To do this, I want to start by paying a personal debt. My first biographical essay, a study of the suicidal Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton, was published nearly forty years ago, in John Murray’s Cornhill Magazine. It was printed alongside the first part of Alan Moorehead’s stirring autobiography, A Late Education: Episodes in a life (1970). This led to my discovery of one of the greatest Australian popular biographers and historians of the previous generation. Three of Moorehead’s short but powerful books from the 1950s and 1960s – Gallipoli (1956), Cooper’s Creek: The real Story of Burke and Wills (1963) and The Fatal Impact: An account of the invasion of the South Pacific 1767–1840 (1966) – were decisive in changing public attitudes. Although previously considered a war correspondent and popular historian, Moorehead (1910–83) achieved a significant type of collective biography, and all three books have remained in print for half a century. Warfare and friendship, exploration and personal endurance, colonial exploitation and ethnic responsibility: these have become major Australian themes. Moorehead’s works alerted me – and the world – to a different Australian cultural viewpoint and helped to establish a new postwar Australian identity.

I know there is a current reassessment of the significance of Moorehead, with Ann Moyal’s fine biographical monograph, published by the National Library of Australia (2005) and drawing on its extensive collection of his papers. Significantly, Moorehead decided against leaving his papers to an American university, despite being offered a considerable amount of money to do so.

The inspiration behind Moyal’s work was anticipated in an important introduction by Manning Clark to a new edition of The Fatal Impact in 1987:

Moorehead always had the gift to anticipate the groundswells in public opinion. In Cooper’s Creek he was out in front in that huge swell of interest starting in the history of Australia … not as a branch of British colonial history … but making it Australia-centred …. helping to show it was interesting to explore the minds of the heroes and heroines of Australia.

Seen from the outside, biography will always be a study of national identity, not just because of its choice of subjects but also because of its manner of treatment. It is the relationship between the biographer and the subject that creates the distinctive identity.

I have been struck by other notable works by Australian biographers in which there is a clear sense of new identities being forged, of new social questions being raised. Let me mention just three published in the past two decades.

The first is David Marr’s fine biography of the novelist Patrick White (1991), which examined the old cultural tensions between Australia and England, the question of homosexuality, and the notion of art as revelation or revenge.

Brenda Niall’s wonderful multi-biography, The Boyds: A family biography (2002), crossed five Australian generations, starting with a true but almost folkloric Australian archetype: the former convict’s beauteous daughter who marries the handsome son of a High Court judge and founds a dynasty. Niall’s biography, ingeniously constructed, moves between the various Boyd houses in a series of subtle, sliding narrative panels. What a significant moment it was for Australian biography when Niall abandoned the idea of writing a biography of Edith Wharton and turned to the Boyds.

Peter Rose’s Rose Boys (2001) was a new kind of family memoir, transforming what starts as an Australian sporting biography into an extraordinarily acute, intimate and disturbing account of his brother’s car accident and subsequent quadriplegia. In its brave emotional risk-taking, Rose Boys bears comparison with John Bayley’s controversial memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998).

These are major works that are helping to shape a distinctive Australian inheritance – ‘filling the biographical gap’ – and launching what I believe will prove to be a golden age of Australian biography. Australian biography is becoming more and more distinct from the British form, both in style and subject matter. I sense a certain new pride taken in Australian biography. This is rather different from the mildly apologetic attitude affected by many British biographers (including me). Nonetheless, there are still clear parallels, which I would like to explore.

It has always been characteristic of the British tradition to approach the genre of biography with a certain good-humoured scepticism. As long ago as the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s learned friend Dr Arbuthnot observed: ‘Biography has added a New Terror to death.’ One could compile an anthology of such gentle witticisms, which, in the English manner, often disguise serious reflections. ‘Every great man has his disciples,’ observed Oscar Wilde, ‘and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.’ ‘There are only three rules for writing biography,’ remarked Somerset Maugham, ‘and fortunately no one knows what these are.’

What is certainly true is that in Britain today we are immersed, not to say drowning, in a sea of biography, autobiography and memoir. According to figures recently produced by British Book Watch, no fewer than 4,000 new biographical titles are published per annum. The earnest student of the form would need to read ten biographies a day to keep abreast of developments.

