Antiquities, said Francis Bacon, are “remnants of History, which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.” The 17th-century English biographer and antiquarian John Aubrey was born in the year Bacon died, read his Essays as a child, and included him in his who’s-who compendium of famous greats, Brief Lives. He offered a variation of his words when looking back on his own achievements: “I have rescued what I could of the past from the teeth of time.”
Aubrey was a collector, a curator, and a chronicler, an enthusiastic preserver of England’s heritage and tradition. Born in Wiltshire in 1626, he lived through an age of social and political upheaval—constitutional chaos, civil war, religious intolerance—but also one marked by daring experimentation and scientific breakthroughs. Aubrey kept “ingenious company,” hobnobbing with the sharpest minds in the country, and when he became a fellow of the newly founded Royal Society in 1663, he began to share his knowledge publicly and contribute to the advancement of learning.
However, unlike his illustrious contemporaries (and Bacon before him), Aubrey was not fully recognized for his accomplishments during his lifetime. Later generations of antiquaries, historians, and archaeologists dusted him off and issued posthumous praise for his pioneering work. He saw only one of his books published—the silly occult primer Miscellanies: A Collection of Hermetick Philosophy, not the groundbreaking compilation of potted biographies upon which his reputation now rests. It wasn’t until 1898, 200 years after Aubrey’s death, and following several abridged, bowdlerized, and pale anonymous imitations, that a near-complete edition of Brief Lives appeared.
Finally, readers could witness, and appreciate, Aubrey’s successful efforts to get at “the plain and naked truth, which is exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered.” By eschewing large, lavish, gushing personal histories for smaller, subtler, warts-and-all character sketches, Aubrey brought eminent writers, philosophers, doctors, and statesmen captivatingly alive. In the process, he ensured his own posterity.
In this masterly and original biography, Ruth Scurr calls Aubrey England’s first great biographer. As a fitting tribute to a man who reinvented the form, Scurr has devised a novel way of telling Aubrey’s story. John Aubrey, My Own Life is composed of Aubrey’s notes, manuscripts, and letters, all edited and arranged in chronological order so as to read like the diary that Aubrey never wrote. At first glance, it seems an audacious enterprise—a crudely stitched-together patchwork, a haphazardly cut-and-pasted collage—but Scurr has so meticulously researched her subject that each “diary” entry, from early recollections in 1634 to dying days in 1697, coheres and convinces as the intimate testimony of an exceptional man.
At the beginning, we encounter a young Aubrey already in possession of a curious mind. He delighted in exploring local sites: visiting a glass painter’s workshop with Sir Walter Raleigh’s great-nephews, trawling the library of Wilton House, and admiring “that stupendous antiquity” Stonehenge. He lost himself in books and drawing and was routinely saddened by the casual mistreatment of manuscripts: “It hurts my eyes and heart to see fragile painted pages used to line pastry dishes, to bung up bottles, to cover schoolbooks, or make templates beneath a tailor’s scissors.” He went on to follow the recommendation of his older and wiser friend Thomas Hobbes by heading to Oxford, where he indulged in learning behind its cloistered walls and “cut a sparkish figure in the town.”
Aubrey’s studies, however, were interrupted by civil war. Sent home to endure “sequestered rural life,” his frustration was compounded by the sight of battle-scarred landscapes and irreparably damaged ancient monuments. But the more noble buildings and stately ruins Aubrey came across, the more compelled he was to delve into their history. And so, in 1654, he took the step of entering “philosophical and antiquarian remarks into pocket memorandum books.” This became a habit, a self-enforced duty—”No one else will make these records in my place”—which he sedulously kept up for the rest of his life.
From this point on, Aubrey started collecting and collating in earnest. He joined clubs and societies, befriended Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, and Robert Boyle, and classified handwriting, ordered shells, dated buildings, and rediscovered the Avebury stone circles. (“It seems to me,” he noted, “that Avebury excels Stonehenge as a cathedral does a parish church.”) Not that the course of his life ran smoothly. He was besieged by all manner of “treacheries and enmities,” sued by a lover, hounded by “catchpoll crocodile” creditors, and harangued by well-wishing friends to take holy orders.
