'Lead the Thoughts Into Domestic Privacies'

A friend tells me a newspaper is looking for a fulltime obituary writer and she thinks it would be an ideal job for me. I’m not in the market but she’s right. Good obituaries are small-scale biographies and always a privilege to write. The first thing I wrote as a newspaper reporter almost half a century ago was the obituary of a farmer named Miller who lived near the small town in Northwest Ohio where I worked. Crime and scandal are trivial matters next to an account of a person’s life, especially when fleshed out beyond the formulaic recitation of names and dates.

Dr. Johnson had precursors (John Foxe, John Aubrey) but essentially he invented biography in English, starting with the “Life of Savage” (1744) and culminating in his masterwork, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). Composed between those two works were the Rambler essays, including one published on October 13, 1750, in which Johnson explains the importance of biography:

“[N]o species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition.”

Johnson’s point is that we read ourselves when reading the lives of others. Biography is an imaginative extension of the sympathetic interest we already take in our fellows. It reminds us of our commonality. Johnson writes:

“[T]he business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.”

This represents an advance in moral understanding. We respect others not necessarily for their public performances but for their “domestic privacies” and “the minute details of daily life.” Boswell adopted this approach and gave us the finest biography in the language, which instructs us to value the eccentricities and independence of the individual – not a fashionable undertaking today.