Two biographies
Sep. 10th, 2016 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakTwo biographies of people on the different ends of the social scale, a century apart.
The Fortunes of Francis Barber by Michael Bundock deals with one of the few black inhabitants of Georgian London we know something about: Francis Barber. The reason why we know about Francis is in the subtitle: "The true story of the Jamaican slave who became Samuel Johnson's heir". Francis Barber started life on a Jamaica plantation as the property of his maybe biological father, Colonel Bathurst, who took him with him when the plantation ran into financial trouble and Bathurst returned (or came, he was actually born on Jamaica) to England to die. (Which he did a few years later, Francis was officially freed in his will.) The child Francis, who in Jamaica wasn't called Francis yet but had the generic slave name Quashey, was then baptized and, at the instigation of Colonel Bathurst's son Dr. Bathurst, who was anti slavery, given to Dr. Samuel Johnson (recently widowed, in the throws of very deep depression and in need of cheering up) as a servant. And thus began an association that lasted for the rest of Johnson's life; Johnson being one of the most famous men in England, it meant that Francis Barber shows up in a lot of people's memoirs and letters as well. Becoming Johnson's main heir also meant he was involved in a very nasty inheritance struggle, since several white friends thought they'd have been far more deserving. He did get his inheritance, and a novelist would end the story here, with Francis, his wife and children moving to Johnson's hometown Lichfield to start a new life, with Francis becoming England's first black school master. But real life unfortunately allowed for no happy ending. The school wasn't a success, the money was gone, and Francis was dependent on help from old time friends like my guy Boswell when he died in poverty.
Michael Bundock has the problem familiar to biographers of servants, that very few first hand source material is available; a very few letters of Francis survive, and he also told Boswell about his life when Boswell was researching his biography of Johnson; Boswell's notes are the best we have on Francis' own view of his life, which was a bit different from how Johnson saw it, and much different from the view anti-Francis folk from Johnson's circle like John Hawkins or Hester Thrale took. (Hawkins, who published the very first Johnson biography two years before Boswell finished his, concludes it with a five page rant on how much he hates Francis Barber, and that includes some racist stuff on how Francis' white wife was a) disgusting for having married him in the first place, and b) how she surely cheats on him, since their kids are light skinned.) With these obstacles in mind, it's not surprising that the book at times is less of a classic biography and more an analysis of the story of slavery in Britain during Francis' life time, the general situation of free black people there, etc. I don't mean this as a criticism: all of it is tremendously interesting to read. (And often both chilling and infuriating, as in the opening chapters describing the situation in Jamaica during Francis' early childhood; Bundock quotes from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, who started out as the overseer of a large sugar estate and then became the owner of a smallholding, noting down the floggings of both male and female slaves and the constant sexual abuse of female ones just as matter of factly as the details of the weather or the books he read.) Just that Francis himself, as a person, remains more a sketch than a portrait. He and Dr. Johnson developed what was very much a father-son relationship, but that doesn't mean Francis always agreed with what Johnson (who was very much anti slavery, but also very much the type To Know Best What's Good For You) had in mind for him, not to mention that if you're a teenager in a house where all the other residents are over 50 and prone to be either depressed or argumentative, you could be forgiven for wanting to leave, which is what Francis did for a while, first working for an apothecary and then joining the navy, before returning to Johnson. He also was social and independently minded enough to find his own circle of friends (there's a letter excerpt from a visitor's at Johnson's who describes Francis sitting with some "of his fellow Africans", "their sooty faces all looking up" when the man entered, for example), not just relying on Johnson's, and, as Hester Thrale, who diidn't like him, grudgingly admitted "not bad looking for a blackamoor". But all too often, there's a limit on what a biographer can speculate if there is no first hand testimony. How did Francis and his later wife Elizabeth Ball meet, for example? What was their relationship really like? Thrale and Hawkins accuse him simultanously of being jealous (Mrs. Thrale makes the obvious allusion when calling his wife "his Desdemona") and of being stupid for thinking his wife's children were his; otoh, Dr. Johnson fully accepted Elizabeth as a sort of daughter in law, gave her his dead wife's Common Prayer book (it survives, and has inscriptions by both), and the couple remained with each other through thick and thin, so you can make educated guesses, but you can't know for sure because there are no letters surviving to each other.
