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Lifepaths: geography and biography
Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 449–458 www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Lifepaths: geography and biography Stephen Danielsa,* and Catherine Nashb a
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK b Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, London E 4NS, UK
Abstract Despite the differences identified in the famous clerihew on the subject, the arts of geography and biography are historically connected. Narratives of the lifepath in western culture have been plotted in an explicitly geographical way, through the metaphor and technique of mapping. This is evident in a variety of forms of life writing: spiritual autobiographies, travel writings, novels, educational texts, sociological studies and memoirs of professional geographers. The papers which follow this introductory essay focus on relations between script and space in the making of life histories, both individual and collective. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Geography; Biography; Culture
The Art of Biography Is different from Geography Geography is about Maps But Biography is about Chaps1 . This epigram, a so called clerihew, is well known, but, on the face of it, puzzling. From the perspective of current Anglophone human geography, it prompts a response along the lines that geography is about more than maps, at least conventional topographic maps, and biography, in its concern with issues of subjectivity and identity, is as much, if not more, about women than men (let alone the clerihew’s clubbable version of English masculinity, the chap). There is now an established tradition of scholarship, using a variety of sources from census data to memoirs, which charts lives, often ordinary lives, in terms of movement and settlement.2 A popular genre assumes the style of a quest or * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Daniels). 0305-7488/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0305-7488(03)00043-4
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pursuit in which the life story of the biographer is entwined with that of their fugitive subject.3 Studies of biography as a form of cultural expression have identified geographical variations, including national styles, such as the importance of wayfaring autobiography in the making of American identities and the cult of authors’ home places in British literary biography.4 The spaces of polite society which framed the rise of modern life writing have been specified, coffee houses and clubs which provided convivial table talk for male biography, private writing desks which provided a site for women to arrange their mementoes and write their memoirs.5 The conceptual dispersal, or ‘decentering’, of the autonomous individual and unified life, has, if anything, emphasised the intersection of the geographical and biographical, in overlapping domains of self and place, positionality and identity, spatiality and subjectivity.6 Professional geography, a discipline still predicated for some authors on the assumption that the world they describe is more interesting than they are, has taken a reflexive, autobiographical turn.7 The arts of geography and biography appear closely connected; life histories are also, to coin a phrase, life geographies. The clerihew on geography and biography appears more intriguing when we consider the anthology it was written to introduce and the author who gave the verse form its name. Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) was well known in his time as a Tory journalist, detective story writer and friend of G.K. Chesterton, the leading Catholic conservative writer. Biography for Beginners was issued in three editions between 1905 and 1925. Its clerihews commemorated, or rather debunked, famous historical and contemporary figures, especially progressive and intellectual ones, in often meter mangling form. Thus John Stuart Mill, By a mighty effort of will, Overcame his natural bonhomie, And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy’. A nonsensical ‘Index of Psychology’ at the end of Biography for Beginners unrelated to the main text, included ‘Kindness to animals (JOB, MARX).Y.M.C.A, unfitness for (WREN)’. Biography for Beginners, subtitled ‘for the use of Upper Forms’ is a public school-boy style send-up of two dominant forms of biography: Victorian style ‘exemplary lives’, aligned to progressive narratives of selfimprovement, and consciously modern psychological ‘exposures’ of character which cut into and across traditional life stories.8 Each clerihew in Biography for Beginners is illustrated with a ‘diagram’, a cartoon by Chesterton. That for the Introductory clerihew (Fig. 1) shows the figure of the geographer inspecting a globe through a lens, and on his shoulders, the figure of the biographer inspecting him, or rather the globe of his head. The arts of Biography and Geography are thus portrayed as different, but not distinct, two aspects of the same sensibility. Geography at the time, as least as represented by the Royal Geographical Society, might well be caricatured as a collection of maps and chaps. A more precise target is the genre of selfinflating travel books like Everywhere: The Memoirs of an Explorer (1924) by A. Henry Savage Landor which was prefaced by an illustration of its double subject: the author at a globe. Bentley and Chesterton were both critics of high imperialism and corporate capitalism, chiding global adventurism for eroding (in Bentley’s words) a regard for ‘the rural life of settled communities’ throughout Europe and the bonds between cultivators and the soil.9 In an essay on Rudyard Kipling, Chesterton attacked the culture of the ‘globetrotter’. ‘The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round. under all this vast illusion of cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and Reuter’s agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree and
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Fig. 1. G.K. Chesterton, The arts of geography and biography, from Edmund Clerihew [Bentley], Biography for Beginners, London, 1905.
that temple, with this harvest or that drinking song’.10 The culture of ‘real life’ could best be comprehended by a pilgrimage like excursion in countryside and a concern for ones own life as a social and spiritual quest.11 From this conservative perspective, land and life (including the life of any individual) were closely, ecologically, interrelated. Maps might play a part in representing this relationship, for example, the sketch map showing the route for Hillaire Belloc’s ‘hike-cum-Catholicpilgrimage’ Path to Rome (1902). 12 But for such pilgrims, the optics of Geography and Biography, as
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depicted in the clerihew and cartoon, were a ridiculous reduction, a ‘splendid parochialism’, in Chesterton’s words, ‘outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing’.13 Framed in this way, by the conservative culture of its time, the clerihew unfolds a field of enquiry it might seem to us now to foreclose, a field traversed by the various ways lives are inscribed in time and space, plotted as both story-lines and routeways. Such plots are shaped by meta-narratives on the course, or development, of nature and society as well as of the self, and theoretical propositions on relations of public and private life, thought and action, free will and determinism. Plotlines are inscribed in texts, institutions and material sites and monuments which portray a culture’s collective memory and destiny. Cultural forms as various as fairy stories, gardens, novels, prisons, professional careers, life insurance, documentary films and war memorials set out plotlines of various form—linear, cyclical, labyrinthine— which people draw on to shape their own lifestories.14 Here we set out some aspects of a basic plotline, the life path as it is represented in some eras of Anglophone culture as a map of moral guidance.
