ABSTRACT
Revisiting omas Dunckerley’s biography proves surprising not only for what it reveals about Dunckerley’s hidden history, but also for what it suggests about changes in how late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Anglo-American society conceived of what we might mistakenly believe rather static concepts: personal identity, the stability of social status, what it means to be a hero and, most relevant to this study, what constitutes a proper biography.1 To most attentive readers, it would seem Dunckerley’s complete life history has been known since shortly a er his death in 1795, and was de nitively restated in 1891 by Henry Sadler.2 However, the cra of biography has long been tricky. In Western history, if a gure was signi cant enough to commission or inspire a biography, circumstances typically guaranteed that the result would be neither reliable nor unbiased. ink, for example, of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, or Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, both of which deviate considerably from modern standards of scholarship and objectivity – that simply was not their intent. Dependent on scienti c requirements for documentary evidence, scholarly method and at least a modicum of objectivity, modern academic biographies are a fairly recent innovation and represent a signi cant shi away from the traditional purposes and methodology of the genre. us it is not surprising that we nd none of the eighteenth-or nineteenth-century lives of Dunckerley conforms to today’s standards of ‘good biography’, not even Sadler’s. Rather, early treatments of Dunckerley more closely resemble medieval hagiographies, which tell us little about the life of the saint, but amply demonstrate how to emulate the saintly.
