Introduction

A book that includes its reader

Robert Burton offers an unusual reason for writing a book about melancholy: he is trying to keep melancholy at bay. “I write of melancholy, by being busie to avoid melancholy,” he tells his reader. The work that follows is an occupation, an inquiry and an attempt to help others through knowledge acquired at some personal cost. “I would help others out of a fellow-feeling,” he adds. These declarations do not explain everything in The Anatomy of Melancholy, but they establish a relation that survives its many changes of subject. The writer does not occupy a place entirely outside the affliction he describes. His reader need not occupy one either.

At first the book can seem to demand an impossible preparation. There are medical authorities to distinguish, ancient poets to recognize, Latin sentences to decipher and divisions within divisions to remember. Burton makes room for almost anything: digestion and demonic temptation, disappointed scholars and jealous husbands, gardens and planetary systems, poverty and the pleasures of music. Yet its abundance also offers many ways in. A reader may arrive through a familiar feeling and stay for an unfamiliar explanation. A comic portrait may open into an account of suffering; a catalogue that seems merely extravagant may expose how difficult it is to bring human experience under a single rule.

Burton repeatedly unsettles the comfortable position of the observer. He invites us to laugh at the world's follies, then discovers those follies among scholars, writers and people very much like himself. The pronoun changes: they become we. The book's prodigious learning does not secure its speaker against vanity, frustration or error. Reading it closely means listening for these changes of position. A confident judgement may be followed by an objection, an exception or a confession. Sometimes a new authority reverses the force of the authorities that came before it. The accumulation is part of the argument, even when the argument refuses to settle.

This edition offers a close modern-English rendering beside the older text so that these movements can be followed without losing contact with Burton's words. It seeks to make the whole work accessible, including its repetitions, awkward transitions and conflicting voices. Burton's strangeness belongs to what there is to read. His familiarity does too: the pleasure of an absorbing occupation, the humiliations of dependence, the mind's return to a feared possibility, the difficulty of consoling someone whose suffering we cannot remove.

Burton and Democritus Junior

Robert Burton lived from 1577 to 1640. Born in Leicestershire, he completed his degree at Christ Church, Oxford, where he spent most of his adult life and served as librarian from 1624 until his death. The Anatomy first appeared in 1621 and grew through successive editions. A life centred on books supplied both its materials and one of its recurring subjects: what learning can give a person, and what it can cost.

The author who addresses us, however, calls himself Democritus Junior. Burton's ancient model is the philosopher whose laughter at human conduct made his neighbours suspect him of madness. In the story Burton recounts, Hippocrates comes to examine Democritus and discovers that the supposed patient understands the world's disorder better than the people who summoned a physician. The story reaches Burton through letters attributed to Hippocrates, not through a contemporary record of the encounter. Its importance here lies in the situation it supplies: the person whom society calls mad may be its most searching critic.

The adopted name permits Burton to move between distances. From one position he surveys the world as a vast spectacle. From another he is the secluded college scholar who hears of wars, marriages, crimes and changes of fortune while remaining largely in place. He presents his retirement as sufficient to his needs, yet the news he gathers fills it with agitation. The long address “Democritus Junior to the Reader” joins this self-portrait to attacks on war, exploitation, religious quarrels and the misuse of learning. It also imagines reforms. The private library opens onto the troubled commonwealth.

Democritus Junior is neither a transparent diary voice nor a disguise that makes personal feeling irrelevant. Burton says that painful experience has taught him something; he also speaks through quotations, theatrical roles and borrowed complaints. When he describes the scholar's dependence on patrons, the length and expense of education or the humiliation of seeking advancement, the speaker's involvement is hard to miss. Elsewhere he admits that scholars help produce the abuses they deplore. His bookish authority repeatedly becomes a bookish vulnerability. These passages reward attention to self-presentation without turning every literary gesture into a biographical fact.

The text used here is the sixth edition, published in 1651, after Burton's death. At its close, the notice signed H. C. describes a corrected copy with handwritten additions used in preparing the edition. That account helps explain the book's continued enlargement; it does not by itself establish that an original manuscript survives. The 1651 printed text is this edition's point of reference. It retains the accumulated character of a work revised over years, including expressions whose immediate political setting belongs to an earlier moment. The separate Note on the Text explains the choice of copy and the treatment of its difficulties.

The many meanings of melancholy

The word melancholy cannot be exchanged throughout this book for one present-day diagnosis. Burton uses it for a bodily humour, a disposition, an established illness, a kind of suffering and, at times, an image of the human condition. In the preface he deliberately widens its reach until folly, discontent, fear and sorrow seem to implicate everyone. In the medical divisions he attempts more exact distinctions. The movement between these uses is essential. A satirist's claim that the world is melancholy does different work from a physician's account of a particular disorder.

Burton explains the name through black bile. His account belongs to a physiology in which humours, bodily qualities, organs and spirits help explain health, temperament and illness. The spirits discussed in this anatomy are often physiological agencies, rather than ghosts or moods; their meaning must be taken from the passage. Similarly, a person's complexion can be a constitution, and a habit an established condition. Such words carry theories within them. Making their sentences easier to read should not make those theories disappear or silently replace them with the language of a later medicine.