Plotting lifepaths In Classical and Judao-Christian culture, the ideal of a right way, a path of moral rectitude, is compared to the life journeys mortals actually make. Christianity’s sacred text is a biography, or four complementary biographies, from which the Church singled out certain journeys, from the flight to Bethlehem to the road to Calvary, as well a some epic journeys from the Old Testament, to construct a path to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Medieval Christianity transformed the very figure of mankind into a lifelong pilgrim, on a journey to move their soul from this world to the next. The journey was inscribed in itineraries to shrines, in devotional texts and in iconic devices like mazes and mappae mundi designed to structure pilgrimage as a meditative performance, a physical as well as mental form of spiritual exercise.15 Pilgrimage was given a new lease of life in the Reformation as a metaphor for personal salvation vested in scriptural truth and for the struggle to free the soul from a corrupt Church. Maps in Protestant bibles plotted the historical as well as prophetic reality of Exodus, the epic journey from bondage to freedom, ignorance to enlightenment, for Christians who saw themselves as latter day Israelites, Chosen People. The journeys of the Evangelists were added to those of Christ to substantiate a theme of peregrination, a form of exegesis which transformed the whole Bible into a highly spatial text, a set of stories which were also itineraries.16 A substantial secondary literature developed in the form of moral guide books and spiritual autobiographies. In contrast to the miraculous Lives of saints and martyrs, guide books like The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, first published in 1606, charted the difficult spiritual progress of ordinary mortals in everyday situations. Spiritual autobiographies take the form of private journals, plotting the set backs and successes on the path to salvation. They formed a literary province open to everyone, men, women and children, who could, or aspired to, read and write. Following his influential spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), the Puritan preacher John Bunyan published the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) a guidebook which charts salvation as journey through hostile, often dangerous territory. The hero Christian’s ‘walk through the wilderness of this world’ takes him through places which helped define the moral landscape of Protestant culture: the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Beulah Land, the Celestial City, and the ‘straight and narrow’ path of righteousness. At the time The Pilgrim’s Progress was a subversive social as well as spiritual text. It champions the mobile world of vagrants, ex-soldiers and itinerant preachers excluded from the polite world of landownership and the Anglican
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Church.17 The representational space of the journey cuts across the gentlemanly geographies of the time, of topographical maps, landscape prints and prospect literature.18 In the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress focussed on the salvation of Christian’s wife Christiana and their children, the Guide pulls from his pocket ‘a map of all the ways leading to or from the Celestial City’. ‘Who that goeth on pilgrimage but would have one of these maps about him’, notes the narrator, ‘that he may look when he is at a stand, which is the way he must take?’. This is not a topographical map, but ‘God’s book’ and the word map here alludes to scriptural flow charts, like Bunyan’s own broadsheet Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation, which were visual aids for barely literate.19 Subsequent editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress were illustrated with topographical landscapes and maps of Christian’s route; reworkings for polite audiences which envisioned Christian’s walk with God as more of a scenic stroll, closing the space between the Word with the world.20 Geographical discovery, in John Locke’s phrase, ‘enlarged the sphere of contemplation’, that field of knowledge which blended observational enquiry and metaphysical speculation. For European states coming to power through overseas and imperial trade, it opened a series of spaces—domestic, national, global—through which life stories were plotted.21 Images of the geographer as a young man at his desk by a window, with maps and compasses in hand, brought together mundane and spiritual dimensions of the lifeworld and the task of charting the way, the truth and the light.22 Spiritual guides continued to be published for people of every station and occupation, farmers, tradesmen, mothers, widows. For example, a seaman’s guide Navigation Spiritualized by John Flavell, first published in 1664, continued to be issued until 1796. These allegorical lives came to terms with the phenomenology of daily life, its places, tasks, routines and accidents, sometimes to the point where the Puritan hermeneutic was inverted. As a moral world was assembled from a primary material world of sense impressions, so the self became something made and remade in different situations, cast adrift from the continuity of the soul. Life took on meaning from an engagement with the material world which was more than a form of spiritual warfare. The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe is a key text in this transition. It transposes the genre of spiritual biography into a realisitic adventure story, a traveller’s tale charted with empirical precision. Robinson Crusoe sets the standard stages of rebellion, punishment, repentance, conversion and deliverance in named places, York, Hull, London, Portugal, Brazil, the Caribbean and the island that we learn eventually, as the story and its geography unfold, is located in the Gulf of Orinoco.23 The fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe (1719) was illustrated with a double hemisphere map, by the leading London cartographer Hermann Moll, on which our hero’s travels are plotted, including those in the later books around Cape Horn and through the East Indies.24 Defoe’s other writings contributed to the geography of self improvement, his Compleat English Tradesman (1732) and his fictional Life.of Captain Singleton (1719) which shows the development of geographical knowledge through a life of trading and buccaneering, progressing to reading maps and descriptive geography, and keeping a journal of an active life.25 Robinson Crusoe became a primer for practical education. It was the only book Rousseau would allow the child in his educational tract Emile. ‘I want him to learn in detail not from books but from things, all that must be known in such a situation; I want him to think he is Robinson himself’. To teach geography to the child, you should reject ‘globes, cosmic spheres and maps’. ‘So many devices! Why all these representations?’ He should begin by walking over the place where he lives, noting the houses, rivers, the sun’s position. ‘Let him make a map of all these things himself. the goal is not that he knows exactly the topography of the region, but that he knows the means of learning it’. Most pupils
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‘know maps, and he makes them. Here are new ornaments for his room’26 Rousseau recast Crusoe as an inversion of the puritan pilgrim; life was a path to be taken by straying from the beaten track, the straight and narrow, to go where curiosity led. By the end of the 18th century exploration had become established as a mode of autobiography, in journeys of observation and introspection, in pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge. Scientists, artists and poets composed memoirs which fashioned their lives in terms of travel, not just between places (sites of patronage, natural scenery) but between different roles, and forms of identity, in a search for knowledge and cultural recognition.27 Images of childhood subjectivity drew on geographical discourse. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister Mignon pledges her silver shoe buckles to get hold of a small atlas to make sense of her obsessive longing for the warmth South.28 ‘Spots of time’, the key phrase in Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, denoting haunting loci of childhood memory, had a currency in contemporary texts on classical and biblical geography.29 The term career was coined around 1800 to denote ‘a course of professional life and employment, which affords opportunity for progress or advance in the world’, and carried with it older sense of career as a head-long gallop along a road or race course.30 Novels focussed on the life courses of heroes and heroines, negotiating sites of curiosity and natural passion on the one hand and those of convention and social virtue on the other, as, in graphic form, did allegorical maps, of childhood, matrimony and education.31 The sense of a geographical life was pronounced in the works of those concerned with depicting and designing the land. The landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752–1818) saw his art as improving the ‘character’ of places in ways which would complement the character of the families who owned them, renovating the twinned traditions of topography and genealogy, such that every place should ‘tell its own tale’. But his own career was an anxious journey, rushing from place, trying to forge a profession in a world he found increasingly hostile, failing in his pursuit to fashion landscape gardens as arenas of moral stability and polite consensus. Repton’s memoir characterises his life as a hazardous voyage, ‘I push off my little bark into the sea unknown.. I have glided through Life’s calms and struggled with its tempests’.32 The landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837) portrayed episodes of his private life, of childhood, courtship and family life, in views of his home region in Suffolk.33 Imperceptible in the painter’s life time to the gallery-going art public, this personal geography was commemorated shortly after his death in his friend C.R. Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843) largely a selection of the painter’s private correspondence which expressed an affinity between his life and landscape with an account of the sites which inspired the art. Leslie’s book was part of a growing movement of British cultural tourism focussed on the places associated with painters and poets, less to understand the work they inspired than the lives which were seen to be implicated in them.34 It was a movement which in turn influenced the self-consciousness of artists, like the painter Paul Nash, whose auto-biography, focussing on personal epiphanies in haunting places, he called his ‘geogbiography’.35 Life history, plotted as a story of self-reflection and self-improvement, has been deployed as a method of social investigation and reform, becoming a paradigm of early 20th century American urban sociology. It emerged from the University of Chicago, and a vision of the city as a testing ground for moral order, and focussed on the lives of various social deviants—thieves, prostitutes, hobos, alcoholics, drug addicts—as they shuttled between spells of institutional discipline and life on the street. Life histories, as told by the subjects themselves (through recorded interview or written memoir) and glossed by the investigators with evidence from official reports on medical or criminal history, were intended to have a ‘theoretical as well as therapeutic value’. The canonical case study is The Jack-Roller (1930).
