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It’s finally happened. Although it has taken me over two years, I’m getting around to telling you about Robert Burton. You know… no, that’s Richard Burton, the famous explorer and translator. Oh, you weren’t thinking of Sir Richard Francis Burton, but of the actor, Richard Burton. Click on the appropriate links to find out about the seventeenth-century Anglican priest, the nineteenth-century pornographer, and the twentieth-century actor. |
The Burton of our current discussion (Robert) is the author of one of the strangest books in the English language, in fact, one of the first psychology books in English, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Quite an important influence on a number of writers, it is almost unread today, and, why do we have hyperlinks if we don’t use them? If you need some background on The Anatomy... I don’t know why, but I have long suspected that I could find the text of this now rather obscure book in some obscure corner of the Internet. Of course Project Gutenberg is one of the great treasures on the Internet, the largest and probably oldest collection of online texts. What can I say about a collection of texts ranging from Greek tragedy to Tarzan? For starters, it is, sadly, lacking in melancholy. (2005 update: Since early 2004, Project Gutenberg is now the proud owner of a digital Melancholy.) |
At another great collection
of online texts, Project Bartleby, you
can find all the inaugural addresses of presidents of the United States.
George W. Bush’s address was added the day he delivered it. But, alas,
there is no long-winded treatise on melancholy, no matter how much it may have
influenced John Keats.
I thought I might have
gotten closer to the Anatomy once I found Renascence Editions,
"works printed in English between 1477 and 1788." There were some very
welcome surprises there, including The Book of the Courtier by Baldessar
Castiglione, an extremely influential but now neglected book (the source of the
concept of the well-rounded Renaissance gentleman), as well as The Boke Named
the Governour by Sir Thomas Elyot, pretty much an English revision of
Castiglione's work. But, regrettably, no Burton.
On my quest for Burton's
work, one of the search engines referred me to Making
of America Books,
which seemed rather
unlikely, since the MOA is a collection of over eight thousand books printed in
the United States, "primary sources in American social history from the
antebellum period through reconstruction." Although I thought I had reached
a dead end, I was very impressed by the site, which offers its books in two
formats. First, it provides a scanned text (optical character recognition) of
the whole work. Then, throughout the text, at the end of each page, there is a
hyperlink to take you to a photographic image of the page. Even if you didn't
care much about the literature, you could easily get distracted by the simple
elegance of the nineteenth-century pages.
And, after I scrolled
through a menu and search or two, there it was, Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy. I'm not sure that I would vote for its inclusion in a digital
library of books that contributed to the "making of America," but I
surely am not going to complain.
Seriously, the Making of America (MOA) library shows what the Internet can do best--make available treasure troves of the best of human accomplishment, in fields as diverse as "education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology." Such a treasure trove of almost three million pages requires a great deal of time, energy, and money to select, acquire, prepare, and maintain. Very few communities and hardly any individuals could afford such a collection. But, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Making of America's holdings are available anywhere you can access the Internet. And, in case you care interested, you can finally reach all half million or so words of The Anatomy of Melancholy (the entire text on a single web page) now.
Of course, reading books from a computer's monitor requires a somewhat different arrangement of one's own anatomy, but I can pop the CD on which I've recorded my newly discovered treasure (which I've titled Robert Burton's Greatest Hits) into my laptop, and kick back in my recliner for fairly comfortable reading, complete with the head of R&R's parrot squad dozing comfortably on my shoulder, although the feline division of R&R protests that there is no room for a laptop cat. If I could just download a worn leather binding for Burton's text, I would be truly not melancholy.
Keep your feet dry, and your heart full of noble but, I hope, not melancholy thoughts, as you celebrate the great books that have shaped our culture and also celebrate the Internet which makes them available to us.
[2002 update - I got response to this article from Australia, France, England, Massachusetts and California. It delights me to find that there is still interest in this very interesting book.]
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