Mind you, this figure includes the personal memoir, which has become immensely fashionable in recent years. Distinguished British authors who have followed this trend, moving significantly from biography to autobiography, include Michael Holroyd (Basil Street Blues, 1999); Lorna Sage (Bad Blood, 2000); and even my old teacher George Steiner, in My Unwritten Books (2008).

Memoirs of the more populist kind lay great emphasis on unhappy or dysfunctional childhood experiences. Some versions have been derided as ‘Misery Memoirs’. (In Australia they tend to be called ‘Triumph over Tribulation’ tales). Huge sales figures have also been achieved by disguised or ghosted Misery Memoirs. One example is Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her true story in her own words, secretly com-piled from taped interviews with the princess and originally published in 1992. Sales of Morton’s book now run to more than two million copies.

British television now has a dedicated biography channel. Biographical series such as Secret Lives, Reputations, and Who Do You Think You Are? have proven popular here and in Britain. The National Portrait Gallery in London runs frequent exhibitions featuring contemporary celebrities, and publishes series of books on biographical subjects.

The British Library recently launched a kit known as The Family History Box, which offers biographical entertainment. It is just like the old chemistry sets we used to have as children.

Meanwhile, the internet hosts numerous sites for genealogy, family history, surnames and clans. The Internet’s famously free (and famously unreliable) Wikipedia is essentially a kind of ‘do it yourself’ biography. And we all now know what it means to ‘Google’ someone.

Biographical films are all the rage, having cleverly usurped the British love of costume drama, especially when a heroine is at the centre. Recent examples include bio-pics of Elizabeth I and the current monarch, Beatrix Potter, Jane Austen, and the glamorous eighteenth-century duchess of Devonshire, based on Amanda Foreman’s outstandingly successful life of Georgiana, an avatar of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Perhaps the most significant recent biographical development in Britain was the publication of The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). I realise that this was the subject of the 2006 Seymour Lecture: Lawrence Goldman’s ‘Virtual Lives: History and Biography in an Electronic Age’ (published in the June 2007 issue of ABR), but I would like to make a couple of points here.

The new DNB expands the original number of individual lives from 38,000 to 50,000. It is no longer written by a small team of scholars. Rather, it has become a communal project, gathering contributions from no fewer than 12,000 biographers. Although all of the old entries have been retained (if briskly rewritten), DNB’s principles of selection have radically changed. In essence, the notion of ‘achievement’ has been greatly widened and democratised. There are fewer clergymen, aristocrats and bureaucrats; more women, workmen and rogues. Or as one critic remarked, ‘less bishops and more actresses’.

This democratising zeal is not exclusive to Britain. I note that the National Library of Australia is developing its People Australia. Australia’s National Portrait Gallery, whose new home by Lake Burley Griffin will be opened in early December 2008, will pioneer new methods of biographical presentation and juxtaposition.

Biography in the university

The movement that has developed most decisively during my lifetime has been the teaching of biography. Tertiary courses now flourish in Britain, Australia and the United States, and to some degree in France and Germany. The study of biography has revived Literature as one of the traditional ‘humanities’, rescuing it from the deserts of Literary Theory and reviving the ideals of Creative Writing courses.

In Britain, this new pedagogical phenomenon began at the private University of Buckingham in 1998, in a course run by Jane Ridley. It was followed in 2000 by the University of East Anglia (already famous for its Creative Writing course), which set up an MA in Life Writing under Lorna Sage, largely inspired by the novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury. It was a bitter irony that both Sage and Bradbury were dying of chronic illnesses. Neither of them lived to see the MA course properly take root. I recently met Lorna Sage’s first and only pupil, a young woman who is now a radio broadcaster. She told me that Lorna never spoke of her own illness but sometimes, during their one-to-one seminars ‘wept over the unhappiness of other lives’.

In 2001 the University of East Anglia (UEA) appointed its first professor of biography: a working writer, not an academic. This happened to be me. This was my first (and only) academic post in forty years as a working biographer. To inaugurate the MA, I gave a lecture to the Ox-ford faculty of English entitled ‘The Biographer Who Came in from the Cold’, named after John le Carré’s famous spy novel (1963). I taught at UEA for six years. Now I am ‘The Biographer Who Got out of the Kitchen’.

After some initial doubts, I do not believe that teaching biography will paralyse it with Theory. On the contrary, it should develop the creative future of the form and produce new generations of young writers who will ‘go forth and multiply’, biographically speaking!