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A jack-roller was a young runaway who robbed other vagrants when they were drunk, asleep or knocked unconscious. Stanley, the Jack-Roller of the book, came from a poor Polish immigrant family, and tells his story in his mid-twenties when his ‘delinquent career’ was over, ‘now settled into the warmth and congenial atmosphere of my own home with my wife and child. Already I have taken out a life insurance policy for him, which will mature when he is old enough for college’. The Jack-Roller plots his own life like a folk tale, from his upbringing by a ‘cruel stepmother’ who ‘started me on the downward path’ heading for ‘the lure of the underworld’. He sees his life as largely determined by Fate, ‘a canoe on a storm-swept sea.. I had as much chance of controlling my desires to drift with the current of the underworld as the canoe had of braving the storm’, ‘hitting the road’ west to try to make a fresh start in the approved frontier fashion before drifting back to the ‘old home town’ and a course which inevitably led the House of Correction (or Corruption as he called it), before a kindly Mrs Smith helped him break away from the rooming district ‘underworld’ and become a successful suburban salesmen, husband and father, a lifepath which the study plots on social-area maps of Chicago.36 Despite critiques of the history of geography as a gallery of heroes, the study is still dominated by the careers of influential individuals and their disciples, if they are placed in wider social and cultural worlds. When the International Geographical Union initiated its commission of the History of Geographic Thought in the 1970s, it intended to free the history of geography from the history of discovery and exploration, focussing on the works of scholars, including cartographers and natural historians as well as university geographers, in the form of a series of ‘bio-bibliographical studies’. The series editor, T.W. Freeman, called on contributors to describe the ‘social, economic and political circumstances’ of these geographers, as ‘citizens of the world’.37 A reflexive approach to the biography of geographers was conducted in the late 1970s by Ann Buttimer, from a humanistic perspective which focussed on the role of geography in the meaning of lives of ‘senior colleagues’ in north European and north American Geography. Through autobiographical essays, shaped by interviews, the study showed how geographical projects, as enacted in careers of research, teaching and administration, reflected and shaped the life journeys of the geographers in question.38 Some came up with strong plot-lines. William R. Mead opens his account by emulating the opening paragraph of Robinson Crusoe, but unlike Defoe’s ‘loose and unguided’ hero goes on to trace his farming-family roots in the local countryside of Buckinghamshire, his knowledge of the detailed nuances of landscape gained on walks and rides as well as the vivid children’s books which evoked real and imaginary places. T.W. Freeman’s childhood interest in places came with his family’s movements in the Methodist ministry, ‘in the tradition of John Wesley’s preachers’, notably those which coincided with his formal studies of geography, at school in South Wales, at University in Leeds. The very idea of lifepaths shapes Torsten Ha¨gerstrand’s memoir. His mother inculcated a consciousness of the flow of time, his schoolteacher father the spatial, craftsman impulse to touch and shape; his first research task was to ‘trace the life from year to year’ of all 10,000 people who inhabited his home parish, from 1840 to 1940, succeeding in condensing ‘whole story in one little diagram’; Hagerstrand subsequently developed the paths and projects of time-geographic as a ‘scientific observer’ before Buttimer convinced him to modify the diagrams in terms of those ‘crucial dimensions of human temporality which seemed to so essential to her view of life-images and perceptions of time on the one hand, and bio-ecological rhythms on the other’, a modification reflected in the diagram of Ha¨gerstrand’s career and his ‘eye-witness/participant’ perspective on the ‘paths and projects’ of time-geography, incorporating ‘memories, feelings, knowledge, imagination and goals’ as elements of a ‘living landscape’.39
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Lifewriting and lifespace The papers which follow focus on relations between script and space in the making of life histories. Rhys Jones analyses the life history of a 12th century Welsh king, as compiled by his immediate successors, as a document, which sought to legitimise both geneaological and territorial power. Like other forms of medieval biography, notably hagiographies, the Historia Gruffudd va Kenan entwined life, legend and landscape. It plotted episodes of exile and captivity and periods of good government in Gwynned—building churches, gardens and orchards—to elide the trajectories of king and kingdom. Brian Short considers the theme of collective biography and territorial legimacy in a forest region of late Victorian England. The documents at issue are the notebooks of recollections of over a 100 dwellers of Ashdown Forest in the Sussex Weald, as they went about their customary practices, transcribed in their homes by a local solicitor and advocate of commons preservation, William Augustus Rapier. Like folk-minded ethnographers of the time, Rapier collected the foresters’ recollections in terms of conservationist arguments about history, culture and place; the ‘life-space’ of the forest is drawn in terms of routines of work and family in short distance, repeated journeys. In a contrasting, consciously global sphere of late Victorian culture Nicola Thomas uses the correspondence and diaries of Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India, to reconstruct the family and friendship networks which defined her actual and desired life space, as it stretched between Britain, India and the United States. By re-ordering the archive, as set out by her husband George, networks of female friendship and support are spun out from established circles of public and private life to describe a life of sickness and dislocation. Terri-ann White reconstructs the myths and facts of the course of her own family life over five generations of a female line, as it runs along and across established social histories of the settlement of western Australia, and in places runs out into apparently empty narrative space. The sense of fragmentation is not just a matter of fragmentary sources, such as an inscribed monument, list of names and addresses and a court report, but of episodes of reticence and shame. Elizabeth Baigent considers the major text of British collective biography, the Dictionary of National Biography, in terms of the making and remaking of national identity. Like historical atlases and encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries were monuments to late 19th century liberal nationalism. The original DNB was male, metropolitan and mesmerized by celebrity and described a national space which excluded not only the private sphere of many women’s life and work but also that of male money making. From the less metropolitan, more academic perspective of Oxford University Press, the new DNB seeks to recast the geography of British biography, but looking at less glamorous lives beyond London and the British mainland, eroding the boundaries between private and public life, and considering how the very profession of geography defined lives that had in the first DNB been described in terms of other careers and callings.
