Biography and History

Barbara Caine

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350307452
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historiografía

Looking at the complex relationship between the discipline of history and the writing of lives, this key textbook provides an original and insightful introduction to a growing and increasingly important area of historical scholarship and research. Examining key works that have changed the nature of biography, Barbara Caine also explores the way biographical narrative and life stories have become a central preoccupation for history. Outlining the main features of contemporary historical biography, this is an ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on historiography, theory and history, theory and methods, historical methodology, history and life/biographical/autobiographical writing, and life-writing courses on English or creative writing degrees. New to this Edition:
- Thoroughly updated throughout
- New concluding chapter on history and the individual life, and the place of biography in history

1Historians and the Question of Biography

Introduction

Although debate on this subject continues, the central place that biography occupies in the writing and the study of history is accepted now in a way that has not been the case since the mid nineteenth century. One can see this very clearly in the numerous roundtables, lectures and symposia on biography that have been hosted by major journals, conferences and institutions like the London-based Institute for Historical Research in the last eight to ten years. To be sure some of these discussions have served to question rather then to recognise the place of biography in history. David Nasaw, in introducing the roundtable on biography in the American Historical Review, argued that biography ‘remains the profession’s unloved stepchild, occasionally but grudg-ingly let in the door, more often shut outside with the riffraff’. But the very fact that a roundtable on this subject was published in the American Historical Review testifies to the widespread interest in the subject amongst historians, as indeed do the subsequent ones with much more enthusiasm for biography in the Journal of Women’s History and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. What is particularly notable is that several of the participants in the American Historical Review roundtable refused to apply the term ‘biography’ to their work, even if that work was a lengthy reconstruction and discussion of the life of an individual. Instead, they insisted, they were using ‘the medium of “life histories” of individuals and groups of individuals, to seek for evidence to probe many key historical issues’,¹ or using an individual life to ‘help us to see not only into particular events but into the larger cultural and social and even political processes of a moment in time’.² These, however, are precisely the things that other historians see as valuable in writing an historical biography. It does raise questions about the extent to which the concern amongst historians is focussed as much on the idea of biography as a particular literary form as it is on the related question of the role and importance of studying an individual life as a way to expand historical understanding and insight.

Discussion about the relationship between biography and history has been an important one for millennia. Beginning with a brief discussion of the contrast between biography and history established in the classical world, this chapter focuses on this debate over the past three centuries, the period in which the claim of biography to be seen as a significant part of history has been repeatedly asserted.

Biography and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ▶

Much of the modern debate about the relationship between biography and history begins with the differentiation between them established in the classical world. History was seen as something quite different from biography in the classical world and as having much greater quality, seriousness and importance. The high status of history came both from its concern with the important legal, political and military deeds and actions of any period and from its rigorous methods and concern with accuracy. This concern with the relations between different nations and peoples, and especially those involving wars, made history a form of knowledge that was of the utmost importance for anyone interested in political life.

To suggest that history had a higher status than biography is not to say that biography was unimportant in the classical world. On the contrary, it was considered one of the major ways in which to commemorate the life of a significant individual and to bring to mind noble characters or to evaluate the deeds and the lives of significant public men. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, for example, for many centuries the most widely read and influential of classical biographies, paired and contrasted Greek and Roman rulers, military leaders and philosophers in ways that showed both their strengths and their failings and allowed the scope for extended moral and philosophical reflections on their motives and conduct, and indeed on the civilisations that they served to represent. It was Plutarch who emphasised most strongly the differences between biography and history and who demanded freedoms for the biographer from the rigour that was so central to the writing of history. For the biographer, Plutarch insisted, it was not deeds that mattered so much as character, and the delineation of character often demanded that attention be paid to aspects of the private life or public figures that were not usually deemed significant in the writing of history. Plutarch refused either to confine himself exclusively to the political and military aspects of a person’s life or to cover the public life of his subjects chronologically and comprehensively. On the contrary, he was deliberately selective, choosing those aspects of each person that he saw as most revealing of his character, accepting that these would not necessarily be the most significant episodes from an historical point of view. In a famous passage at the beginning of his life of Alexander, Plutarch pointed to the differences between biography and history, insisting that, unlike an historian, he would not deal comprehensively with everything Alexander had done.

