A Diary Imagined
JOHN AUBREY -€‚ƒ‚„…†‡, the author of Brief Lives, a col-lection of short, informal biographies on luminaries such as Shakespeare, John Dee and Francis Bacon, saw himself more as collector than writer. He lived through times of great turmoil: he was 22 when Charles I was executed; he saw Oliver Cromwell's rise to power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England and his son Richard Cromwell's brief succession; he experienced the Restoration of Charles II, the short reign of James II and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that brought William of Orange and his wife Mary (daughter of James II) to the throne. Aubrey died in 1697, ten years before England and Scotland joined their parlia-ments to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain. From an early age he saw his England slipping away and committed himself to preserving for posterity what remained of it, in stories, books, monuments and buildings.
He compiled natural and antiquarian remarks in notebooks, or on scraps of paper, cross-referenced, revised and correct-ed over time. He was concerned with accuracy like a scrupu-lous modern investigative journalist, so his notes are full of gaps and question marks where it has not been possible to remember or find a particular piece of information. Towards the end of his life, Aubrey began to panic, not about pain or death, but about the future of his precious col-lections. What should he do with all the piles of paper it had been his life's work to assemble? Fortunately for him and for us he was a friend of Elias Ashmole, who had promised to give his
own important collection of antiquarian artifacts to Oxford University on the condition that it erected a new building to house his donation. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683 and at the end of his life Aubrey decided there was no better place for his paper collections.
The record of Aubrey's life is no less chaotic and fragmentary than his work. Among the manuscripts and letters he deposited in the Ashmolean were some scant autobiographical jottings, 'to be interponed as a sheet of wast-paper only in the binding of a booke'. Aubrey's idea that his record of his life might serve as end-pages to a book about something or someone else is typically self-e©acing. Nevertheless, he hoped that his name would live on after his death and that posterity would benefit from the paper collections he had assembled. Most of these were preserved in the Ashmolean and then moved to the Bodleian Library in 1860. Except for the recent attention to Brief Lives, none of Aubrey's manuscripts, which fill over 20 boxes, have been adequately edited and many are in need of conservation. Aside from his few pages of autobiographical notes, the main sources for Aubrey's life are the remains of his corres- pondence, which are uneven and often oblique: there are over 800 letters to or from him in the Bodleian. Sometimes it is possible to tell exactly where Aubrey was and what he was doing on a particular date. Sometimes weeks, even months, go by where he cannot be traced. His relationships, especially the most intimate, flash past, illuminated only for an instance, like a dark landscape beneath a clouded sky when the moon breaks through fleetingly. Unlike Pepys, John Evelyn and other celebrated men of the 17th century, Aubrey did not leave a diary.
Scholar's sensibility When I was searching for a biographical form that would suit the remnants of Aubrey's life I realised that he would disappear inside a conventional biography, crowded out by his friends, acquaintances and their multitudinous interests. Aubrey lived through fascinating times and has long been valued for what can be seen through him; there is no shortage of scholars who appreciate the use that can be made of him. But the biographer has other purposes: to get as close to her subject and his sensibility as possible; to produce a portrait that captures at least something of what that person was like. In the contemporaneous pencil port-rait of Aubrey that survives he looks like an unremarkable 17th-century gentleman, his bland face square between the curtains of a heavy wig. A portrait in words, one that does him more justice, is what I determined to write. Inspired by the vivid sense of self that emerges from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and Robert Hooke, I thought: if only we had Aubrey's diary, his modesty, self-e©acement and attention to others would not be such a problem. No one gets crowded out of his or her own diary. In constructing Aubrey's diary I have used as many of his own words as possible. It is a diary based on the historical evidence; a diary that shows him living vividly, day by day, month by month, year by year, but with necessary gaps when nothing is known about where he was or what he was doing. I have not invented scenes or relationships as a novelist would, but nor have I followed the conventions of traditional biography. When he is silent I do not speculate about where he was or what he was doing or thinking. When he speaks I have modernised his words and spellings Ruth Scurr is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge. Her book and indicated the original sources in endnotes. I have added words of my own to explain events or interactions that would otherwise be obscure and to frame or o©set the charm of Aubrey's own turns of phrase. When the year but not the precise month or day of a piece of evidence is known, I have arranged it with other entries, sometimes clustering themes or events that fit together.
From chaos to narrative There are three distinct kinds of entry in the diary: discur-sive descriptions of events and conversations within spe-cific months or years based on his writing and correspond-ence; shorter notes about personal events that occurred on particular days; and entries providing brief accounts of public events which begin 'on this day'. My work has been to weave Aubrey's chaotic notes into a biographical narra-tive. For example, here is his note on smallpox:
Of periodicall small-poxes. – Small-pox in Sherborne dureing the year 1626, and dureing the yeare 1634; from Michael-mas 1642 to Michaelmas 1643; from Michaelmas 1649 to Michaelmas 1650; etc. Small-pox in Taunton all the year 1658; likewise in the yeare 1670, etc. I would I had the like observations made in great townes in Wiltshire; but few care for these things … 1638 was a sickly and feaverish autumne; there were three graves open at one time in the churchyard of Broad Chalke.
This note dates from 1686, when Aubrey studied the reg-ister books of half a dozen parishes in South Wiltshire and sent extracts to Sir William Petty. I have created two diary entries based on this material, the first for 1638 when Aubrey, living at Broad Chalke aged 12, saw the graves: 'This autumn, Broad Chalke is sickly and feverish; I walked through the churchyard earlier today and saw three open graves.' And a second entry for 1643, the year Aubrey caught smallpox when he was an undergraduate in Oxford:
Smallpox is periodical. There was smallpox in Sherborne during 1626 (the year of my birth), and during the year 1634, and it has been back again since Michaelmas last year. Such facts and observations in the great towns should be recorded, but few care for these things.
By backdating the information Aubrey gives us I have shown his sensibility developing, from childhood, through youth, to middle and old age. He believed that antiquar-ies, like poets, are born not made. By the time he was an undergraduate he was already an active antiquary, aware of the need to record small details that others would over-look. Aubrey's approach to his own life and other lives was imaginative and empirical in equal measure. In imagining his diary by collating the evidence I have echoed the idea of antiquities – the searching after remnants – that meant so much to Aubrey. I have collected the fragmentary remains of his life, from manuscripts, letters and books, his own and other people's, and arranged them carefully in chronological order. I have done so 'playingly' (a word he used of his own writing) but with purpose. Ultimately, my aim has been to write a book in which he is still alive.
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