Acknowledgements The articles following this are based on papers given at the session ‘Life Histories/Life Geographies’ at the RGS/IBG Annal Conference at Leicester in 1999. Thanks to the contributors for their patience during the time it has taken to reach publication.
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Notes 1. Introductory remarks to Edmund Clerihew [Bentley], Biography for Beginners, London, 1905. 2. K. Halfacree, and P. Boyle, The challenge facing migration research: the case for a biographical approach, Progress in Human Geography, 17 (1993) 333–348; C. Pooley, and J. Turbull, Changing home an workplace in Victorian London: the life of Henry Jaques, shirtmaker, Urban History, 24 (1997) 148–178; S. Smith and J. Watson (Eds), Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Minneapolis, 1996; D. Bertaux (Ed), Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, Beverley Hills, 1981; L.L. Langness and G. Frank, Lives: An Anthropologlcal Approach to Biography, Novato, CA, 1982. 3. R. Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, London, 1985; R. Lichenstein, and I. Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room, London, 1999. 4. R.F. Sayre, Autobiography and the making of America in: J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton, 1980, 146–168; J. Schlaeger, Biography: cult as culture in: J. Batchelor (Ed), The Art of Literary Biography, Oxford, 1995, 57–72. 5. R. Holmes, Inventing the truth, in: J. Batchelor (Ed.), The Art of Literary Biography, 15–26;A. Pelz, The desk: excavation site and repository of memories, in: M. Myrone, A. Pelz (Eds), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850, Aldershot, 1999, 134–147. 6. C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, London, 1986; S. Pile, N. Thrift (Eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, London, 1995; R.D. Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness and Moral Concern, Baltimore, 1997; W.H. Epstein (Ed.), Contesting the Subject, West Lafayette, 1991; M. Shortland, R. Yeo (Eds), Telling Lives in Science, Cambridge, 1996, 1–44. 7. P. Moss (Ed), Placing Autobiography in Geography (2001); For an equivocal view, affirming a biographical perspective but hesitant about an autobiographical one, see D.N. Livingstone, Science Space and Hermeneutics, Heidelberg, 2002, 32–38, see also 91–98. 8. The most notable progressive text is Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, first published in 1918. 9. E.C. Bentley, Those Days, Vol. 51, London, 1940, 282–283. 10. G.K. Chesterton, On Mr Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small, in Heretics, London, 1920, 31–46. 11. L. Hunter, G.K. Chesterton: Explorations in Allegory, London, 1979. 12. D. Matless, The uses of cartographic literacy: mapping survey and citizenship in twentieth-century Britain, in: D. Cosgrove (Ed), Mappings, London, 1999, 193–212. 13. Chesterton, On Kipling, 46. 14. C. Steedman, Maps and polar regions: a note on the presentation of childhood subjectivity in fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in: N. Thrift, S. Pile (Eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, London, 1995, 77–92; B. Seaton, The garden autobiography, Garden History, 7 (1979) 101–120; J. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century England, Chicago, 1986, 43–53; W.H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography, Philadelphia, 1987, 139–214; M. Sturken, Personal stories and national meanings, in: M. Rhiel, D. Sutcliffe (Eds), The Seductions of Biography, London, 1998, 31–41. 15. D.C. Connolly, Imagined Pilgrimage in Gothic Art: Maps, Manuscripts and Labyrinths, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, 1998. 16. C. Delano-Smith, and E.M. Ingram, Maps in Bibles 1500–1600: An Illustrated Catalogue, Geneva, 1991. 17. C. Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688, Geneva, 1988, 222–228. 18. J. Turner, Bunyan’s sense of place, in: V. Newby (Ed), The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, Liverpool, 1980, 91–116. 19. J. Bunyan, in: W.R. Owens (Ed.), A Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and damnation, Oxford, 1994, xxiv–xxvii; G. Campbell, The sources of Bunyan’s Mapp of Salvation, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44 (1981) 240–241. 20. G. Hill, Cartographical Curiosities, London, 1984, 24. 21. G. Quilley, The sphere of contemplation: the imagery of global navigation in eighteenth-century England, in: C. Smethurst (Ed.), Romantic Geographies, Glasgow, 1994, 55–64. 22. K. van Berkel, Vermeer and the representation of science, in: W.E. Franits (Ed), The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer, Cambridge, 2001, 138–139.
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23. G.A. Starr, Defore and Spiritual Biography, Princeton, 1965; J.P. Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in ‘Robinson Crusoe’, Baltimore, 1966; H.D. Peck, Robinson Crusoe: the moral geography of limitation, Journal of Narrative Technique, 3 (1973) 2031. 24. D. Reinharz, Cartography, literature and empire: Herman Moll, his maps and friends, Mercator’s World 4 (1999) 32–39. 25. R.J. Mayhew, Geography in eighteenth-century British education, Paedagogica Historica 34 (1998) 731–769, see also 752–753. 26. J.J. Rousseau, Emile, or on Education, New York, 1979, 184–188, see also 169–171. 27. D. Outram, Life-paths: autobiography science and the French Revolution, in: M. shortland, R. Yeo (Eds), Telling Lives in Science, 1996, 281–294; D. Outram, On being Perseus: new knowledge, dislocation and enlightenment exploration, in D. Livingstone, C. Withers (Eds), Geography and Enlightenment, Chicago, 1999, 281–294. 28. Steedman, Maps and Polar Regions, 81. 29. I. Whyte, William Wordsworth’s Guide to the lakes and the geographical tradition, Area 32 (2000) 101–106. 30. Epstein, Recognizing Biography, 139. 31. F. Reitinger, Mapping relationships: allegory, gender and the cartographical image in eighteenth-century England and France, Imago Mundi 51 (1999) 106–136. 32. S. Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England, New Haven, 1999, 21–25. 33. S. Daniels, Love and death across an English garden: Constable’s paintings of his family’s flower and kitchen gardens, Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992) 433–458. 34. S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Cambridge, 1993, 204–205. 35. C.C. Abbot and A. Betram (Eds), Poet and Painter, being the Correspondence between Gordon Bentley and Paul Nash 1910–1946, Oxford, 1955, 214, Our thanks to David Matless for this reference. The memoir was published in P. Nash, Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, London, 1949. 36. C. Shaw, The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story, Chicago, 1966, with an introduction by H.S. Becker. 37. T.W. Freeman, M. Oughton and P. Pinchemel, Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, Vol. 1 (1977) 1–2. 38. A. Buttimer, The Practice of Geography, London, 1983, 1–19. 39. A. Buttimer, The Practice of Geography, London, 1983, 44–77, see also 91, 238–255.
