AFTER HIS DEATH in 1697, almost three centuries passed before Aubrey was fully recognised as a pioneer biographer, antiquarian, archaeologist and historian of nature, science, mathematics, language, folklore and architecture. The only book1 he published in his lifetime, Miscellanies: A Collection of Hermetick Philosophy (1696), was considered a ‘mad book’ of spells and hocus-pocus in the rational eighteenth century. After waiting so long and fighting so hard to publish a book of his own, Aubrey almost lost his purchase on posterity in a single ill-judged dash into print at the end of his life. His posthumous reputation was partially rescued by the next generation of antiquaries. Early in the eighteenth century, the scholar and editor Thomas Hearne rightly credited Aubrey with arranging for the remains of Osney Abbey to be recorded, ‘before the Destruction made by the late horrid Rebellion (against King Charles the First)’. Hearne noted that details2 of Osney’s tower and various other parts had been delineated ‘by the Care and Charge of the late Mr John Aubrey, who began the study of antiquities very early when he was Gentleman-Commoner of Trinity College in Oxford, and had no inconsiderable Skill in them as may appear from his History of the Antiquities of Wiltshire, his Native County, now remaining in the Museum Ashmoleanum’. Hearne argued that though imperfect and unfinished, it was apparent from Aubrey’s manuscripts that he wrote well on antiquities, ‘to the study of which he was led by a Natural Inclination’. Unfairly, Hearne blamed Elias Ashmole for distracting Aubrey in his later years into ‘the Whimseys and Conceits of Astrologers, Sooth-Sayers and such like ignorant and superstitious Writers, which have no Foundation in Nature, Philosophy, or Reason’. Aubrey’s passion for astrology needed no encouragement. But nothing could detract from the fact that he was ‘a very ingenious man and the world is indebted to him for so carefully preserving the remains of the old Abbey of Osney and for assisting Mr Wood and others in their searches after Antiquities’.
The first of Aubrey’s manuscripts to be published in the eighteenth century was his study of Surrey. Richard Rawlinson, a young antiquary, Oxford bibliophile and friend of Hearne’s, came across Aubrey’s manuscript in the Ashmolean. Accompanied by his brother and the bookseller Edmund Curll, Rawlinson followed in Aubrey’s footsteps through Surrey to finish his work. Aubrey’s manuscript, with Rawlinson’s additions and omissions, was published by Curll in five volumes costing twenty-five shillings as Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (1718–19). Rawlinson complained3 in his introduction that Aubrey’s original manuscript was ‘huddled together in a very confused and immethodical Order’, and set about reducing or regularising Aubrey’s notes. As is often the wont with confident standardisers, he introduced some mistakes, including the claim that Aubrey got married after he returned from his travels in France. Nevertheless, once published, Aubrey’s natural history of Surrey became a valued work of reference, albeit one studded with gaps and holes where names and facts could not be ascertained.
Aubrey’s pioneering work on the megaliths at Avebury and Stonehenge was recognised by the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley, who surveyed both sites and became the first secretary of the London Society of Antiquaries in 1718. Stukeley followed Aubrey in attributing the stone monuments to the Druids. But whereas Aubrey imagined the Druids were members of a savage culture, Stukeley thought they were bearers of Mosaic wisdom and the highest of all high priests of nature. He read Aubrey’s friend4 Thomas Gale’s notes on the unpublished Monumenta Britannica manuscript and consulted the original in the Ashmolean. Keen to assert his own scholarly prowess, Stukeley is sometimes criticised for not crediting Aubrey with the ideas he borrowed from him. Aubrey would not have been surprised. Throughout his biographical work, he always did his best to defend other people’s intellectual property; towards the end of his life, he knew he had not done enough to secure his own. Aubrey’s prospectus for publishing his Monumenta was fanciful in the extreme and the small number of subscribers he secured for the project could not have seen the chaotic state of the manuscript. But even without publication, Aubrey’s work influenced the next generation and played a formative part in the development of archaeology in England. He has a claim to be recognised as the first English archaeologist.
During Aubrey’s lifetime, Anthony Wood extracted information from the Brief Lives manuscripts for inclusion in Athenae Oxonienses (vol. 1, 1691 and vol. 2, 1692). Scandalously, he did not include a single acknowledgement to Aubrey. It was not until 1797, a hundred years after Aubrey’s death, that further printed extracts were included in a miscellany, The Minutes of Lives, The Oxford Cabinet, Consisting of Engravings from Original Pictures, in the Ashmolean Museum, and other Public and Private Collections, with biographical anecdotes by John Aubrey FRS, and other Celebrated Writers. But soon after this volume appeared, the publisher, James Caulfield, and his transcriber were denied further access to the Aubrey archive by Edmond Malone, the Shakespearean scholar, who had been preparing his own edition of the Brief Lives and claimed an exclusive right to the manuscript. Malone’s edition never appeared. In 1813, substantial extracts from Aubrey’s Brief Lives were published in Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, to which are added Hearne’s Journey to Reading, and to Whaddon Hall the Seat of Browne Willis, Esq. and Lives of Eminent Men, by John Aubrey, Esq. The whole now first published from the originals in the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum, with biographical and literary illustrations. This was the edition through which Victorian biographers came to appreciate Aubrey. The editors, the Revd Dr Philip Bliss and the Revd John Walker, censored Aubrey’s seventeenth-century candour out of consideration for the prim sensibilities of nineteenth-century readers.