My own students had wonderfully varied backgrounds: doctor, barrister, financial journalist, housewife, television researcher, ex-headmistress, social worker, company director, taxi driver, primary school teacher, Pakistani air force pilot, Japanese retail manager, Nigerian poet.

Pleasingly, several poets defected from Creative Writing to Life Writing. Poets make excellent biographers. One of them now runs a new Writers’ Project at the British Library Oral History Department. Five of my students have already published their own books: notably Druin Burch’s fine study of the eighteenth-century surgeon Astley Cooper, memorably entitled Digging Up the Dead (2007), a refer-ence both to surgical and biographical practices. My Pakistani air force pilot was Mohammed Hanif, whose first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), started life as an essay about Plutarch, the dreams and forebodings of Tyrants, and General Zia-ul-Haq. It was longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize

One of the major lessons we learned was this: no biography, however good, is definitive. It is important to understand how a series of biographies on the same subject shape and change a reputation through time. To learn about biography, you must view it comparatively. For instance, there are at least eight good lives of the eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and all repay study, from William Godwin’s original memoir of 1798 to Lyndall Gordon’s biography of 2005.

Apart from the UEA, other MA courses have sprung up: in Oxford, under Hermione Lee; and at London University, under Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison. Lisa Jardine, the distinguished scholar of seventeenth-century science, has founded the Centre for Editing Life and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London. Last year, the new University of Kingston founded ‘The Centre for Life Narratives’ and posted an important mission statement on its website.

A Biographers’ Club has been founded in London and runs a notable website. Even the Royal Society, austerely dedicated to scientific papers and traditionally opposed to scientific lives, is launching a new series, Memories in Science, to mark its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 2010.

Such developments have not been restricted to Britain. Perhaps the first university course in biography offered anywhere in the world was founded here in Australia, at Griffith University, in the 1970s. The National Library of Australia’s oral history project began at the same time. Biography has been taught at Monash University and La Trobe University since 1996. The Biography Institute, in Canberra, was founded in 2005; its conferences and workshops are attended by writers, academics and postgraduate students from around the world.

Because of the good offices of Dr Geoffrey Cains, the National Biography Award was founded in 1996; the National Biography Award Lecture, also administered by the State Library of New South Wales, followed in 2003.

Reflecting on the kind of biographical issues that are being debated in universities and at conferences around the world, I have come up with the following:

• the significance of the cult of celebrity, and the generation of pseudo-biographical forms, notably on the Internet (e.g. Facebook)
• the creative impact of biography on other media: film, television, photography, portraiture, and even ballet (e.g. the recent ‘biographical ballet’ about George Gershwin, produced in Paris in 2008)
• the revival of biography within narrative history
• the use of biography as a bridge to fields of specialist know-ledge, such as philosophy or the physical sciences
• the development of biographical exhibitions, using physical objects (so-called ‘object biography’), photographs, video loops and sound archives
• ethical questions such as the biographer’s invasion of privacy
• the big philosophical or epistemological questions about the nature of human understanding, empathy and subjectivity (e.g. how far can we ever know another human being?)

One of the most suggestive indications is the sudden and rapid expansion not merely of biographies but of books about biography, studying the genre as a literary form. The Subject Index at the British Library currently lists 363 English language titles under this heading. It is no coincidence that eighty per cent of these titles were published after 1990. Here are just nine of the most influential recent ones: Ian Donaldson, James Walter and Peter Read (eds): Shaping Lives: Reflections on biography (1992); Paula R. Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography (1999); Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (eds): Telling Lives in Science: Essays on scientific biography (1996); Michael Holroyd’s Works on Paper: The craft of biography and autobiography (2002); Peter France and William St Clair (eds): Mapping Lives: The uses of biography (2004); Hermione Lee’s Body Parts: Essays on life-writing (2005); Thomas Söderqvist (ed.): The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 (2007); Brenda Niall’s Life Class: The education of a biographer (2007); and Nigel Hamilton’s How to Do Biography: A primer (2008).

In my view, the study of biography at university can become a complete new humanist discipline. It can also keep an eye – or watching brief – on the new ‘para-biographic’ forms now multiplying, such as internet blogs (of which there are now more than one hundred and ten million), CD sleeves, author statements, profiles, and interviews, the self-correcting Wikipedia entries on the Internet, and – if anyone can bear to look at them – celebrity and reality television shows, which continue to burgeon like exotic hot-house jungle plants.

