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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
Copyright © Richard Holmes 2016
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Cover design by Heike Schüssler
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Source ISBN: 9780008168728
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008168711
Version: 2017-09-06
To Arabella Pike
my wonderful editor for more than twenty years
Contents
11 John Keats the Well-Beloved
13 Thomas Lawrence Revarnished
1
Every so often I close one of my working notebooks (there are nearly two hundred of them now, dating from 1964, the earliest in soft blue crumpled cardboard from Woolworths, the most recent in glossy black spiral-bound A5 hardback, from Black n’ Red) and begin to reflect on the whole journey, and the time left, and what if anything I have learned along the way. I look back at the highways and byways of biography, my own Footsteps and my Sidetracks, and most of all on my strange, unappeased sense of some continuous, intense and inescapable pursuit.
I remember, for instance, the early summer of 1974, when I had just finished my first book, a biography of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was eight hundred pages long and I was nearly thirty. I had travelled in England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Italy in search of my fiery, footloose poet. I felt like a veteran after a long campaign in the field. I felt grizzled, anecdotal, displaced. What’s more, I found that I had returned with two conclusions about writing biography that were certainly not taught back home in academia.
The first was the Footsteps principle. I had come to believe that the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past. Mere archives were not enough. He must go to all the places where the subject had ever lived or