English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey (review)

For the past decade or two, few critical treatments of biographical writing have failed to include remarks decrying the lack of contemporary attention to the genre by literary scholars, even as such analyses have continued to appear regularly. Occasionally, when versions of this critical canard are carefully qualified, the observations actually turn out to be valid, as they are in the case of Allan Pritchard's claims in his study of seventeenth-century English biography. Pritchard is correct that this formative area has long been neglected because of the tendency to focus on the eighteenth-century achievements of James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, and others. Aside from some treatments of individual seventeenth-century biographers, Donald Stauffer's English Biography before 1700, published in 1930, has by default remained the major overview, and Pritchard's study is a welcome addition to fill this scholarly gap.

The case for the formative role of the seventeenth century in the development of English biography emphasizes the impressive growth in biographical output over the period: 'A complete list of sixteenth-century English biographies would be short, but a complete list of seventeenth-century biographies would be so long that no one has yet ventured to compile such a bibliography.' Along with this numerical increase, the range of figures deemed worthy of biographical treatment expanded significantly – no longer were kings and saints the major candidates – and new formal options emerged. Pritchard's eleven chapters focus on the major inherited traditions (religious biography, the numerically dominant form throughout the period, and the lives of political and military leaders); on the newer types of biography that appeared, particularly in the second half of the century (the lives of intellectual and literary figures and brief lives); and on the major writers in both the older exemplary traditions (Izaak Walton) and the emerging more realistic modes (John Aubrey and Roger North).

The terrain of biography, seemingly one of the most accessible and open of genres, actually offers a number of potential critical snares, most of which Pritchard avoids. The radical differences between early English biography and our own biographical expectations and practices make teleology a constant temptation. Pritchard's refreshing honesty about the difficulties confronting modern readers of seventeenth-century biographies – the abstraction and the focal problems of the texts, for example – means that critical judgments are seldom skewed in terms of future developments. Moreover, unlike its currently more glamorous sibling autobiography, which tends to dominate wherever it is textually grafted, biography has historically functioned as a host rather than a parasite among genres. As a result, it can sometimes be difficult, particularly with early biography, to separate it from the historical, devotional, polemical, and even satirical writings in which it is often embedded. In such cases Pritchard consistently avoids over-readings of the kind which have marred previous treatments.

Books like this one are not flashy; they lack the theoretical or critical pyrotechnics necessary for 'shock and awe.' This study offers the comprehensiveness, the illumination of larger generic and subgeneric patterns, and the judicious deployment of detail that mark the best examples of its own genre, the critical survey. Critics often complain that biography lacks a poetics. If one is ever to be developed, it will come after, and depend on, thorough and careful studies like this one. Pritchard has provided a solid scholarly grounding for future studies of early English biography. In addition, at a time when too many publishers are turning out books that look like candidates for the recycling bin before they have even reached their first readers, the University of Toronto Press deserves everyone's gratitude for continuing to produce books of the highest quality that are a pleasure to read.