The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.