Biography’s Victorian values: why do modern Lives adhere to a 19th-century model?

Literary form needs refreshing in any genre, but most modern life stories seem stuck in a deadening past

The history of the novel is the history of the reinvention of the novel. Each generation seeks to find its own “novelty”, not just in terms of substance, psychology and subject but as regards form, structure and voice. By contrast, biography seems remarkably consistent. There is a deep similarity between those worthy (and often fascinating) 19th-century volumes – Scott’s Napoleon, Lockhart’s Scott, Carlyle’s Frederick The Great, Froude’s Carlyle – and the contemporary biographies of figures like Philip Larkin and Roy Jenkins, Muriel Spark and Margaret Thatcher. Most biographies tend to take the advice of the King in Alice In Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop”. Moreover, they also tend to emulate the King’s style. Carroll tells us he says this “gravely”.

Why hasn’t biography been as daring as the novel? Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians is often cited as breaking with a reverential and panegyric tradition. Such a tradition did exist – Lockhart’s invented deathbed scene of Scott sagely dispensing wisdom is unlikely, given the poor man had been trepanned, filled with opium and left thinking he was King Lear. But some of the shock value of the 19th-century biography has been forgotten: revealing the state of the Carlyle’s marriage brought no end of problems for Froude. But Strachey’s cock-snooking, slightly sophomoric tone did not change the basic narrative form of the biography.

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