For I am writing biography, not history, and the truth is that the most brilliant exploits often tell us nothing of the virtues or vices of the men who performed them, while on the other hand a chance remark or a joke may reveal far more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles in which thousands fall, or of marshalling great armies, or laying siege to cities.³

The freedom to choose the incidents that reveal ‘character and inclination’ that Plutarch demanded for biography served further to underline its lower status. A biography might well offer a basis for private contemplation, and thus serve a moral purpose. But its stress on the individual and its concern with the private realm and with daily life meant that for many centuries it was regarded as a lower and less important form of writing than history.

This classical sense of the distinction between history and biography and the greater importance and seriousness accorded history in the Classical world was generally accepted up until the end of the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, however, Francis Bacon challenged it, arguing that individual lives needed to be seen as a part of history, rather than as something quite distinct from it. For Bacon, there was not just one category or type of history, but several, of which biography was one. In his The Advancement of Learning, he suggests that

history, which may be called just and perfect history, is of three kinds, according to the object which it propoundeth, or pretendeth to represent: for it either representeth a time, or a person, or an action. The first we call chronicles, the second lives, and the third nar-rations or relations. Of these, although the first be the most complete and absolute kind of history, and hath most estimation and glory, yet the second excelleth it in profit and use, and the third in verity and sincerity. For history of times representeth the magnitude of actions, and the public faces and deportments of persons, and passeth over in silence the smaller passages and motions of men and matters … But lives, if they be well written, pro-pounding to themselves a person to represent, in whom actions, both greater and smaller, public and private, have a commixture, must of necessity contain a more true, native, and lively representation.⁴

Bacon’s insistence that individual lives might prove to be more useful and lively than chronicles of major political and military events anticipates the challenge to history that was offered much more extensively by biography in the eighteenth century.

This belief that biography was more lively and appealing than other forms of history was held strongly by many writers in the eighteenth century. Hugh Blair’s widely read Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), for example, included a discussion of ‘the inferior kinds of historical composition’, in which he stressed the usefulness and importance of biography. It was less formal than history but often very instructive for readers to whom the small details of daily life would be appealing and instructive. Robert Bisset, who wrote a number of histories as well as a biography of Edmund Burke, made a similar point. ‘No species of writing’, he argued, ‘combines in it a greater degree of interest and instruction than biography.’

Our sympathy is most powerfully excited by the view of those situations, which, by a small effort of the imagination, we can approximate to ourselves. Hence Biography often engages our attention and affection more deeply than History. We are more concerned by the display of individual character than of political measures, of individual enjoyment or suffering, than of the prosperity or adversity of nations. Even in History the biographical part interests us more than any other.⁵

This emphasis on the capacity of biography to excite sympathy points to a concern with a new readership that emerged in the eighteenth century, making demands that traditional history could not satisfy. A significant part of this new readership was composed of middle-class women whose favourite genre was the novel. The rise and prominence of the novel, the emergence of sentimental poetry at the same time, and the extensive discussion of what women should read brought to the fore a recognition of the importance of the ‘sentimental reader’ and a new sense of the need to engage the emotions in all literary forms and for men as well as women.

