ABSTRACT
In biography the century had a long way to go before it reached Johnson and Boswell, the greatest practitioners of the art. It developed away from the distant formality advised by Addison in Freeholder No. 35 and towards the judicious realism advised by Johnson. Addison had correctly condemned the Grub-street authors who added a new terror to death by rushing to “Curll’s chaste press” with garbled and jumbled “lives.” Although these works are now usually negligible, often valuable are such brief lives as are found in the biographical dictionaries of the time. A thirst for information about celebrities is marked in the Life of Francis Bacon (1740) by David Mallet, the “beggarly Scotchman” who later published Bolingbroke’s Works (1754), and in such pedestrian compilations as John Jortin’s Erasmus (2v, 1758-60) and Ferdinando Warner’s Sir Thomas More (1758). New techniques gradually mingled with established methods. The noble Roman style of Conyers Middleton’s Life of Cicero (1741), at which Fielding sneered but which Fanny Burney and others thought “manly and elegant,” was less significant than Middleton’s effective use of Cicero’s letters as jewels set in the biographical narrative. This method was developed by William Mason2 (1724-1797) in the
The Development of Biography
“Memoirs” he prefixed to his edition of his friend Thomas Gray’s Poems (1775). Mason used many letters and thus stimulated the tradition of combining “life and letters” which was later common, and was followed by Boswell. Unfortunately for Mason’s ultimate reputation he garbled inexcusably the texts of the letters used.
