ABSTRACT
John Aubrey began the Brief Lives project at a time when he was disillusioned by the process of printing. One of Aubrey's responses, as well as to begin Brief Lives, was to turn the manuscript of the Life of Hobbes into a statement of what he saw as the stifling of truth by the print process. The compromise Aubrey reached for the Lives was to write the biographical text he wanted, and then to deposit it in the manuscript collections of the biographer and antiquary Anthony Wood. Andrew Clark, editor of the 1898 Clarendon edition, who disapproved strongly of Aubrey, even claimed that they look such a mess because they were written in a state of alcoholic stupor. No material has been excluded from the text of Brief Lives; to do this would have caused particular problems in the many cases where Aubrey deleted material by simply writing the word 'false' beside it.
