreme pleasant in his conversation, and at dinner, supper, etc.; but Satyricall. (He pronounced the letter R [littera canina] very hard – a certaine signe of a Satyricall Witt.”
Aubrey’s highly entertaining brief life of Sir Walter Raleigh has been widely anthologised:
“He loved a wench well; and one time getting up one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood (’twas his first lady) who seemed at first boarding to be something fearful of her Honour, and modest, she cryed, Sweet Sir Walter, what do you me ask ? Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cryed in the extasey, Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter. She proved with child, and I doubt not but this Hero took care of them both, as also that the Product was more than an ordinary mortal.”
Aubrey’s treatment of women is typical of his age, as was his attitude to outsiders. Brief Lives has almost no foreigners (Colbert, Descartes and Erasmus) and very few independent women. This comes from his brief life of Mary, the countess of Pembroke, sister of the great Sir Philip Sydney:
“She was very Salacious, and she had a Contrivance that in the Spring of the yeare, when the Stallions were to leape their Mares, they were to be brought before such a part of the house, where she had a vidette [a hole to peep out at] to looke on them and please herselfe with their Sport; and then she would act the like sport herselfe with her stallions. One of her great Gallants was Crook-back’t Cecill, Earl of Salisbury.”
Nevertheless, according to Ruth Scurr, Aubrey was “proud of the fact that he did not ‘disdain to learn from ignorant old women’. When seeking information to pass on to the future about eminent men, it was often women’s voices and experience he recorded.”
Aubrey, a self-effacing, modest man, was a brilliant oral historian, who treasured the minutiae of everyday life and took care to exclude himself from his biographical research. Scurr says, “he knew he was inventing the modern genre of biography”, and his obsession with what he took to be the truth makes him a very modern figure. He said he was after “the naked and plaine trueth, which is here exposed so bare, that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many passages that would raise a blush in a young virgin’s cheeke”. He was sometimes criticised for being “too minute” (trivial), but Aubrey’s answer was that “a hundred yeare hence that minutenesse will be gratefull.” He was a man who trusted in posterity – and thus posterity rewards him.
A Signature Sentence
“[Shakespeare’s] father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his Father’s trade, but when he killed a Calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a Speech.”
Three to Compare
Patrick Garland: Brief Lives by John Aubrey: A Play in Two Acts for One Player (1967)
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