Lifepaths: geography and biography Stephen Danielsa,* and Catherine Nashb a
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK b Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, London E 4NS, UK
Abstract Despite the differences identified in the famous clerihew on the subject, the arts of geography and biography are historically connected. Narratives of the lifepath in western culture have been plotted in an explicitly geographical way, through the metaphor and technique of mapping. This is evident in a variety of forms of life writing: spiritual autobiographies, travel writings, novels, educational texts, sociological studies and memoirs of professional geographers. The papers which follow this introductory essay focus on relations between script and space in the making of life histories, both individual and collective. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Geography; Biography; Culture
The Art of Biography Is different from Geography Geography is about Maps But Biography is about Chaps1 . This epigram, a so called clerihew, is well known, but, on the face of it, puzzling. From the perspective of current Anglophone human geography, it prompts a response along the lines that geography is about more than maps, at least conventional topographic maps, and biography, in its concern with issues of subjectivity and identity, is as much, if not more, about women than men (let alone the clerihew’s clubbable version of English masculinity, the chap). There is now an established tradition of scholarship, using a variety of sources from census data to memoirs, which charts lives, often ordinary lives, in terms of movement and settlement.2 A popular genre assumes the style of a quest or * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Daniels). 0305-7488/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0305-7488(03)00043-4
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pursuit in which the life story of the biographer is entwined with that of their fugitive subject.3 Studies of biography as a form of cultural expression have identified geographical variations, including national styles, such as the importance of wayfaring autobiography in the making of American identities and the cult of authors’ home places in British literary biography.4 The spaces of polite society which framed the rise of modern life writing have been specified, coffee houses and clubs which provided convivial table talk for male biography, private writing desks which provided a site for women to arrange their mementoes and write their memoirs.5 The conceptual dispersal, or ‘decentering’, of the autonomous individual and unified life, has, if anything, emphasised the intersection of the geographical and biographical, in overlapping domains of self and place, positionality and identity, spatiality and subjectivity.6 Professional geography, a discipline still predicated for some authors on the assumption that the world they describe is more interesting than they are, has taken a reflexive, autobiographical turn.7 The arts of geography and biography appear closely connected; life histories are also, to coin a phrase, life geographies. The clerihew on geography and biography appears more intriguing when we consider the anthology it was written to introduce and the author who gave the verse form its name. Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) was well known in his time as a Tory journalist, detective story writer and friend of G.K. Chesterton, the leading Catholic conservative writer. Biography for Beginners was issued in three editions between 1905 and 1925. Its clerihews commemorated, or rather debunked, famous historical and contemporary figures, especially progressive and intellectual ones, in often meter mangling form. Thus John Stuart Mill, By a mighty effort of will, Overcame his natural bonhomie, And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy’. A nonsensical ‘Index of Psychology’ at the end of Biography for Beginners unrelated to the main text, included ‘Kindness to animals (JOB, MARX).Y.M.C.A, unfitness for (WREN)’. Biography for Beginners, subtitled ‘for the use of Upper Forms’ is a public school-boy style send-up of two dominant forms of biography: Victorian style ‘exemplary lives’, aligned to progressive narratives of selfimprovement, and consciously modern psychological ‘exposures’ of character which cut into and across traditional life stories.8 Each clerihew in Biography for Beginners is illustrated with a ‘diagram’, a cartoon by Chesterton. That for the Introductory clerihew (Fig. 1) shows the figure of the geographer inspecting a globe through a lens, and on his shoulders, the figure of the biographer inspecting him, or rather the globe of his head. The arts of Biography and Geography are thus portrayed as different, but not distinct, two aspects of the same sensibility. Geography at the time, as least as represented by the Royal Geographical Society, might well be caricatured as a collection of maps and chaps. A more precise target is the genre of selfinflating travel books like Everywhere: The Memoirs of an Explorer (1924) by A. Henry Savage Landor which was prefaced by an illustration of its double subject: the author at a globe. Bentley and Chesterton were both critics of high imperialism and corporate capitalism, chiding global adventurism for eroding (in Bentley’s words) a regard for ‘the rural life of settled communities’ throughout Europe and the bonds between cultivators and the soil.9 In an essay on Rudyard Kipling, Chesterton attacked the culture of the ‘globetrotter’. ‘The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round. under all this vast illusion of cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and Reuter’s agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree and
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Fig. 1. G.K. Chesterton, The arts of geography and biography, from Edmund Clerihew [Bentley], Biography for Beginners, London, 1905.
that temple, with this harvest or that drinking song’.10 The culture of ‘real life’ could best be comprehended by a pilgrimage like excursion in countryside and a concern for ones own life as a social and spiritual quest.11 From this conservative perspective, land and life (including the life of any individual) were closely, ecologically, interrelated. Maps might play a part in representing this relationship, for example, the sketch map showing the route for Hillaire Belloc’s ‘hike-cum-Catholicpilgrimage’ Path to Rome (1902). 12 But for such pilgrims, the optics of Geography and Biography, as
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depicted in the clerihew and cartoon, were a ridiculous reduction, a ‘splendid parochialism’, in Chesterton’s words, ‘outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing’.13 Framed in this way, by the conservative culture of its time, the clerihew unfolds a field of enquiry it might seem to us now to foreclose, a field traversed by the various ways lives are inscribed in time and space, plotted as both story-lines and routeways. Such plots are shaped by meta-narratives on the course, or development, of nature and society as well as of the self, and theoretical propositions on relations of public and private life, thought and action, free will and determinism. Plotlines are inscribed in texts, institutions and material sites and monuments which portray a culture’s collective memory and destiny. Cultural forms as various as fairy stories, gardens, novels, prisons, professional careers, life insurance, documentary films and war memorials set out plotlines of various form—linear, cyclical, labyrinthine— which people draw on to shape their own lifestories.14 Here we set out some aspects of a basic plotline, the life path as it is represented in some eras of Anglophone culture as a map of moral guidance.
