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Biography pp 13–66Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Biography as an Institution

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Abstract

The extremes Lytton Strachey proposes for the length of biography highlight the problem Bernard Shaw expresses which persists throughout the history of the genre: the proper size and scope of life-writing. In the nineteenth century, this issue was especially acute as the Victorian attraction to history, leading to the inclusive life, opposed the plea for an interpretative life indicated by George Eliot in 1852.1 Initially, the analytic life was a minority voice as large, multi-volume biographies dominated Victorian lives. However, a tradition originating in short Latin lives, renewed by antiquaries of the sixteenth century, popularized by Aubrey’s Brief Lives in the seventeenth, dignified by Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in the eighteenth and culminating in works like Strachey’s Portraits in Miniature in the twentieth reasserted the centrality of the brief life. In the nineteenth century, the form reached its apogee in collective lives, biographies in series and biographical dictionaries. Their extraordinary sales and continued influence is a measure of their importance.

A biography should either be as long as Boswell’s or as short as Aubrey’s.

Lytton Strachey, ‘John Aubrey’

It is appalling how small even the most extensive knowledge boils down when it is pithily used.

George Bernard Shaw to Archibald Henderson

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Notes and References

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  25. Leon Edel has developed this idea in ch. 1 of Literary Biography (1957; New York: Anchor Books, 1959).

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  30. David Moldstad, ‘George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Smiles’, Life of George Stephenson’, ELN, 14 (1977) 189–92.

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  32. Samuel Smiles, The Lives of George and Robert Stephenson (1863; London: Folio Society, 1975) ch. XI. This combined life is the most accessible edition. All further references are to this version.

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  35. Samuel Smiles, Selections from the Lives of the Engineers, ed. Thomas Park Hughes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966) pp. 80–2, 302. I have used this edition for its accessibility, useful introduction and bibliography. All further references are to this edition.

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  45. John Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopedists (London: Chapman & Hall, 1878) I, 18.

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  46. Morley, ‘Byron’, Critical Miscellanies (London: Chapman & Hall, 1871) pp. 255–6. In his essay ‘The Man of Letters as Hero’, Morley asks whether a biography can ‘effectually and truly reveal the inward history, which is, after all, the real tissue of the man’s being’.

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  47. Nineteenth Century Essays, ed. Peter Stansky (University of Chicago Press, 1970) p. 61.

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  48. See John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) pp. 121–4;

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  52. Morley, Voltaire (1872; London: Macmillan) pp. 301–2; ‘A New Calendar of Great Men’, Nineteenth Century, no. 180 (Feb 1892) p. 390. Morley explained, for example, that ‘Little books are often laughed at as a sort of tinned intellectual meats; but many have no doubt found how extremely difficult it is to write them well. To tell the story of even a great man’s life in some two hundred pages or so might seem to those who have never tried an easy matter enough; but it will not seem so to any who have tried it’ (ibid.).

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  54. Anon., ‘English Men of Letters, ed. J. Morley, Johnson, by Leslie Stephen’, Athenaeum, 2645 (6 July 1878) p. 11; ‘Shelley’, Athenaeum, 2662 (2 Nov 1878) p. 553; ‘Hutton’s Scott’, Athenaeum, 2646 (13 July 1878) p. 46; ‘English Men of Letters’, Athenaeum, 2645 (6 July 1878) p. 13. E. F. Benson wrote one of the most negative assessments of the series declaring they were ‘a shelf of disillusionment’. His attack on the unsuitability of writers’ lives for biography appeared in the Contemporary Review, LXVIII (1895) 131–2.

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  56. Maitland, ibid., p. 306; Leslie Stephen, Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1878) p. 2. All further references are to this edition.

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  57. Gosse, ‘Biography’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge University Press, 1910) III, 953. All further references are to this edition.

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  58. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962) pp. 241–2. For details on European biographical dictionaries see

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  59. Sidney Lee, ‘A Statistical Account’ (1900), Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) pp. lxii–lxiii. All further references are to this edition. The Oxford edition of the Dictionary of National Biography first appeared in 1917, reprinting twenty-two volumes of the main dictionary (original in sixty-three volumes) with the twenty-second the Supplement. Vols 1–21 were originally issued between 1885 and 1890, ed. by Leslie Stephen; vols 22–26, 1890–1, ed. by Stephen and Sidney Lee; vols 27–66, 1891–1901, ed. by Lee alone. ‘A Statistical Account’ was first published in June 1900 as the Preface to vol. 63, the last volume of the first series. The ‘Postscript to the Statistical Account’ was published in 1908. They both appear in vol. I of the Oxford reprint.

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  60. The clearest history of the shaping of the Dictionary of National Biography is Alan Bell’s article ‘Leslie Stephen and the DNB’, Times Literary Supplement, 3951 (16 Dec 1977) p. 1478. A fuller account can be found in the ‘Memoir of George Smith’ written by Sidney Lee in vol. I of the DNB.

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  71. Lee, ‘Preface’, A Life of William Shakespeare (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1898) p. vi. By 1899 — one year after publication — the biography was in its 4th edn.

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  73. Leslie Stephen, ‘Biography’ (1893), Men, Books and Mountains, ed. S. O. A. Ullmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1956) pp. 131, 128.

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  82. On the original title of Eminent Victorians see Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968) II, 66;

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  87. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, A Critical Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968) II, 33–4, 658, 665. Strachey’s literary executors emphasize Strachey’s talent as a miniaturist in the introduction to a recent collection entitled The Shorter Strachey: ‘Close observation of detail and exquisite care in its selection and presentation’ summarize his virtues. ‘The limitations of the smaller canvas brought out his strengths — concision and precision’, they add.

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    Ira Bruce Nadel

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Nadel, I.B. (1984). Biography as an Institution. In: Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09033-4_2

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