Nonetheless, the primary aims of teaching biography remains the written form: to recover a great tradition, establish the study of comparative biography, and lure students from Theory and back to the actual practise of research and writing. It highlights the central importance of the biographer–subject relationship to the study and under-standing of biography as a form. Above all, though, it aims to teach the art and craft of biographical narrative – storytelling.

Biography and storytelling

People often suggest that the future of biography lies in a radical change of form, in the development of fractured or postmodern narrative modes. Brian Matthews’s experimental and award-winning biography Louisa (1987), a Po-Mo biography of Henry Lawson’s heroic mother, is one example. It used multiple biographic voices and dramatised self-questionings. (It will be fascinating to see what Matthews does in his biography of Manning Clark.) Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), with its flamboyant insertions of fictional interludes, is another example of this technique. Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) used a fictional biographer – Geoffrey Braithwaite – to explore factual, or counter-factual, questions about Flaubert (e.g. what colour were Emma Bovary’s eyes?).

My own book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic biographer (1985), in which the biographer continually steps in and out of four different Romantic ‘frame’ narratives (the lives of Stevenson, Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Nerval), might claim to be a fourth. It is interesting that all these experimental works appeared in the mid-1980s, a period when we all wanted to ‘shake the cage’ of conventional biographical form and see what happened.

The traditional art of storytelling will always be central to biography and its power. What we may need more is a change of subjects or a development in our ideas of the kind of materials that biography can deal with. It is new biographical subjects which will redefine the narrative form, not vice versa.

Even if it is not presented chronologically, biography always takes the form of a human story, a narrative action, an agon. This has been so since the earliest Parallel Lives of Plutarch (c.120 CE). Plutarch launched the great narrative melodramas of biography: Alexander’s self-destruction, Julius Caesar’s assassination, Antony and Cleopatra’s love affair. In his prologue to his Life of Alexander, Plutarch summarised his approach: he would tell ‘not history, but lives’. He would look for the inside story, the intimate gesture, ‘an expression or a jest’, that revealed true character. He would narrate ‘the souls of men’. (As his Elizabethan translator Sir Thomas North wryly observed, Plutarch was interested ‘not only in how many battles Alexander won, but how often he was drunk’.)

When I suggest that biography is non-fiction storytelling, I mean the following. It has a protagonist, a time sequence, a plot, and a dramatic pattern of human cause and effect. Its essential discipline is secular; it resists supernatural explanations. (Even Plutarch is sceptical about the gods, though he is fascinated by dreams.) The rhythm of biographical narrative is that of suspense/mystery followed by resolution/explanation. The basic unit is the anecdote, strung along the narrative like beads on a string.

But there are numerous epistemological problems in storytelling. How reliable or selective are our sources? What are the vagaries of human memory? In what sense can one write he or she ‘thought’ or ‘felt’ something? How far can we ‘know the other’, philosophically speaking?

There is a powerful school of French sceptics – Sartre, Barthes, Derrida – that questions the fundamental authenticity of the narrative form. But there is also a counter Anglo-Saxon body of informal theory, which explores the idea of ‘identity as narrative’, expressed in the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981), the histories of Simon Schama, and the shrewd critical accounts by the American critic Paul John Eakin (How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, 1999).

These were addressed at a theoretical level by Professor Ian Donaldson in his brilliant 2006 ABR/La Trobe University Annual Lecture ‘Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography’ (see ABR, November 2006), which responded to a number of anti-biographers, notably the British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (who accused it of ‘bourgeois linearity’), Roland Barthes (who announced the death of the author) and Stefan Collini (who argued that it was sociologically unrepresentative).

On a more practical, writerly level, I would suggest that nearly all biographical problems can be answered by finding appropriate forms of narrative. A good example of this is one of the earliest breakthroughs in popular biography, Daniel Defoe’s Life of Jack Sheppard (1724). Here, a master storyteller brought traditional forms of narrative to bear on a new and subversive subject, and, in the process, completely transformed the genre. Defoe’s treatment of Jack Sheppard (1702–24) was revolutionary. In an age accustomed to biographical eulogies of the good and great, how could Defoe create a significant biography of a petty thief?

