St John’s Biography of Sir James Brooke.
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THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
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Title :
St John’s Biography of Sir James Brooke. |
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Author :
Nicholas Tarling |
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Abstract:
A biography will vary not only with its subject. It will, of course, vary also with the author and with the author’s approach. That approach in turn will vary with the readership and with the publisher or patron, with the public and the purpose. In our own day, the demand for biography is apparently insatiable. The subjects are varied: princes and princesses, generals and governors, artists and writers. Sometimes the authors are professional biographers, sometimes professional historians; sometimes theyare friends or relatives, sometimes amateurs. Sometimes they are, in some way, ‘authorised,’ sometimes ‘official’: as a result the authors perhaps gaining wider access to material, yet possibly also being discouraged from being too free with their use of it. The public indeed is apparently looking for warts and above, and sometimes gets warts above all else. Though narrative history is no longer much to its taste, it does not particularly want in substitution the ‘life and times’ kind of biography of an earlier era. It is encouraged to look for revelations, for the Hyde even more than the Jekyll, for the underside, the private rather than the public. Its expectations risk imposing demands on a biographer that can be satisfied only by anachronism or speculation.
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| DOI: XXXX |
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How to cite:
Nicholas Tarling. (1990). St John’s Biography of Sir James Brooke. The Sarawak Museum Journal, XLI (62): 255-270 |
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References
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