“But, fough! The cassock stinks,” he wrote.
It was when Hobbes died in 1679 that Aubrey turned to writing of a different kind. After completing an account of his friend’s life, Aubrey compiled a list of other possible luminaries whose biographies could be included in a single volume. He got to work on his project, writing up “minutes of Lives” swiftly, “playingly,” and “tumultuarily, or as they occurred in my thoughts.” He viewed his literary endeavor—his cataloguing of “worthy men’s names and notions”—as similar to his investigating and archiving of antiquaries: Both were means of safeguarding and showcasing cultural legacies, of preventing England’s treasures from being tarnished or “swallowed by oblivion.”
The Aubrey that emerges from Ruth Scurr’s pages is a man who was mild-mannered and self-effacing. At a particularly low ebb, he belittles his talents, declaring that he has been “a whetstone to other people’s achievements. Nothing more.” But Aubrey was also clever, convivial, and passionate about his pursuits. It is a joy to behold him going about his labors of love, whether making pilgrimages and “perambulations” across counties to survey grottos, sepulchers, medicinal wells, and abbeys, or dilating on the merits of urns, coins, astrological charts, and other rarities and curiosities.
Interestingly—and in contrast to Samuel Pepys in his diary—what Aubrey scarcely comments on is the turmoil and carnage around him: the Great Plague, the Great London Fire (or, as he terms it, the Great Conflagration) of 1666, and, of course, the English civil war. It is a pity, as the detail he does give, when not perfunctory, is revealing, akin to the minute, gem-like observations that stud each of his brief lives. He has this to say of Charles I’s execution: “On this day, the King was executed. It was bitter cold, so he wore two heavy shirts, lest he should shiver and seem afraid.”
Years later, once peace has been restored, he witnesses the coronation of James II and notices how “the crown tottered extremely.” The only signs of the times Aubrey regularly mentions are notable scientific discoveries or social developments, such as London’s first coffeehouse, where he stays late conversing with his ingenious friends and enjoying a drink that “will prevent drowsiness and make one fit for business.”
If there is fault to be found here it lies not in what Aubrey divulges but the way he does so. In her introduction, Scurr tells us that she has modernized Aubrey’s words and spellings. Thus, this original line from his brief life of Shakespeare—”His Comoedies will remaine witt as long as the English tongue is understood”—is fine-tuned into “His comedies will remain wit. . .” Scurr has also added words of her own to elucidate or “offset the charm of Aubrey’s own turns of phrase.” She deserves credit for all her deft tinkering: For Aubrey to live and breathe, and for us to appreciate “one of the finest English prose writers there has ever been,” he should be comprehensible.
For the most part, Scurr maintains a discreet presence, but sometimes we can detect her involvement. Here is Aubrey marveling at the ever-changing color of a new turquoise ring: “Today I noticed that it has become nubilated, or cloudy, at north and south.” (That explanatory “or cloudy” is Scurr’s helping hand.) On other occasions, though, Aubrey’s language is either so opaque or so specialized it cries out for simplification:
And yet there are instances where Scurr judiciously resists any kind of tweaking. “All my business and affairs are suddenly running kim kam!” Aubrey announces—and with it, Scurr gives us the option: to either read between the lines or be contentedly befuddled.
Graham Greene claimed that the autobiography, which opens after a birth and closes before a death, is merely “a sort of life.” Scurr’s imagined autobiography of John Aubrey fits that description, with Aubrey glossing his beginnings (as a newborn he was “very sickly, likely to die”) and anticipating his demise: “My candle burns low.” (He was later buried in an unmarked grave.) Scurr’s account is only a sort of life because it is a radically new way of presenting a life. Bold, innovative, and consistently absorbing, John Aubrey, My Own Life, manages the dual feat of dramatizing a brilliant biographer and reinterpreting the art of biography.
Malcolm Forbes is a writer and critic in Berlin.