Plotting lifepaths In Classical and Judao-Christian culture, the ideal of a right way, a path of moral rectitude, is compared to the life journeys mortals actually make. Christianity’s sacred text is a biography, or four complementary biographies, from which the Church singled out certain journeys, from the flight to Bethlehem to the road to Calvary, as well a some epic journeys from the Old Testament, to construct a path to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Medieval Christianity transformed the very figure of mankind into a lifelong pilgrim, on a journey to move their soul from this world to the next. The journey was inscribed in itineraries to shrines, in devotional texts and in iconic devices like mazes and mappae mundi designed to structure pilgrimage as a meditative performance, a physical as well as mental form of spiritual exercise.15 Pilgrimage was given a new lease of life in the Reformation as a metaphor for personal salvation vested in scriptural truth and for the struggle to free the soul from a corrupt Church. Maps in Protestant bibles plotted the historical as well as prophetic reality of Exodus, the epic journey from bondage to freedom, ignorance to enlightenment, for Christians who saw themselves as latter day Israelites, Chosen People. The journeys of the Evangelists were added to those of Christ to substantiate a theme of peregrination, a form of exegesis which transformed the whole Bible into a highly spatial text, a set of stories which were also itineraries.16 A substantial secondary literature developed in the form of moral guide books and spiritual autobiographies. In contrast to the miraculous Lives of saints and martyrs, guide books like The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, first published in 1606, charted the difficult spiritual progress of ordinary mortals in everyday situations. Spiritual autobiographies take the form of private journals, plotting the set backs and successes on the path to salvation. They formed a literary province open to everyone, men, women and children, who could, or aspired to, read and write. Following his influential spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), the Puritan preacher John Bunyan published the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) a guidebook which charts salvation as journey through hostile, often dangerous territory. The hero Christian’s ‘walk through the wilderness of this world’ takes him through places which helped define the moral landscape of Protestant culture: the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Beulah Land, the Celestial City, and the ‘straight and narrow’ path of righteousness. At the time The Pilgrim’s Progress was a subversive social as well as spiritual text. It champions the mobile world of vagrants, ex-soldiers and itinerant preachers excluded from the polite world of landownership and the Anglican
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Church.17 The representational space of the journey cuts across the gentlemanly geographies of the time, of topographical maps, landscape prints and prospect literature.18 In the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress focussed on the salvation of Christian’s wife Christiana and their children, the Guide pulls from his pocket ‘a map of all the ways leading to or from the Celestial City’. ‘Who that goeth on pilgrimage but would have one of these maps about him’, notes the narrator, ‘that he may look when he is at a stand, which is the way he must take?’. This is not a topographical map, but ‘God’s book’ and the word map here alludes to scriptural flow charts, like Bunyan’s own broadsheet Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation, which were visual aids for barely literate.19 Subsequent editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress were illustrated with topographical landscapes and maps of Christian’s route; reworkings for polite audiences which envisioned Christian’s walk with God as more of a scenic stroll, closing the space between the Word with the world.20 Geographical discovery, in John Locke’s phrase, ‘enlarged the sphere of contemplation’, that field of knowledge which blended observational enquiry and metaphysical speculation. For European states coming to power through overseas and imperial trade, it opened a series of spaces—domestic, national, global—through which life stories were plotted.21 Images of the geographer as a young man at his desk by a window, with maps and compasses in hand, brought together mundane and spiritual dimensions of the lifeworld and the task of charting the way, the truth and the light.22 Spiritual guides continued to be published for people of every station and occupation, farmers, tradesmen, mothers, widows. For example, a seaman’s guide Navigation Spiritualized by John Flavell, first published in 1664, continued to be issued until 1796. These allegorical lives came to terms with the phenomenology of daily life, its places, tasks, routines and accidents, sometimes to the point where the Puritan hermeneutic was inverted. As a moral world was assembled from a primary material world of sense impressions, so the self became something made and remade in different situations, cast adrift from the continuity of the soul. Life took on meaning from an engagement with the material world which was more than a form of spiritual warfare. The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe is a key text in this transition. It transposes the genre of spiritual biography into a realisitic adventure story, a traveller’s tale charted with empirical precision. Robinson Crusoe sets the standard stages of rebellion, punishment, repentance, conversion and deliverance in named places, York, Hull, London, Portugal, Brazil, the Caribbean and the island that we learn eventually, as the story and its geography unfold, is located in the Gulf of Orinoco.23 The fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe (1719) was illustrated with a double hemisphere map, by the leading London cartographer Hermann Moll, on which our hero’s travels are plotted, including those in the later books around Cape Horn and through the East Indies.24 Defoe’s other writings contributed to the geography of self improvement, his Compleat English Tradesman (1732) and his fictional Life.of Captain Singleton (1719) which shows the development of geographical knowledge through a life of trading and buccaneering, progressing to reading maps and descriptive geography, and keeping a journal of an active life.25 Robinson Crusoe became a primer for practical education. It was the only book Rousseau would allow the child in his educational tract Emile. ‘I want him to learn in detail not from books but from things, all that must be known in such a situation; I want him to think he is Robinson himself’. To teach geography to the child, you should reject ‘globes, cosmic spheres and maps’. ‘So many devices! Why all these representations?’ He should begin by walking over the place where he lives, noting the houses, rivers, the sun’s position. ‘Let him make a map of all these things himself. the goal is not that he knows exactly the topography of the region, but that he knows the means of learning it’. Most pupils
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‘know maps, and he makes them. Here are new ornaments for his room’26 Rousseau recast Crusoe as an inversion of the puritan pilgrim; life was a path to be taken by straying from the beaten track, the straight and narrow, to go where curiosity led. By the end of the 18th century exploration had become established as a mode of autobiography, in journeys of observation and introspection, in pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge. Scientists, artists and poets composed memoirs which fashioned their lives in terms of travel, not just between places (sites of patronage, natural scenery) but between different roles, and forms of identity, in a search for knowledge and cultural recognition.27 Images of childhood subjectivity drew on geographical discourse. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister Mignon pledges her silver shoe buckles to get hold of a small atlas to make sense of her obsessive longing for the warmth South.28 ‘Spots of time’, the key phrase in Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, denoting haunting loci of childhood memory, had a currency in contemporary texts on classical and biblical geography.29 The term career was coined around 1800 to denote ‘a course of professional life and employment, which affords opportunity for progress or advance in the world’, and carried with it older sense of career as a head-long gallop along a road or race course.30 Novels focussed on the life courses of heroes and heroines, negotiating sites of curiosity and natural passion on the one hand and those of convention and social virtue on the other, as, in graphic form, did allegorical maps, of childhood, matrimony and education.31 The sense of a geographical life was pronounced in the works of those concerned with depicting and designing the land. The landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752–1818) saw his art as improving the ‘character’ of places in ways which would complement the character of the families who owned them, renovating the twinned traditions of topography and genealogy, such that every place should ‘tell its own tale’. But his own career was an anxious journey, rushing from place, trying to forge a profession in a world he found increasingly hostile, failing in his pursuit to fashion landscape gardens as arenas of moral stability and polite consensus. Repton’s memoir characterises his life as a hazardous voyage, ‘I push off my little bark into the sea unknown.. I have glided through Life’s calms and struggled with its tempests’.32 The landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837) portrayed episodes of his private life, of childhood, courtship and family life, in views of his home region in Suffolk.33 Imperceptible in the painter’s life time to the gallery-going art public, this personal geography was commemorated shortly after his death in his friend C.R. Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843) largely a selection of the painter’s private correspondence which expressed an affinity between his life and landscape with an account of the sites which inspired the art. Leslie’s book was part of a growing movement of British cultural tourism focussed on the places associated with painters and poets, less to understand the work they inspired than the lives which were seen to be implicated in them.34 It was a movement which in turn influenced the self-consciousness of artists, like the painter Paul Nash, whose auto-biography, focussing on personal epiphanies in haunting places, he called his ‘geogbiography’.35 Life history, plotted as a story of self-reflection and self-improvement, has been deployed as a method of social investigation and reform, becoming a paradigm of early 20th century American urban sociology. It emerged from the University of Chicago, and a vision of the city as a testing ground for moral order, and focussed on the lives of various social deviants—thieves, prostitutes, hobos, alcoholics, drug addicts—as they shuttled between spells of institutional discipline and life on the street. Life histories, as told by the subjects themselves (through recorded interview or written memoir) and glossed by the investigators with evidence from official reports on medical or criminal history, were intended to have a ‘theoretical as well as therapeutic value’. The canonical case study is The Jack-Roller (1930).