Defoe was writing in an early and much neglected biographical tradition, known to scholars as the Newgate Calendar or Prison Confessions. From the period 1720–60, twelve hundred male and fifty-eight female ‘confessions’ have survived. These were usually brief, homiletic biographies written by the Newgate Ordinary (the prison chaplain) and sold as cheap pamphlets. Mostly, they were lives of the failed, the lost, the forgotten, the condemned.

With brilliant originality, Defoe (himself a former inmate at Newgate) stood the genre on its head. He reversed the reader’s expectation. Before his execution, Jack Sheppard had escaped not once but three times from his death cell. Defoe presented Sheppard not as miserable petty thief but as a heroic and resourceful escape artist. Defoe set out to show his pluck, his humour, his incorrigible determination – and his terrible cockney jokes. He has Sheppard remarking of the visiting clergymen: ‘In Newgate, a File is a more valued gift than a Bible.’ After his penultimate escape, Sheppard proclaimed with cheerful blasphemy: ‘Yes, Sir, I am the Shepherd, and all the Jailers in the Town are my Flock; and I cannot stir into the Country but they are all at my Heels baaaa-ing after me.’

Defoe’s publisher (Applebee) inserted a single engraving of Jack’s third escape route, showing the amazingly ingenious and resourceful way he evaded the locks and chains of the notorious ‘Castle’ death-cell. The engraving was like a strip-cartoon in nine panels, a visual narrative, which closely followed Defoe’s breathless account from room to room in the prison. Using Jack’s own words, Defoe described how Jack unpicked his shackles, climbed up a disused chimney, broke through six locked doors in the dark; crept through the prison chapel, clambered over the spiked roof and lay there listening to St Sepulchre’s church chime the midnight hour. Faced with a final twenty-foot drop onto a flat roof, Jack had the self-command to return to his cell and fetch a blanket to use as a rope. Finally, exhausted, he slept for two hours before descending into the street. Defoe makes this escape saga both a gripping piece of storytelling and a vivid demonstration of Jack’s indomitable character. Indeed, it is a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress:

Being got to the Chapel, I climbed over the iron Spikes, and with ease broke one of them off for my further [lock-picking], and opened the Door on the inside … Here I came to another massive Door, which being fastened by a very strong lock, my spirits began to fail me … But cheering up, I wrought with great diligence, and in less than half an hour, with the help of the Nail from the Red Room and the Spike from the Chapel, wrenched the Box off – and so made the Door my Humble Servant!

While still at liberty, Sheppard began to hear stories and ballads about himself. This quickened his own sense of identity: ‘That night I came to a cellar at Charing Cross, and refreshed myself very comfortably with Roast Veal etc, and heard about a dozen people all discoursing about Sheppard, and nothing else was talked about while I stayed amongst them.’

After Jack’s last escape, he stole a set of gentleman’s clothes, rings, and sword, picked up two pretty girls, and had the audacity to hire a coach and ride back under the very gateway of the Newgate Prison arch. This, as told by Defoe, was a stroke of theatrical genius and a brilliant assertion of a transformed self, a new and glorious identity:

I now made an extraordinary Appearance, and from a Carpenter and a Butcher was now transformed into a Perfect Gentleman; and in company with my Sweetheart aforesaid, and another young Woman her acquaintance, went into the City, and were very merry together in a Public House not far from the Prison … and drank three quarters of a Pint of best Brandy …

Defoe’s short biography ran to eight editions in six weeks. In a touching gesture, he handed a copy to Sheppard on the gallows. In death, Jack had been given another Life. It turned him into a legend, and one could see how easily his story could transfer into other media. It did so: John Gay’s hugely popular eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera (1728), numerous Victorian music halls, a thriller by William Harrison Ainsworth (1839), Bertolt Brecht’s Three-penny Opera (1928), a Hollywood film and, most recently, a television dramatisation.

It also reaffirmed the value of the Lost Life – and launched a tradition which can be traced back to Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), and which includes Alexander Masters’s highly original Stuart: A life backwards (2005) and Ben Macintyre’s comic-thriller biography, Agent Zigzag: A true story of Nazi espionage, love and betrayal (2007).

Biography and the future

Finally, let me turn to the broadest panorama: the future of biography; or rather, its futures, for biography has always been destined to have separate roles in different cultures. The tasks to be carried out look subtly different between a post-imperial England and (if I may say) a pre-republican Australia. They are certainly very different in France and the United States.

