Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 June 1893 — One View of Biography. [ARTICLE]

One View of Biography.

What right has a biography to be in two volumes ? One can say all that is worth saying about any man except Gladstone in a very few hundred pages, and what is more, within the scantier plot of ground the biographer can present a more artistic view of his subject. Of course, the world likes to hear gossip about the victim’s teaspoons and the size of his collar and generally such stuff as in a decent age would be left for housemaid’s conversation with the footman. The conditions under which biographies are hurried through the press nowadays absolutely prevent them from being great works in the corrector sense of the word. Our belief is that the biography is a sort of an advertisment. The compiler receives very generous help from a multitude of quite insignificant people, and feels constrained to publish the letters they wrote to the victim, and the letters the victim wrote back to them. So the gentle reader is asked to take interest in men and women whose importance it is impossible not to magnify. If only biographers knew what to omit, things would be so much the better. —[Pall Mall Gazette.