'In His Prodigious Learning'

About twelve years ago I went through a Peter Ackroyd phase at the time my middle son (now eighteen) was reading Ackroyd’s books for younger readers. In terms of his industriousness (18 works of fiction, more than 30 biographies and histories), it’s useful to think of Ackroyd as the English Joyce Carol Oates, if only La Oates (as Guy Davenport  called her) could write. Ackroyd works in the old-fashioned, non-academic English tradition identified by John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969; rev. ed. 1991): “Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.” Ackroyd no doubt has his economic motives, and his professionalism is unquestioned, but he writes as a marvelously learned and collegial amateur, in the etymological sense. I remember reading his volumes devoted to Blake, Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, Chaucer and, best of all, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002). I’m happy to see Nige has read and enjoyed it: “Now I have finally reached the last page [516, in the Chatto & Windus edition], I feel mildly bereft, as if a journey with a particularly agreeable and informative companion has come to an end.”

I had the same feeling. I have a weakness for grab-bag books, great compendiums of learning and lore, the locus classicus of which is The Anatomy of Melancholy. Here’s Ackroyd on Robert Burton’s bed-side reader:

“The treatise is indeed fantastic. Although Burton disclaims ‘big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Alcestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit . . . elogies [sic], hyperbolical exornations [sic], elegancies etc. which many   so much affect,’ he employs all of these devices in a great phantasmagoria of prose. It is an opéra bouffe of paraphrase and quotation, as Burton whispers to the great authors across the centuries or overhears them murmuring in his Oxford library.”

Ackroyd cites four quintessentially English writers who reveled in (and sometimes filched from) Burton’s encyclopedia of inspired and crackpot erudition. He devotes many pages to Dr. Johnson:

“In his bad temper and solicitude for others, in his prodigious learning and no less prodigal speech, in his hack work and in his high endeavours, in his gregariousness and in his melancholy, he is characteristic and unmistakable. He attempted very form of writing and excelled in each one of them.”

Ackroyd writes sparingly of John Keats, noting that the poet read The Anatomy of Melancholy “as a form of personal diary, and thereupon composed an ‘Ode on Melancholy.’” Charles Lamb, likewise, gets only limited attention from Ackroyd, though he quotes Lamb on Burton: “that fantastic old great man.” Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy get proper, extended notice from Ackroyd, including this:

“. . . as Hazlitt put it, Uncle Toby remains ‘one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature’ and of course to the English imagination itself.”