Similarly, we can make educated guesses what Francis thought of the big trials involving slaves seeking their freedom that took place in London while he was there, like the Somerset case, but we simply don't know (as opposed to knowing what Johnson thought). And so forth. One wishes for a novel, because a novelist, not bound to what can be proven, could fill in Francis' thoughts and feelings.
Like many a biography, this one also works a an analysis of biographies and how narrative bias works. To quote from a passage dealing with quotes.
In her "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson" (1786), (Hester Thrale) recounted that when Johnson's cat Hodge had grown old,
Mr. Johnson always went out himself to buy Hodge's dinner, that Francis the Black's delicacy might not be hurt, as seeing himself employed for the convencience of a quadruped.
The story is intended to be comical in its use of the pseudo-Johnsonian vocabulary "The convenience of a quadruped." It is also intended to show Johnson in a good light, willing to stoop to menial tasks rather than give offence to his employee. On both these accounts, it succeeds. But is is impossible to miss the sneer at Barber in the phrase "that Francis the black's delicacy might not be hurt" - there is clearly an implication that he is getting above himself. There were other servants in the household (as (Hester Thrale) knew), so Barber was not the only one to benefit from Johnson's action, but he alone is the object of Mrs. Thrale's jibe. It is not just any servant who is giving himself airs; it is a particular black servant. Boswell's version of the same story, published in his "Life of Johnson", provides a revealing contrast:
I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having the trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.
In this account the dig at Barber does not appear, and Johnson's actions are for the benefit of all the servants, not just Barber.
(Boswell in general fares well in this book, which you wouldn't think given that Boswell, as opposed to Johnson, was pro slavery and the subject is a former slave. But Boswell truly liked Francis Barber, and Michael Bundock makes a good case that he did so in a non-patronising manner, writing to and about Barber not different than to his white friends, and was there for him when Barber fell on hard times.)
All in all, I found the book very much worth reading, and the frustrations I have are not the author's fault, but that of the source material availability.
The Last Royal Rebel by Anna Keay, subtitle, "The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth", has no such source material difficulties. Her main character has had a lot of bad press in his time (unsuccessfully rebelling with the victor writing your story will do that), but not only is he prominent in a lot of people's letters, memoirs, etc., but we have his own letters as well, and plenty accounts from both friends and enemies to provide a three dimensional picture. Our hero is the oldest and favourite illegitimate son of Charles II., and while I've read a novel about him which I've reviewed here and of course came across numerous references in biographies of other people, notably his father, but this is the first non-fictional biography about Monmouth himself I've read.
First of all, I was surprised that some of what I had assumed novelist Jude Morgan to have invented in his novel was actually historical fact, such as Monmouth's closeness to his aunt (though only five years older than him), Charles II.' favourite sister Henriette Anne (Minette), and how much her husband, Philippe d'Orleans (Monsieur, famously homosexual but no less petty and authoritarian with his wife for that) resented it. Also, the central father-son relationship between Charles and Monmouth comes across as very similar in both novel and biography, with biographer Anna Keay making a good case against the depiction of Monmouth as an empty headed greedy idiot prone to be used by every opposition politician, or, alternatively, wanting the crown from the start (both of which his enemies said about him), and for the disastrous fallout between father and son being as much Charles' fault as Monmouth's. Even the unofficial reconciliation between them near the end of Charles' life, and Charles' intentions of calling his son back from exile, is actually backed up with chapter and verse, and I thought Morgan the novelist had made that one up for sure so the central relationship doesn't end on a bad note.
Otoh Keay the biographer is harsher on the younger Monmouth than Morgan the novelist while being more admiring of the older. Mind you, she's not condemning; but she does provide the numbers of how much money young James spends on clothing alone, and that's just part of the inevitable result of giving a teenager after a somewhat poor childhood unrestricted access to every worldly indulgence at a court that made all the preceding ones seem tame by comparision in licenteousness. For Keay, the key shift that turned Monmouth from young Restoration rake to responsible human being happens at age 22 when he's part of the French-Dutch war and experiences the realities of battle after knowing just the fun of dressing up as a soldier. What's remarkable then isn't that he turns out to be capable of physical bravery but that ever subsequently, he shows caring about his men (keeping pushing for them to get paid, the lack of paying of soldiers being all too common vice of the era, and lobbying with his father for hospitals for veterans being built), and also distaste for needless death (when he had the job of crushing a Scottish rebellion and found part of the army continued killing even after the battle had ended, he put an end to it and when word came from London that there shouldn't have been any prisoners, he wrote back that killing prisoners was what butchers did, not soldiers, and he wouldn't).