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A jack-roller was a young runaway who robbed other vagrants when they were drunk, asleep or knocked unconscious. Stanley, the Jack-Roller of the book, came from a poor Polish immigrant family, and tells his story in his mid-twenties when his ‘delinquent career’ was over, ‘now settled into the warmth and congenial atmosphere of my own home with my wife and child. Already I have taken out a life insurance policy for him, which will mature when he is old enough for college’. The Jack-Roller plots his own life like a folk tale, from his upbringing by a ‘cruel stepmother’ who ‘started me on the downward path’ heading for ‘the lure of the underworld’. He sees his life as largely determined by Fate, ‘a canoe on a storm-swept sea.. I had as much chance of controlling my desires to drift with the current of the underworld as the canoe had of braving the storm’, ‘hitting the road’ west to try to make a fresh start in the approved frontier fashion before drifting back to the ‘old home town’ and a course which inevitably led the House of Correction (or Corruption as he called it), before a kindly Mrs Smith helped him break away from the rooming district ‘underworld’ and become a successful suburban salesmen, husband and father, a lifepath which the study plots on social-area maps of Chicago.36 Despite critiques of the history of geography as a gallery of heroes, the study is still dominated by the careers of influential individuals and their disciples, if they are placed in wider social and cultural worlds. When the International Geographical Union initiated its commission of the History of Geographic Thought in the 1970s, it intended to free the history of geography from the history of discovery and exploration, focussing on the works of scholars, including cartographers and natural historians as well as university geographers, in the form of a series of ‘bio-bibliographical studies’. The series editor, T.W. Freeman, called on contributors to describe the ‘social, economic and political circumstances’ of these geographers, as ‘citizens of the world’.37 A reflexive approach to the biography of geographers was conducted in the late 1970s by Ann Buttimer, from a humanistic perspective which focussed on the role of geography in the meaning of lives of ‘senior colleagues’ in north European and north American Geography. Through autobiographical essays, shaped by interviews, the study showed how geographical projects, as enacted in careers of research, teaching and administration, reflected and shaped the life journeys of the geographers in question.38 Some came up with strong plot-lines. William R. Mead opens his account by emulating the opening paragraph of Robinson Crusoe, but unlike Defoe’s ‘loose and unguided’ hero goes on to trace his farming-family roots in the local countryside of Buckinghamshire, his knowledge of the detailed nuances of landscape gained on walks and rides as well as the vivid children’s books which evoked real and imaginary places. T.W. Freeman’s childhood interest in places came with his family’s movements in the Methodist ministry, ‘in the tradition of John Wesley’s preachers’, notably those which coincided with his formal studies of geography, at school in South Wales, at University in Leeds. The very idea of lifepaths shapes Torsten Ha¨gerstrand’s memoir. His mother inculcated a consciousness of the flow of time, his schoolteacher father the spatial, craftsman impulse to touch and shape; his first research task was to ‘trace the life from year to year’ of all 10,000 people who inhabited his home parish, from 1840 to 1940, succeeding in condensing ‘whole story in one little diagram’; Hagerstrand subsequently developed the paths and projects of time-geographic as a ‘scientific observer’ before Buttimer convinced him to modify the diagrams in terms of those ‘crucial dimensions of human temporality which seemed to so essential to her view of life-images and perceptions of time on the one hand, and bio-ecological rhythms on the other’, a modification reflected in the diagram of Ha¨gerstrand’s career and his ‘eye-witness/participant’ perspective on the ‘paths and projects’ of time-geography, incorporating ‘memories, feelings, knowledge, imagination and goals’ as elements of a ‘living landscape’.39
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Lifewriting and lifespace The papers which follow focus on relations between script and space in the making of life histories. Rhys Jones analyses the life history of a 12th century Welsh king, as compiled by his immediate successors, as a document, which sought to legitimise both geneaological and territorial power. Like other forms of medieval biography, notably hagiographies, the Historia Gruffudd va Kenan entwined life, legend and landscape. It plotted episodes of exile and captivity and periods of good government in Gwynned—building churches, gardens and orchards—to elide the trajectories of king and kingdom. Brian Short considers the theme of collective biography and territorial legimacy in a forest region of late Victorian England. The documents at issue are the notebooks of recollections of over a 100 dwellers of Ashdown Forest in the Sussex Weald, as they went about their customary practices, transcribed in their homes by a local solicitor and advocate of commons preservation, William Augustus Rapier. Like folk-minded ethnographers of the time, Rapier collected the foresters’ recollections in terms of conservationist arguments about history, culture and place; the ‘life-space’ of the forest is drawn in terms of routines of work and family in short distance, repeated journeys. In a contrasting, consciously global sphere of late Victorian culture Nicola Thomas uses the correspondence and diaries of Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India, to reconstruct the family and friendship networks which defined her actual and desired life space, as it stretched between Britain, India and the United States. By re-ordering the archive, as set out by her husband George, networks of female friendship and support are spun out from established circles of public and private life to describe a life of sickness and dislocation. Terri-ann White reconstructs the myths and facts of the course of her own family life over five generations of a female line, as it runs along and across established social histories of the settlement of western Australia, and in places runs out into apparently empty narrative space. The sense of fragmentation is not just a matter of fragmentary sources, such as an inscribed monument, list of names and addresses and a court report, but of episodes of reticence and shame. Elizabeth Baigent considers the major text of British collective biography, the Dictionary of National Biography, in terms of the making and remaking of national identity. Like historical atlases and encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries were monuments to late 19th century liberal nationalism. The original DNB was male, metropolitan and mesmerized by celebrity and described a national space which excluded not only the private sphere of many women’s life and work but also that of male money making. From the less metropolitan, more academic perspective of Oxford University Press, the new DNB seeks to recast the geography of British biography, but looking at less glamorous lives beyond London and the British mainland, eroding the boundaries between private and public life, and considering how the very profession of geography defined lives that had in the first DNB been described in terms of other careers and callings.