In 1898, two centuries after Aubrey’s death, a near-complete transcript of the Brief Lives manuscripts was edited by the Revd Andrew Clark: scholar, diarist and rector of Great Leighs, Essex. There were still excisions to spare the blushes of readers. For example, in his life of General Monck, Aubrey describes how the mother of Monck’s mistress was one of the ‘five women barbers’ of Drury Lane who punished another woman for passing venereal disease to one of their husbands. The five women resolved5 ‘to gett her and whippe her and to shave all the hair off her pudenda’. Clark transcribes this as ‘to gett her and whippe her and . . .’ so it is impossible to understand6 from his edition why the five women were described as barbers. Clark was not shy of making high-handed value judgements entirely out of sympathy with Aubrey’s inclusive biographical approach. ‘It is plain, from a glance over the MSS, that many of the lives are of little interest; in some cases, because they contain more marks of omission than statements of fact; in other cases, because they give mainly excerpts from prefaces of books; and so on. A much more interesting7, as well as handier, book would be produced, if the editor were to reject all lives in which Aubrey has nothing of intrinsic value to show,’ Clark pronounced. But for all its shortcomings, his edition, which included over 500 lives and gathered together material Aubrey had left scattered, was the best and most definitive for the next 100 years.
During the nineteenth century, Aubrey won renown for his work on Wiltshire. In his lifetime he divided his Wiltshire collections into two projects: the antiquities and the natural history of the county. Before he died, he entrusted his countryman and fellow antiquary Thomas Tanner with completing both. At the time, Tanner was assisting Bishop Gibson with the new 1695 edition of Camden’s Britannia, into which a lot of Aubrey’s Wiltshire remarks were incorporated. Almost 150 years later, further selections from the Natural History of Wiltshire collections were published by John Britton, who was born, as Aubrey was, in Kington St Michael. Britton was Aubrey’s first biographer. His book, Memoir of John Aubrey, FRS, embracing his autobiographical sketches, a brief review of his personal and literary merits, and an account of his works; with extracts from his correspondence, anecdotes of some of his contemporaries, and the times in which he lived, was published by the Wiltshire Topographical Society in 1845. Also in the mid nineteenth century, the Revd Canon John Edward Jackson, rector of Leigh Delamere, where Aubrey once went to school, published an edition of the Wiltshire antiquities manuscript. When Aubrey donated it to the Ashmolean Museum, it was in two parts: Hypomnemata Antiquaria A, and B. Aubrey’s brother William borrowed part B in 1703 and never returned it. Again, Aubrey would not have been surprised: this kind of common carelessness and the resultant loss to scholarship was what he spent his life fighting. Canon Jackson thought that whilst many of Aubrey’s remaining Wiltshire remarks ‘do not at first sight appear to be very important’, excuses could be made for retaining and publishing them, given ‘that he was the first, and for a long time the only collector for Wiltshire; and that almost any notices of days long past are better than no notices at all’. In 1862, Canon Jackson’s largely inclusive approach resulted in Wiltshire: the Topographical Collections of John Aubrey, FRS, an expensive, thick quarto book of nearly 500 pages with more than 40 plates.
In the twentieth century, Aubrey’s reputation developed dramatically. Anthony Powell began work on his biography of Aubrey in the 1930s and had completed an outline when war broke out in 1939. After six years in the army and subsequent demobilisation ‘in circumstances not always ideal for sifting historical material’, Powell published John Aubrey and His Friends in 1948. There was a deep resonance between Powell’s sensibility and Aubrey’s own: both saw England at war; both mapped the manners of their very English milieus. Powell understood that Aubrey would stand the test of time: ‘Aubrey, without the least conceit, possessed an exceptional sense of his own existence as part of history; and it is perhaps appropriate that he should have been subjected to history’s mechanical process in a marked degree. For a long time he was not much thought of, partly on account of his deprecatory attitude towards himself. Humility is a rare quality. Those who possess it8 sometimes encounter neglect in life and run some risk of oblivion after death; but in the end history grinds exceeding small.’ In 1949, Powell published a new popular edition of over 200 of the Brief Lives, and the scholar Oliver Lawson Dick’s edition appeared the same year, together with a brief biography of Aubrey.
