Customer Reviews

Biography: A Brief History

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We live in a time in which we are overwhelmed by biographical information. The 'Internet' now has millions of people frantically posting the most intimate and even more often the most trivial details of their lives. The barriers which once made it impossible to invade the privacy of public figures have been legally torn down. Scandal, gossip, and the real inside stuff are now provided to an ever more hungry public in tons. There are also more respectable developments in this flourishing area including more responsible, detailed scholarly work.
It wasn't always this way. And Nigel Hamilton tells the story of the liberalization, tracing the history of Biography as a literary - genre beginning with 'Gilgamesh' and hitting milestones along the way towards the twentieth century. Great turning - point works such as those of Augustine, Samuel Johnson (Boswell) Rousseau, Lytton - Strachey are interpreted for their contribution to the overall development of the genre
One central question considered is whether it is the task of the biographer to tell an ideal story of a model figure, an example for imitation or to provide the whole truth about the figure in question. Our world of course has it all , from niche publisher hagiographies to mass- market 'tell - it-alls' and the direction has been in opening up more and more areas of the person's life for investigation and consideration. Another major trend is toward the 'fictionalization' of biography and the using speculative, imaginative means. Peter Ackroyd does this with his 'Dickens' and Edmund Morris becomes a character in 'Reagan'.
Hamilton maintains that 'biography' is now the most popular form of non- fiction writing today. He too is peeved that the academic world does not give enough respect to the Genre. He also tries to argue for the poltiical importance of Biography as being a form which flourishes in Democracies and is stifled in totalitarian and fascist regimes.
Hamilton as a biographer himself (Robert Lowell)knows the territory and provides an edifying historical survey.

How can one take this book seriously when one reads the following on Page 124? "Another commissioned but then contested work was that of James Anthony Froude, who was asked by the great Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle to be his posthumous official biographer. Froude subsequently fell afoul of Carlyle's surviving daughter, Mary, who considered his four-volume biography (beginning in 1884) to be defamatory - even though Froude had nobly omitted much telling evidence of spousal abuse and impotence. There followed a three-decade-long war between the party of the official biographer and the daughter - one that was never resolved."
Carlyle probably was impotent and his marriage had never been consummated - he certainly had no children! Mary was a niece, not a "surviving daughter." Readers interested in the history of biography would be much better served by reading A.O.J. Cockshut's "Truth To Life:The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century" (1974) or "The Art of Autobiography in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Cenutry England" (1984).