BIOGRAPHY

Where Najder concentrates on building up a detailed portrait of Conrad using every scrap of available information, the new biography by John Stape is a much slighter affair. At only a third of the length of Najder’s, his book abjures thoroughness in favour of brisk narrative. That said, what he loses in scope and detail he gains in accessibility. The Mittel-Europa seriousness of Najder gives way in Stape to a lighter touch which allows him to cover the inevitable longueurs of a writer’s life more fleetly than Najder, though it diminishes Conrad’s stature by making us feel that, after all, he was just another novelist with the usual worries about sales and

houses and fallow periods and troublesome children. Najder’s Conrad is a grander figure altogether: he looms, as James might have said. Stape’s is more recognisably the workaday man of letters. Both have their truth. Najder’s book has been extensively revised since its original appearance to accommodate new research, but only Conrad specialists are likely to notice the differences. Anyone wanting a good brief introduction will be happy with Stape’s life. Both biographers have avoided commentary on the novels, so for detailed critical discussion you will have to look elsewhere. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

A C GRAYLING LOCKE’S LAUNDRY

LOCKE: A BIOGRAPHY

★By Roger Woolhouse (Cambridge University Press 528pp £25)

JOHNLOCKEIS one of the great figures of the modern philosophical pantheon. No study of the history of thought since the seventeenth century can ignore him. In the close confines of university philosophy departments his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is read (in parts), or read about, by students instructed to examine his criticism of the doctrine of innate ideas, or his theory of perception and the correlative distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or his famous discussion of the problem of personal identity. But in the real world Locke’s writings have been even more significant. His Two Treatises of Government was quoted extensively and verbatim in the documents of the American and French revolutions, and they, together with the Essayand his writings on religious toleration, made him one of the two heroes invoked by the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the other being his friend Isaac Newton. Roger Woolhouse’s thorough, detailed and very readable biography of Locke gives an account of these works, in lucid expositions annexed to the occasions in Locke’s life that prompted him to write them. This is especially interesting given that Locke lived through, and indeed played a part in, the fraught history of the Glorious Revolution in England, and his

Lustrous Locke

political writings are justifications of the new order of 1688, overturning the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings and laying the foundations of a constitutional dispensation which served as a model in the subsequent history of Europe and America. Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset, in 1632 to a lawyer father who was on Parliament’s side in the Civil War. Educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was subsequently a Student (a Fellow) for many years, Locke’s early interest was medicine and science. He privately and intermittently practised as a physician, but circumstances called his main energies to political life as the secretary of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who was increasingly drawn to oppose the Catholicising tendencies of Charles II and, even more, the Duke of York, who became James II in 1685. Shaftesbury died before the serious matter of open rebellion against James came to a head, but Locke had to flee into exile in the Netherlands, where he remained until William and Mary replaced James. In increasing ill-health thereafter, Locke lived mainly in retirement, apart from a spell as a Commissioner for Trade in the new government, nursing his asthma and bronchitis in the relatively breathable air of Essex. He died in 1704, aged seventy-two. Woolhouse tells this story in careful and copious detail. Locke’s encounters with other leading lights of the day, Newton and Boyle chief among them, fall into their due place in the story, and Woolhouse describes with exemplary clarity each stage in the development of Locke’s thought by detailing successive drafts of his writings. The tumultuous history of the time glimmers through the refracting lens of Locke’s activities; Woolhouse does not step aside to provide a full context, but – since his business is with one man – honours the reader with the assumption

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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