Aubrey’s popularity was further boosted by Patrick Garland’s one-man stage play Brief Lives, which premiered in London at the Hampstead Theatre in 1967, had two runs on Broadway and was adapted for television. Closely based on Aubrey’s own writing and starring Roy Dotrice, the play broke box office records on both sides of the Atlantic. For forty years, Dotrice played Aubrey as a lovable, eccentric, gossipy old man, and as a result entered the Guinness Book of Records for the greatest number of solo performances (1,782). Dotrice’s representation of Aubrey on stage was a partial portrait: Aubrey’s youthful enthusiasm, pioneering intellectual curiosity, originality and generosity to other scholars played no part in it. But the success of the play indirectly inspired a revisitation of the manuscripts. In 1972, the publisher and editor9 John Buchanan-Brown compiled a new edition of the Miscellanies together with extracts from Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme manuscript and other fragments. Buchanan-Brown argued that to understand who Aubrey was, ‘one must forget the figure created so persuasively and with such little historical basis upon the stage and television’. He emphasised that far from being backward-looking, Aubrey belonged to the intellectual avant-garde of his age. Also in 1972, J. E. Stephens published the first (and to this day the only) edition of Aubrey’s Idea of Education manuscript, taking a simplistic and somewhat irritated approach to his working methods: ‘Much of the manuscript is ill-arranged and repetitive, and despite the fact that the author returned to it at intervals to amend and to annotate parts of the text, it remains incomplete. There are several hundred insertions in the margins vertically and on the reverse side of the manuscript sheets. Many of the additions10 are no more than personal memoranda to the writer reminding him to seek out this or that paper or to ask advice on some point at issue: others record his second thoughts and the opinions of the virtuosi in whose company he mixed.’
In 1975, the distinguished historian of science Michael Hunter published the first study of Aubrey’s ideas, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning. This is still the best book on Aubrey’s intellectual milieu. Hunter intended his book to supplement Powell’s focus on Aubrey’s social life. Powell referred often to Aubrey as someone primarily interested in the past, whereas Hunter argued that the present and the future were at least as imaginatively important to him. Hunter explained11 the nature of Aubrey’s intellectual preoccupations and compared and contrasted them with those of his contemporaries, arguing that there was still no straightforward distinction between mechanist moderns and mystical ancients in Aubrey’s time: in fact, ‘he was typical in deriving scientific and magical theories and explanations from all sorts of old and new sources’.
In 1980, John Fowles, a novelist fascinated by the collector’s quest, noted that generations of scholars had sunk their lives into trying to order Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica manuscript, before he rushed in himself ‘where angels fear to tread’ and together with the historian Rodney Legg published for the first time a quasi-facsimile edition of Monumenta Britannica, nearly 200 years after Aubrey’s death. In his brief foreword12 Fowles wrote: ‘I think not even with Pepys are we closer to an existential awareness of what it was like to be alive then: the anxieties, the delusions, the hopes, the joys, the melancholies and poetries.’
In the twenty-first century, Aubrey’s afterlife, slowly but surely accumulating since he died, is flourishing. In 2010, the literary and intellectual historian William Poole organised an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, ‘John Aubrey and the Advancement of Learning’, to coincide with the Royal Society of London’s 350th anniversary. Poole’s accompanying book offers an introduction to Aubrey’s intellectual world: ‘Aubrey was a very clubbable man in a very clubbable century.’ As part of Oxford University’s Cultures of Knowledge project13, ‘Networking the Republic of Letters 1550–1750’, Poole is coordinating the publication and digitalisation of Aubrey’s correspondence. This will make the collection of over 800 letters Aubrey exchanged with the pre-eminent philosophers, scientists and scholars of his day accessible in print and online: a gift to posterity beyond his wildest dreams. In 2015, Clark’s long-standing edition of Brief Lives has been superseded by Kate Bennett’s magisterial new scholarly edition for the Clarendon Press. In Bennett, Aubrey has found at last an editor after his own heart. More fastidious in the pursuit of truth than Aubrey was himself, Bennett’s Brief Lives is the first to be faithful to Aubrey’s own vision of the form and meaning of his biographical collections. Her edition includes censored and deleted material, title pages, antiquarian notes and indices, together with a critical introduction and comprehensive commentary. It is the result of two decades of painstaking work in archives: Aubrey would have been delighted.
Aubrey hoped that his name would live on after his death and that posterity would benefit from the paper and material collections it was his life’s work to assemble. Most of these collections were successfully preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. In 1860, Aubrey’s paper collections were moved to the Bodleian Library. Aside from Brief Lives very recently, none of them has been adequately edited, and many are in urgent need of conservation. With two exceptions (Faithorne’s portrait of Aubrey and Hollar’s engraving of the drawing of Osney Abbey Aubrey commissioned), all the illustrations in my book are Aubrey’s own, reproduced from his manuscripts, by kind permission of the Bodleian Library. Hollar’s engraving of Osney Abbey is rare: it was mysteriously omitted from a large number of the first editions of the second volume of Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, and afterwards the plate was lost or melted in the Fire of London. The engraving is reproduced in my book with thanks to Olivia Horsfall Turner, Curator of Designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who is preparing an edition of Aubrey’s Chronologia Architectonica. From childhood and throughout his life, Aubrey loved to draw and paint. I have chosen for the cover of John Aubrey: My Own Life his only known self-portrait: a sketch of himself and Sir James Long of Draycot out hawking. Typically, it is clear which figure is Sir James, at the centre of the picture, with a telescope and the sword Oliver Cromwell permitted him to wear. But which figure is Aubrey? My bet is that he drew himself the least defined of all the figures: the one lightly shaded in brown beside Sir James, through whom the outlines of some trees are visible; the one who has dismounted from his horse and is looking intently at a building in the valley beyond.