Brief Lives and Characters

Abstract

This period saw an increase in the writing of the brief life and the character, both within collections such as John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and Anthony Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses and as separate productions. This chapter will begin by considering one brief life, Shaftesbury’s account of his foxhunting squire relative Henry Hastings, whose composition, publication history, terminology, and delicately ironic tone is typical of the brief life’s special relationship with locality (both urban and distinctly rustic) and associated traditions, with family relationships, with anecdotal oddity and singularity, and with antiquarian rarity. In direct contrast to biography, with which it has an eccentric relationship, the brief life is often the fruit of antiquarian research, the preservation of a marginal, fragile, and often provincial account which later finds an urban home in the rhapsodic publication or the magazine. This period shows two modes, often in dialogue: exemplarity (both hagiographical and satirical) and particularity.