She also makes a good case for Monmouth not seeking the crown for himself until late in the game (i.e. after his father had died), arguing his support from and friendship with his cousins William of Orange and Mary depended on that, as they were in fact the legitimate Protestant claimants (and would turn out to claim the throne from Mary's father, James II., contender for the "most disastrous Stuart king ever" title despite such rivals as Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I., after Monmouth's death). What's truly appalling to read is the account of Monmouth's death and the aftermath. His followers were butchered in the "Bloody Assisses" (meaning they got the full hanged, drawn and quartered treatment), and while Monmouth himself was beheaded, the executioner bungled the job badly, resorting after five ineffective strokes with the axe and a still twitching Monmouth to hacking off the head with a knife, and when he finally held it up, no one cheered but many cried.
Charles II. was generally fond of his illegitimate children (and provided for them, which wasn't self evident), and Keay's speculation as to why the relationship with Monmouth was extra intense rings plausible: she points out all the others had living mothers who fought and sometimes schemed for them, but Monmouth didn't, and even when his mother HAD been alive, Charles, who'd been 18 when this first child was born, had tried to kidnap him from her, not once but three times (the last time successful), meaning Charles really was everything to this particular son, and the jealousy this inspired would contribute to dooming him in the end. It's a compelling and tragic story to read, and it's hard to disagree with the physician James Welwood, who wrote to Mary of Orange about her cousin:
"Monmouth seem'd to be born for a better Fate; for the first part of his life was all Sunshine, though the rest was clouded. He was Brave, Generous, Affable, and extremely Handsome: Constant in his Friendships, just to His Word, and an utter enemy to all sorts of Cruelty. He was easy in his Nature, and fond of popular Applause which led him insensibly into all his Misfortunes; But wherever might be the hidden Designs of some working Heads he embark'd with, his own were noble, and chiefly aim'd at the Good of his Country."
The Fortunes of Francis Barber by Michael Bundock deals with one of the few black inhabitants of Georgian London we know something about: Francis Barber. The reason why we know about Francis is in the subtitle: "The true story of the Jamaican slave who became Samuel Johnson's heir". Francis Barber started life on a Jamaica plantation as the property of his maybe biological father, Colonel Bathurst, who took him with him when the plantation ran into financial trouble and Bathurst returned (or came, he was actually born on Jamaica) to England to die. (Which he did a few years later, Francis was officially freed in his will.) The child Francis, who in Jamaica wasn't called Francis yet but had the generic slave name Quashey, was then baptized and, at the instigation of Colonel Bathurst's son Dr. Bathurst, who was anti slavery, given to Dr. Samuel Johnson (recently widowed, in the throws of very deep depression and in need of cheering up) as a servant. And thus began an association that lasted for the rest of Johnson's life; Johnson being one of the most famous men in England, it meant that Francis Barber shows up in a lot of people's memoirs and letters as well. Becoming Johnson's main heir also meant he was involved in a very nasty inheritance struggle, since several white friends thought they'd have been far more deserving. He did get his inheritance, and a novelist would end the story here, with Francis, his wife and children moving to Johnson's hometown Lichfield to start a new life, with Francis becoming England's first black school master. But real life unfortunately allowed for no happy ending. The school wasn't a success, the money was gone, and Francis was dependent on help from old time friends like my guy Boswell when he died in poverty.
