Book Reviews
A lot of trouble over a few books

This is a review of John Aubrey: Aubrey's Brief Lives by John Aubrey (Author), Oliver Lawson Dick (Editor) , Ruth Scurr (Introduction) Imprint: Vintage Classics ISBN: 9781784870331

A couple of years ago during a period between jobs , I found myself with plenty of time on my hands. After a few long, introspective walks, I decided that a worthwhile project would be to collect and catalogue all my old photos, letters and diaries and make an attempt to organise and preserve them. I imagined a future "somebody" might spend a couple of pleassant hours going through them and , who knows?, taking a few notes which could be thoughtfully read over later. Who this person was going to be was not clear to me. Perhaps one of my children? or my grandchildren? Certainly someone who was interested in the past and who felt they would gain an insight into my life and times by studying these untidy notebooks and badly focused photos.

I now realise that I wasn't doing this collating and reviewing for any imagined time pilgrim. I was doing it for myself, in an effort to preserve my own memories in a Quixotic attempt to hold on to events and people whose connection to me was slipping into a deep time-hole. Around the same time I also sought out these memory-ghosts on Facebook and with gnomic Google searches, trying to recreate my past life and turn memories into something more solid than a pleasant moment of idleness . I copied old photos to my computer and searched out dead relatives I had never met. I looked for their stories in old newspapers and sought out records of their births, marriages and deaths. Of course this was both interesting and a complete waste of time. My long leisure hours came during a period of unemployment and there were other more pressing problems needed my attention. But the need to record lives , including my own, that were slipping from memory and into insignificance was strong. I wrote the notes and stored them on the internet , where they remain to be found by someone who wants to read them.

John Aubrey was likely taken by a similar drive when he started writing about the subjects of his Brief Lives at the end of the seventeenth centuary . His notes and various writings were scattered both during his life and after he died to a number of places, presenting future editors of his work with a number of practical difficulties. Aubrey was driven with a desire to collect information about people he knew personally or was interested in. It is likely he had the idea that at some time in the future he would gather all these notes together and re-write them into a coherent whole. That isn't what happened , and it has been left to history and editors to collect the notes and jottings and form them into a coherent work. This book is based Oliver Lawson Dick’s edition of Brief Lives (1949) and here Aubrey's text has been straightened , corrected and prepared for easy reading like a well scrubbed child meeting a rich god parent for the first time. In a LRB review Adam Smyth helpfully points out some of the eccentricities of Aubrey's original text, to give a hint of what might be missed after Lawson Dick's editing. This is an important point to consider when trying to evaluate Aubrey, from a historical perspective, by attempting to read the text exactly as he wrote it. For readers that want to do that there are plenty of other editions available. In this version, the reader has a tamed text to read and some helpful biographic information on Aubrey's subjects which give some historical context to the reader who may have a non-specialist's interest in historical biography. The lives described are not presented with any publication history , but stand as selected examples of Aubrey's work.

Within the selected biographies there is enough detail, both historical and salacious, to keep any one entertained. Aubrey relied on many different people for his writings and not all the details he collected in his Lives would be acceptable to readers in later ages. There is a directness in the writing and a certain sauciness that makes accesable. Its difficult, for example, to resist this description of the wife of John Overall Professor of Theology at Cambridge 1596–1607."She had (they told me) the loveliest Eies that were ever seen, but wondrous wanton". He knew what some of his audience wanted to hear. Here is a gossipy legend about the daughters of "Man for all seasons" Sir Thomas Moore:

In his Utopia his lawe is that the young people are to see each other stark-naked before marriage. Sir William Roper, of Eltham, in Kent, came one morning, pretty early, to my Lord, with a proposall to marry one of his daughters. My Lord’s daughters were then both together abed in a truckle-bed in their father’s chamber asleep. He carries Sir William into the chamber and takes the Sheete by the corner and suddenly whippes it off. They lay on their Backs, and their smocks up as high as their arme-pitts. This awakened them, and immediately they turned on their bellies. Quoth Roper, I have seen both sides, and so gave a patt on the buttock, he made choice of, sayeing, Thou art mine. Here was all the trouble of the wooeing. This account I had from my honoured friend old Mris. Tyndale, whose grandfather, Sir William Stafford, was an intimate friend of this Sir W. Roper, who told him the story.

Continuing with the tap room tales is this one about George Monk, Duke of Albemarle "He was a prisoner in the Tower, where his semstress, Nan Clarges, a Blacksmith’s daughter was kind to him; in a double capacity." And once the scene is set Aubrey continues with the following vignette

Her mother was one of the five Woemen-Barbers. There was a maried woman in Drury Lane that had clapt (i.e. given the pox to) a woman’s husband, a neighbour of hers. She complained of this to her neighbour gossips: so they concluded on this Revenge, viz. to gett her and whippe her and to shave all the haire off her pudenda; which severities were executed and put into a Ballad. ’Twas the first Ballad I ever cared for the reading of; the Burden of it was thus:

Did yee ever heare the like
Or ever heard the same
Of five Woemen-Barbers
That lived in Drewry-lane

In Aubrey's world women had a limited number of roles and this is, of course, reflected in Brief Lives . Women in this book are mostly servants, whores or dutiful wives and mothers. Only members of the aristocracy manage to escape these roles . Here is Aubrey on Mary Herbert, Queen of Arcadia ,Duchess of Pembrooke and one of the first female playwrights in England.

She was very salacious, and she had a Contrivance that in the Spring of the yeare, when the Stallions were to leape the Mares, they were to be brought before such a part of the house, where she had a vidette (a hole to peepe out at) to looke on them and please herselfe with their Sport; and then she would act the like sport herselfe with her stallions. One of her great Gallants was Crooke-back’t Cecill, Earl of Salisbury.

Nevertheless, according to Ruth Scurr, Aubrey was open to learning from women and was “proud of the fact that he did not ‘disdain to learn from ignorant old women’. When seeking information to pass on to the future about eminent men, it was often women’s voices and experience he recorded.” Its worth considering that Aubrey was continually collecting information about his subjects and his writings are full of false trails that begin and then suddenly finish when Aubrey realises he is missing some part of the story. This gives a feeling of companionability that helps establish a different type of relationship with the reader when compared with the omnipresent and all knowing style of much of today's biography. With its many gaps and uncertainties Brief Lives gives us a chance to sit next to a fireside raconteur and to learn, and be entertained by, stories of lives lived in seventeenth century England without being lectured.

Aubrey recognised there is a tendency to see our own golden years as the best, and when he saw this in some of his own subjects he gently mocked their self-professed wisdom. Let's meet an old aristocrat who thundered down these old saws from his mouldering mountain top:

"rue Gravity and prudence, not one that depends upon the grave cutt of his beard to be thought so."

"Alas! O’ God’s will! Now-a-dayes every one, forsooth!"

"Now we are come all to our Coaches forsooth! Now young men are so farre from managing good horses, they know not how to ride a hunting nag or handle their weapons. So God help the King if, etc."

"We had no depopulacion in those dayes."

"All this is now lost; and pride, whoreing, wantonnesses, and drunkennesses. Their servants like clownes too, drunkards too: breeches of one sort, Doublet of another, drabled with the teares of the Tankard and greasie"

Choose your own modern equivalent.

To avoid the teares of the tankard and too much greasie its probably best to keep returning to Brief Lives rather than consume it in one massive feast. Aubrey's Inn of Anecdotes is always open and thanks to Ruth Scurr's research and the editorial decisions of Oliver Lawson-Dick it's an easy and entertaining place to visit.