John Aubrey’s and Life-Writing

John Aubrey constructed an intimate and nonthreatening biographical persona, which allowed him to collect sensitive material about people in a politically turbulent period. He preserved documents and facts, but also anecdotes and “sayings,” as records of the human voice and the reputations of biographical subjects. He developed an expectation that comprehensive and factual biographical reference works were necessary, and that biography could be an aspect of social or historical knowledge. He wrote the lives of women and of those who were not privileged, rejecting the exemplary tradition and writing sympathetically about ordinary people. When writing the life of Hobbes, he disagreed with his collaborator, Dryden, about the nature of biography, which Dryden saw as a neoclassical rhetorical art, requiring the suppression of ignominious or inelegant facts and creation of a pantheon of eminence. Aubrey created a new form, fame for disillusioned times, with modern values and a respect for fact.