Michael Bundock has the problem familiar to biographers of servants, that very few first hand source material is available; a very few letters of Francis survive, and he also told Boswell about his life when Boswell was researching his biography of Johnson; Boswell's notes are the best we have on Francis' own view of his life, which was a bit different from how Johnson saw it, and much different from the view anti-Francis folk from Johnson's circle like John Hawkins or Hester Thrale took. (Hawkins, who published the very first Johnson biography two years before Boswell finished his, concludes it with a five page rant on how much he hates Francis Barber, and that includes some racist stuff on how Francis' white wife was a) disgusting for having married him in the first place, and b) how she surely cheats on him, since their kids are light skinned.) With these obstacles in mind, it's not surprising that the book at times is less of a classic biography and more an analysis of the story of slavery in Britain during Francis' life time, the general situation of free black people there, etc. I don't mean this as a criticism: all of it is tremendously interesting to read. (And often both chilling and infuriating, as in the opening chapters describing the situation in Jamaica during Francis' early childhood; Bundock quotes from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, who started out as the overseer of a large sugar estate and then became the owner of a smallholding, noting down the floggings of both male and female slaves and the constant sexual abuse of female ones just as matter of factly as the details of the weather or the books he read.) Just that Francis himself, as a person, remains more a sketch than a portrait. He and Dr. Johnson developed what was very much a father-son relationship, but that doesn't mean Francis always agreed with what Johnson (who was very much anti slavery, but also very much the type To Know Best What's Good For You) had in mind for him, not to mention that if you're a teenager in a house where all the other residents are over 50 and prone to be either depressed or argumentative, you could be forgiven for wanting to leave, which is what Francis did for a while, first working for an apothecary and then joining the navy, before returning to Johnson. He also was social and independently minded enough to find his own circle of friends (there's a letter excerpt from a visitor's at Johnson's who describes Francis sitting with some "of his fellow Africans", "their sooty faces all looking up" when the man entered, for example), not just relying on Johnson's, and, as Hester Thrale, who diidn't like him, grudgingly admitted "not bad looking for a blackamoor". But all too often, there's a limit on what a biographer can speculate if there is no first hand testimony. How did Francis and his later wife Elizabeth Ball meet, for example? What was their relationship really like? Thrale and Hawkins accuse him simultanously of being jealous (Mrs. Thrale makes the obvious allusion when calling his wife "his Desdemona") and of being stupid for thinking his wife's children were his; otoh, Dr. Johnson fully accepted Elizabeth as a sort of daughter in law, gave her his dead wife's Common Prayer book (it survives, and has inscriptions by both), and the couple remained with each other through thick and thin, so you can make educated guesses, but you can't know for sure because there are no letters surviving to each other.
Similarly, we can make educated guesses what Francis thought of the big trials involving slaves seeking their freedom that took place in London while he was there, like the Somerset case, but we simply don't know (as opposed to knowing what Johnson thought). And so forth. One wishes for a novel, because a novelist, not bound to what can be proven, could fill in Francis' thoughts and feelings.
Like many a biography, this one also works a an analysis of biographies and how narrative bias works. To quote from a passage dealing with quotes.
In her "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson" (1786), (Hester Thrale) recounted that when Johnson's cat Hodge had grown old,
Mr. Johnson always went out himself to buy Hodge's dinner, that Francis the Black's delicacy might not be hurt, as seeing himself employed for the convencience of a quadruped.
The story is intended to be comical in its use of the pseudo-Johnsonian vocabulary "The convenience of a quadruped." It is also intended to show Johnson in a good light, willing to stoop to menial tasks rather than give offence to his employee. On both these accounts, it succeeds. But is is impossible to miss the sneer at Barber in the phrase "that Francis the black's delicacy might not be hurt" - there is clearly an implication that he is getting above himself. There were other servants in the household (as (Hester Thrale) knew), so Barber was not the only one to benefit from Johnson's action, but he alone is the object of Mrs. Thrale's jibe. It is not just any servant who is giving himself airs; it is a particular black servant. Boswell's version of the same story, published in his "Life of Johnson", provides a revealing contrast:
I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having the trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.
In this account the dig at Barber does not appear, and Johnson's actions are for the benefit of all the servants, not just Barber.
(Boswell in general fares well in this book, which you wouldn't think given that Boswell, as opposed to Johnson, was pro slavery and the subject is a former slave. But Boswell truly liked Francis Barber, and Michael Bundock makes a good case that he did so in a non-patronising manner, writing to and about Barber not different than to his white friends, and was there for him when Barber fell on hard times.)
All in all, I found the book very much worth reading, and the frustrations I have are not the author's fault, but that of the source material availability.
The Last Royal Rebel by Anna Keay, subtitle, "The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth", has no such source material difficulties. Her main character has had a lot of bad press in his time (unsuccessfully rebelling with the victor writing your story will do that), but not only is he prominent in a lot of people's letters, memoirs, etc., but we have his own letters as well, and plenty accounts from both friends and enemies to provide a three dimensional picture. Our hero is the oldest and favourite illegitimate son of Charles II., and while I've read a novel about him which I've reviewed here and of course came across numerous references in biographies of other people, notably his father, but this is the first non-fictional biography about Monmouth himself I've read.
