Pricks, Devils, and Phlegm. John Aubrey and the Fertile Facts of English Biography.

A Genius for History

In about a month’s time, on 12th March, it will be the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Aubrey. Aubrey is not one of the most prominent names in English Literature, but he is among the most curious. Born in 1626, Aubrey lived through the tumult of the seventeenth century—his time at Oxford University was interrupted by the Civil War. He is known to us today as one of the great preservers of information of that period.

In an age when everything was new—the New Learning, the New World, the New Science, the new commonwealth, the new politics, the new religion—the age of Bacon, Hobbes, Hooke, Locke, and Coke—Aubrey was a dedicated hunter and preserver of the old.

An antiquarian rather than a writer, Aubrey wished to collect the world’s fragments before they went to dust. He spent his life gathering material to be deposited in the Ashmolean Museum (later transferred to the Bodleian Library). He was, according to Adam Fox’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography profile, “the author of the first English books entirely devoted to archaeology, place names, and folklore.” He was also interested in astronomy, navigation, and applied mathematics and knew many of the great scientists of the time.

Aubrey was a restless collector of information: we would call him an infovore. His work covered a scientific commonplace book, a work of natural history, drawings of buildings to be demolished, two plays, a miscellany of supernatural phenomena, an essay on educational reform, among many others.

As his friend George Ent said, he was one “whose boundlesse mind / Scarce within Learnings compasse is confin’d.” In his huge capacity for saving and collecting information and manuscripts, Aubrey had a genius for history.

Aubrey’s Fertile Facts

Foremost among his literary accomplishments, Aubrey is a seminal biographer—one the greatest tellers of anecdotes in English Literature. Among his many manuscripts is Brief Lives, which is full of stories which might otherwise be lost about interesting and eminent men and women of his time, including Bacon, Hobbes, and Hooke.

Aubrey has a special talent for finding what Virginia Woolf called—in an essay about biography—“the creative fact; the fertile fact.” It is in the little things that Aubrey’s subjects live most vividly, such as the fact that Thomas Hobbes sang to himself when he thought he could not be overheard, or that flies landed on ...