On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what he found so appealing about the 17th-century English polymath Sir Thomas Browne, the man he numbered among his ‘first favourites’ of English prose. He mentions Browne’s formal qualities, of course: he is ‘great and magnificent in his style and diction’; his Urne-Buriall ‘redolent of graves and sepulchres’ in every line. Yet most of his praise is reserved for Browne’s sensibility, for a man who is ‘fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangeness’; who ‘loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men’s, that they too were curious’.
Coleridge is typical of Browne’s admirers. Forster, Woolf, Borges, Sebald, to name just a handful of recent devotees, all give the impression that to read Browne is to make an especially intimate engagement with a particular, and particularly engaging, personality; is to encounter a man who is tolerant, humane, plangent, quietly sceptical, possessed of an almost discomfiting apprehension of what Woolf called ‘the curious shades of our private life’.
And it is this sense of Browne that fills the pages of Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s new book — so much so that it is with an impression of Browne, based on his writings but not tied closely to them, that he is primarily concerned.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in