First of all, I was surprised that some of what I had assumed novelist Jude Morgan to have invented in his novel was actually historical fact, such as Monmouth's closeness to his aunt (though only five years older than him), Charles II.' favourite sister Henriette Anne (Minette), and how much her husband, Philippe d'Orleans (Monsieur, famously homosexual but no less petty and authoritarian with his wife for that) resented it. Also, the central father-son relationship between Charles and Monmouth comes across as very similar in both novel and biography, with biographer Anna Keay making a good case against the depiction of Monmouth as an empty headed greedy idiot prone to be used by every opposition politician, or, alternatively, wanting the crown from the start (both of which his enemies said about him), and for the disastrous fallout between father and son being as much Charles' fault as Monmouth's. Even the unofficial reconciliation between them near the end of Charles' life, and Charles' intentions of calling his son back from exile, is actually backed up with chapter and verse, and I thought Morgan the novelist had made that one up for sure so the central relationship doesn't end on a bad note.
Otoh Keay the biographer is harsher on the younger Monmouth than Morgan the novelist while being more admiring of the older. Mind you, she's not condemning; but she does provide the numbers of how much money young James spends on clothing alone, and that's just part of the inevitable result of giving a teenager after a somewhat poor childhood unrestricted access to every worldly indulgence at a court that made all the preceding ones seem tame by comparision in licenteousness. For Keay, the key shift that turned Monmouth from young Restoration rake to responsible human being happens at age 22 when he's part of the French-Dutch war and experiences the realities of battle after knowing just the fun of dressing up as a soldier. What's remarkable then isn't that he turns out to be capable of physical bravery but that ever subsequently, he shows caring about his men (keeping pushing for them to get paid, the lack of paying of soldiers being all too common vice of the era, and lobbying with his father for hospitals for veterans being built), and also distaste for needless death (when he had the job of crushing a Scottish rebellion and found part of the army continued killing even after the battle had ended, he put an end to it and when word came from London that there shouldn't have been any prisoners, he wrote back that killing prisoners was what butchers did, not soldiers, and he wouldn't).
She also makes a good case for Monmouth not seeking the crown for himself until late in the game (i.e. after his father had died), arguing his support from and friendship with his cousins William of Orange and Mary depended on that, as they were in fact the legitimate Protestant claimants (and would turn out to claim the throne from Mary's father, James II., contender for the "most disastrous Stuart king ever" title despite such rivals as Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I., after Monmouth's death). What's truly appalling to read is the account of Monmouth's death and the aftermath. His followers were butchered in the "Bloody Assisses" (meaning they got the full hanged, drawn and quartered treatment), and while Monmouth himself was beheaded, the executioner bungled the job badly, resorting after five ineffective strokes with the axe and a still twitching Monmouth to hacking off the head with a knife, and when he finally held it up, no one cheered but many cried.
Charles II. was generally fond of his illegitimate children (and provided for them, which wasn't self evident), and Keay's speculation as to why the relationship with Monmouth was extra intense rings plausible: she points out all the others had living mothers who fought and sometimes schemed for them, but Monmouth didn't, and even when his mother HAD been alive, Charles, who'd been 18 when this first child was born, had tried to kidnap him from her, not once but three times (the last time successful), meaning Charles really was everything to this particular son, and the jealousy this inspired would contribute to dooming him in the end. It's a compelling and tragic story to read, and it's hard to disagree with the physician James Welwood, who wrote to Mary of Orange about her cousin:
"Monmouth seem'd to be born for a better Fate; for the first part of his life was all Sunshine, though the rest was clouded. He was Brave, Generous, Affable, and extremely Handsome: Constant in his Friendships, just to His Word, and an utter enemy to all sorts of Cruelty. He was easy in his Nature, and fond of popular Applause which led him insensibly into all his Misfortunes; But wherever might be the hidden Designs of some working Heads he embark'd with, his own were noble, and chiefly aim'd at the Good of his Country."
no subject
Date: 2016-09-14 05:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-14 04:52 pm (UTC)