As far as Britain is concerned, many biographers now sense what Jonathan Bate (a leading Shakespeare scholar who has now turned Romantic biographer of ‘John Clare’) has recently called ‘the approach of a paradigm shift’.

It is true that the traditional form of major Life and Times biographies, often in two volumes, are still being written, often magnificently: Claire Tomalin on Samuel Pepys (2002); Hilary Spurling on Henri Matisse (1998, 2005) Hermione Lee on Edith Wharton (2007); and, most recently, Michael Holroyd returning to mighty form with his massive study: A Strange Eventful History: The dramatic lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (2008).

Yet clearly, something is happening at the cutting edge. There is a widespread questioning of the traditional forms and chronology, and a fascination with briefer and more experimental work. There is renewed interest in marginal and subversive subject matter. The ‘monolithic’ single Life is giving way to biographies of groups, of friendships, of love affairs, of ‘spots of time’ (microbiographies), or of collective movements in art, literature or science.

Many concern what Virginia Woolf called ‘neglected lives’, or collective lives, those held together for an historic moment by a common endeavour, place or ideal, and there-fore not dependent on the ‘single life’ or traditional womb-to-tomb story. In consequence, because of the unusual nature of their subjects, they tend to develop unusual narrative forms.

Let me suggest nine popular and highly influential biographies that indicate this new pattern. Some of these titles are frequently proposed as harbingers of a ‘paradigm’ change in biographical forms, but they really mark a rediscovery of different kinds of subject matter. They are Holroyd’s Basil Street Blues; Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999); Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2001); Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: The friends who made the future, 1730–1810 (2002); Masters’s Stuart: A life backwards; William St Clair’s The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British slave trade (2006); Anne Wroe’s Being Shelley: The poet’s search for himself (2007); Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A woman in world history (2007); and Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008).

The narrative form of each of these books is highly unusual: for instance, the meta-biographical layerings of Miller’s Brontë book (exploring the phenomenon of the ‘Brontë industry’), and the tragic, reversed chronology of Masters’s life of his down-and-out subject.

But Lives may be ‘experimental’ in a different sense: not because they concern obscure or marginal or ethnically undervalued subjects, but simply because they appear difficult, specialised or remote from common concerns or culture. Johnson is famously reported by Boswell as saying that ‘he could write the Life of Broomstick’. But could he write the life of a particle physicist or a pure mathematician or indeed a Newton?

The writing of scientific Lives represents perhaps the most significant new field in British biography, and it has already challenged many assumptions. For years, biographies of individual scientists have been traditionally regarded as a form of children’s literature. Their narratives have taken the form of simplified ‘eureka stories’: Isaac Newton and the fall of the apple and the instant discovery of universal gravity.

It has also been the convention of science biography to ignore or at least be nervous of the mistakes and dead-ends of scientific research. The messy process of actual research and experiment is ironed out as the Whig history of endless progress. Men and women of science are assumed not to have inner or emotional lives at all, but to be icy blocks of cheery rationalism, ‘men in white coats’. For nearly the whole of the twentieth century, it was assumed there were Two Cultures, and that arts-educated people could never speak to, let alone understand, the scientist, and vice versa.

The intensity of our concern about the planet, about global and environmental issues, has put the biographical element back into science with a vengeance. We realise that science does not – cannot – exist in a human vacuum. We want to know what drives individual scientists to make their discoveries (and especially their mistakes); and how they feel about non-scientific things: love, religion and politics, for example. Renewed interest in the ethical dilemmas posed by scientific discovery requires a humanist response which the enquiring spirit of biography is ideally placed to provide. All this has lead to an explosion of biographical interest in the creativity of scientists, and the historic context of their work. Here are some of the striking new works this has produced: Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1996); Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo’s Telling Lives in Science: Essays on scientific biography; Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits: Building the 17th century scientific revolution (1999); Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002); Patricia Fara’s Newton: The making of genius (2002); Anne Thwaite’s Glimpses of the Wonderful: The life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810–1888 (2002); Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men; and Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007).

Science biography confronts a central question of our age: how far can we trust scientists as guides to survival on our planet; whether science is a source of hope or dread.