In earlier times, the connection between history and public men assured its high status. The reader of history was generally assumed to be an educated man, interested in public matters and disciplined in his habits. To gain the greatest benefit from reading history, it was necessary that the reader ‘be not confused, wandering and desultory in his reading. … that he have a clear and good Judgement, that he may with dexterity apprehend what he reads and well discern what is to be selected’.⁶ The increase in literacy amongst women and others not engaged in public life made many writers argue that if history spoke only to public men, it was ‘meaningless to the largest part of mankind’. This was in marked contrast to biography, which spoke to everyone.⁷

The emergence of this new readership was accompanied by some new ideas about history. David Hume, for example, believed that women needed to study history, which was both more instructive and more entertaining than the novels that they read. History, he insisted, offered the best way ‘of becoming acquainted with human affairs, without dimin-ishing in the least from the most delicate sentiments of human virtue’ and the only possible basis for women to be able converse sensibly with men ‘of sense and reflection’. In part as a way of attracting this readership, Hume sought to introduce episodes and incidents into his histories that would affect his readers, and he deliberately experimented with sentimental approaches usually associated with fiction and designed specifically for a female readership. His account of the execution of Charles I, for example, was carefully written in a way that would move some to tears.⁸ As David Wootton has argued, Hume offered a new approach to history in his concern to retell a story that had already been told. Prior to that, it had been assumed that those seeking a knowledge of history would do so through reading the works of great contemporary historians who had participated in the events that they depicted: Livy or Tacitus, if they wanted to know about Rome; Clarendon if they wanted to know about Elizabethan England. Hume argued that working with these original sources was both too time consuming and too confusing for most contemporary readers, who needed a concise and carefully composed account that would provide both instruction and pleasure. This approach involved a new sense of progress in historical knowledge, but it also involved a new way of incorporating individual lives into historical accounts.⁹

Thomas Carlyle and the idea of biography as history

Interest in the nature of daily life in earlier times, and a sense, which had begun in the eighteenth century, that this was essential if there was to be a real understanding of the past, continued into the nineteenth century. Indeed, it formed the basis of a critique of earlier approaches to history that had placed political developments at the centre. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Francis Jeffery, the first editor of the influential Edinburgh Review, and a noted essayist and critic, insisted on the need to extend beyond the political realm of ‘regular history’ if one sought to understand even the forces shaping the character of the nation. For these forces consist of ‘everything which affects the character of individuals: – manners, education, prevailing occupations, religion, taste, and above all the distribution of wealth, and the state of prejudice and opinions’.¹⁰ Literature was particularly important because of what it revealed about the ‘state of prejudice and opinion’, but so too were individual memoirs and diaries, which provided an unparalleled insight into the lives, activities and opinions of particular individuals. Jeffery responded with great enthusiasm to works like Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs or to Pepys’s Diary, which was first published in 1825. Pepys’s diaries, he insisted, ‘fulfilled the desire of knowing, pretty minutely, the manners and habits of former times, – of understanding, in all their details, the character and ordinary way of life and conversation of our forefathers’.¹¹

In Britain, the strongest cases for linking biography and history – indeed for seeing them as completely inseparable – was made by Thomas Carlyle. ‘History is the essence of innu-merable biographies,’ Carlyle insisted, in his 1830 essay ‘On History’. A study of the inner life, the changing nature of the conscious or half-conscious aims of man and of spiritual beliefs, he argued, might offer a more significant history than that evident in the study of political institutions or military episodes.¹² His work on Cromwell, with its emphasis on the importance of his religious beliefs, and through which a different way of understanding the seventeenth century was suggested, served to illustrate his approach.¹³

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, – must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.¹⁴

Carlyle’s belief in the importance of individual lives is evident throughout his History of the French Revolution, which continually refers to particular individuals in illustrating political developments or indeed the state of France itself and the pattern and process of the revolution. Following on from this, Carlyle used the terms ‘history’ and ‘biography’ interchangeably in his massive History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great. This focus on individual lives commended his way of presenting historical figures as ‘real beings, which were once alive, beings of his own flesh and blood, not mere shadows and dim abstractions’.¹⁵

The illiberal and anti-democratic nature of Carlyle’s thought, his strongly judgemental approach both to individuals and to historical events and his complete disregard for any wider analysis of ec...