Acknowledgements The articles following this are based on papers given at the session ‘Life Histories/Life Geographies’ at the RGS/IBG Annal Conference at Leicester in 1999. Thanks to the contributors for their patience during the time it has taken to reach publication.
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Notes 1. Introductory remarks to Edmund Clerihew [Bentley], Biography for Beginners, London, 1905. 2. K. Halfacree, and P. Boyle, The challenge facing migration research: the case for a biographical approach, Progress in Human Geography, 17 (1993) 333–348; C. Pooley, and J. Turbull, Changing home an workplace in Victorian London: the life of Henry Jaques, shirtmaker, Urban History, 24 (1997) 148–178; S. Smith and J. Watson (Eds), Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Minneapolis, 1996; D. Bertaux (Ed), Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, Beverley Hills, 1981; L.L. Langness and G. Frank, Lives: An Anthropologlcal Approach to Biography, Novato, CA, 1982. 3. R. Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, London, 1985; R. Lichenstein, and I. Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room, London, 1999. 4. R.F. Sayre, Autobiography and the making of America in: J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton, 1980, 146–168; J. Schlaeger, Biography: cult as culture in: J. Batchelor (Ed), The Art of Literary Biography, Oxford, 1995, 57–72. 5. R. Holmes, Inventing the truth, in: J. Batchelor (Ed.), The Art of Literary Biography, 15–26;A. Pelz, The desk: excavation site and repository of memories, in: M. Myrone, A. Pelz (Eds), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850, Aldershot, 1999, 134–147. 6. C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, London, 1986; S. Pile, N. Thrift (Eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, London, 1995; R.D. Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness and Moral Concern, Baltimore, 1997; W.H. Epstein (Ed.), Contesting the Subject, West Lafayette, 1991; M. Shortland, R. Yeo (Eds), Telling Lives in Science, Cambridge, 1996, 1–44. 7. P. Moss (Ed), Placing Autobiography in Geography (2001); For an equivocal view, affirming a biographical perspective but hesitant about an autobiographical one, see D.N. Livingstone, Science Space and Hermeneutics, Heidelberg, 2002, 32–38, see also 91–98. 8. The most notable progressive text is Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, first published in 1918. 9. E.C. Bentley, Those Days, Vol. 51, London, 1940, 282–283. 10. G.K. Chesterton, On Mr Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small, in Heretics, London, 1920, 31–46. 11. L. Hunter, G.K. Chesterton: Explorations in Allegory, London, 1979. 12. D. Matless, The uses of cartographic literacy: mapping survey and citizenship in twentieth-century Britain, in: D. Cosgrove (Ed), Mappings, London, 1999, 193–212. 13. Chesterton, On Kipling, 46. 14. C. Steedman, Maps and polar regions: a note on the presentation of childhood subjectivity in fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in: N. Thrift, S. Pile (Eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, London, 1995, 77–92; B. Seaton, The garden autobiography, Garden History, 7 (1979) 101–120; J. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century England, Chicago, 1986, 43–53; W.H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography, Philadelphia, 1987, 139–214; M. Sturken, Personal stories and national meanings, in: M. Rhiel, D. Sutcliffe (Eds), The Seductions of Biography, London, 1998, 31–41. 15. D.C. Connolly, Imagined Pilgrimage in Gothic Art: Maps, Manuscripts and Labyrinths, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, 1998. 16. C. Delano-Smith, and E.M. Ingram, Maps in Bibles 1500–1600: An Illustrated Catalogue, Geneva, 1991. 17. C. Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688, Geneva, 1988, 222–228. 18. J. Turner, Bunyan’s sense of place, in: V. Newby (Ed), The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, Liverpool, 1980, 91–116. 19. J. Bunyan, in: W.R. Owens (Ed.), A Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and damnation, Oxford, 1994, xxiv–xxvii; G. Campbell, The sources of Bunyan’s Mapp of Salvation, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44 (1981) 240–241. 20. G. Hill, Cartographical Curiosities, London, 1984, 24. 21. G. Quilley, The sphere of contemplation: the imagery of global navigation in eighteenth-century England, in: C. Smethurst (Ed.), Romantic Geographies, Glasgow, 1994, 55–64. 22. K. van Berkel, Vermeer and the representation of science, in: W.E. Franits (Ed), The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer, Cambridge, 2001, 138–139.
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23. G.A. Starr, Defore and Spiritual Biography, Princeton, 1965; J.P. Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in ‘Robinson Crusoe’, Baltimore, 1966; H.D. Peck, Robinson Crusoe: the moral geography of limitation, Journal of Narrative Technique, 3 (1973) 2031. 24. D. Reinharz, Cartography, literature and empire: Herman Moll, his maps and friends, Mercator’s World 4 (1999) 32–39. 25. R.J. Mayhew, Geography in eighteenth-century British education, Paedagogica Historica 34 (1998) 731–769, see also 752–753. 26. J.J. Rousseau, Emile, or on Education, New York, 1979, 184–188, see also 169–171. 27. D. Outram, Life-paths: autobiography science and the French Revolution, in: M. shortland, R. Yeo (Eds), Telling Lives in Science, 1996, 281–294; D. Outram, On being Perseus: new knowledge, dislocation and enlightenment exploration, in D. Livingstone, C. Withers (Eds), Geography and Enlightenment, Chicago, 1999, 281–294. 28. Steedman, Maps and Polar Regions, 81. 29. I. Whyte, William Wordsworth’s Guide to the lakes and the geographical tradition, Area 32 (2000) 101–106. 30. Epstein, Recognizing Biography, 139. 31. F. Reitinger, Mapping relationships: allegory, gender and the cartographical image in eighteenth-century England and France, Imago Mundi 51 (1999) 106–136. 32. S. Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England, New Haven, 1999, 21–25. 33. S. Daniels, Love and death across an English garden: Constable’s paintings of his family’s flower and kitchen gardens, Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992) 433–458. 34. S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Cambridge, 1993, 204–205. 35. C.C. Abbot and A. Betram (Eds), Poet and Painter, being the Correspondence between Gordon Bentley and Paul Nash 1910–1946, Oxford, 1955, 214, Our thanks to David Matless for this reference. The memoir was published in P. Nash, Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, London, 1949. 36. C. Shaw, The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story, Chicago, 1966, with an introduction by H.S. Becker. 37. T.W. Freeman, M. Oughton and P. Pinchemel, Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, Vol. 1 (1977) 1–2. 38. A. Buttimer, The Practice of Geography, London, 1983, 1–19. 39. A. Buttimer, The Practice of Geography, London, 1983, 44–77, see also 91, 238–255.