My new book, The Age of Wonder, is an attempt to grapple with these challenges in the form of a collective biography, or what I have called, rather sportingly, ‘a relay race of scientific stories’. The book covers the fields of astronomy, chemistry, geographical exploration, ballooning and experimental surgery at the turn of the nineteenth century. It re-examines such classic scientific tales as how Davy invented the Miner’s Lamp, how William Herschel discovered the new planet Uranus, how Joseph Banks went in search of Paradise in Tahiti, and how Mary Shelley invented the most famous scientist of all time – Dr Frankenstein.

The Age of Wonder is set at exactly the time when the great Romantic writers and poets were championing emotion and subjectivity, and supposedly turning against rationalism, objectivity and science. Yet writers such as Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Goethe and Mary Shelley were absolutely fascinated by science. The real subject is what I have called ‘scientific passion’: the inner lives and drives of scientists, and their impact on writers and the way we all imagine the world around us.

My book is subtitled ‘How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science’ because, right from the beginning, science has held out both promise and menace, both progress and destruction, precisely the dilemmas we face right now. I argue that it was the Romantics who first faced them two centuries ago, and that biography is the way of finding how we got here. The past has a great future, indeed.

Finally, and even more broadly, one may wonder what might be the future task of biography in emerging countries such as China, India, Russia, Iran and South America? It should not be forgotten that each of these has a fabulously rich tradition in fiction and poetry, and even film: yet biographically they are largely an unknown quantity, except for ideologically motivated Lives of the Great Leaders: Mao, Stalin, Ghandi, Genghis Khan, the Moguls – many in fact written by Western biographers.

Here again we can see the old historic tension emerging between the traditional ‘Great Men’ school of biography, and the modern impulse to recover ‘Neglected Lives’. From that point of view one might say that the finest Russian biography of recent years, though cast as a fiction, has been Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

In these countries, notions of not only human rights but of genealogy, privacy and individual identity itself may still be radically different from ours. It is a fascinating question how far biography as a form may in fact depend on the existence of liberal democratic institutions and the freedoms that go with them: relative freedom of expression, largely uncensored publishing, generally unrestricted libraries and open archives, and a secular culture of self-expression and self-development.

Can biography flourish in radical Muslim states? Can true biography flourish in any kind of one-party, authoritarian state? (The answers are not simple: after all, it could flourish under the Roman emperors and the enlightened despots of eighteenth-century Europe.)

One might hazard the guess that biography will do better in modern India than in China because of the prosperous professional and middle classes in India, its multicultural diversity, and its strong popular grassroots tradition of folksong, stories, poetry and now film. It is true that oral history has growing significance for China, exemplified by Xinran Xue’s China Witness: Voices from a silent generation (2008), an attempt to tell the true story of Mao’s Cultural Revolution through scores of personal interviews. Yet even this book was written in London, and is not being published in Beijing.

These are large questions, and they will reverberate in coming years. But as one who has believed passionately in the wonderful form of biography, its unique combination of the critical and imaginative spirit, and who continues to struggle with it after nearly forty years in the field, I offer them to you here in Australia and leave them confidently in your keeping.

And on that suitably apocalyptic note, I shall bid farewell with my ‘Ten Commandments for Biographers’:

1. Thou shalt honour Biography in all its Living forms and Experiments.
2. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s Novel.
3. Thou shalt recognise that Biography is a celebration of Human nature in all its glorious Contradictions.
4. Thou shalt demand that it be greater than Gossip, because it is concerned with Justice.
5. Thou shalt require that though it chronicles an outward career (the Facts) it reveals an inward life (a Comprehensive Truth).
6. Thou shalt see that this Truth can be told again and again, unto each generation.
7. Thou shalt greet it as a Life-giving form, as it is concerned with Human struggle and the Creative spirit, which we all share.
8. Thou shalt relish it as a Holiday for the human Imagina-tion – for it takes us away to another Place, another Time, and another Identity – from which we can come back refreshed.
9. Thou shalt be immodestly Proud of it, as it is something that the English have given to the world, like cricket, and parliament, and the Full Cooked Breakfast … and the Australians have re-invented like the Sydney Opera House, the Walk About, and the open air Barbecue.
10. And lastly, thou shalt be Humble about it, for it demonstrates that none of us can ever know, or write, the last Word about the human Heart.

This is an edited version of the 2008 HRC Seymour Lecture in Biography, which Richard Holmes delivered in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane in September 2008. This lecture, which was endowed by Dr John Seymour and Dr Heather Munro AO, was presented by the Biography Institute at the Australian National University.