Backlisted - The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Philip Pullman is our guest on the 100th episode of Backlisted. John, Andy and Nicky travelled to Oxford for this special episode devoted to Robert Burton's extraordinary 1400-page The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621 and described by Sir Philip as 'a glorious and intoxicating and endlessly refreshing reward for reading ... Nor would we wish the book to be a sentence shorter, or be without one of the thousands of anecdotes and quotations. This is one of the indispensable books; for my money, it is the best of all'.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)4'35 - The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello. Where are we, Andy? We're in a tent at the Port Elliot Festival. Basking in sunshine. And a few days ago on Friday the 19th of July 2019, so historians know when it was, we recorded the episode you're about to hear. We were in a village near Oxford in the house of Philip and Jude Pullman. In fact we were in in their kitchen, which is very... We'd have this thing for kitchen tables. Yeah, we recorded around a kitchen table, but it was a different kitchen table.

It was a different kitchen table, but rather touchingly, they hadn't got a table that wasn't absolutely tottering with piles of books. The kitchen table was pretty full of books, but we then managed to clear a space for us. It was the sort of house that you dream Sir Philip Pullman or any writer you like lived in it was basically just stacked with books and musical instruments yeah so it's episode 100

it's slightly self-regarding for us to talk about that but we want to just say we are astonished uh still be doing this we love doing it we're really grateful to you lot for sticking with us there's so many podcasts you could be listening to so many of them are about murders relatively few of ours are about murders but some of them are but they rhyme sometimes aren't they and um i love gassing on about books i think it's also we love the the fact that people do interact with it on Twitter and Facebook, and it does feel like there is a community of people out there. Whenever anyone says, does anyone read anymore? And there's a lot of kind of, you know, sad head shaking

amongst the upper echelons of publishing, saying maybe we're in the wrong business. A bit like working in a bookshop. You know, you're always encouraged by, not only the number of times people say, oh, I haven't read this book and I'm going to, but that they have read it or that there are other things that they want to share.

It's an amazing privilege to be able to do what we do. And thank you. And also just to say we've got some amazing episodes coming up before the end of this year and we're giving you a special heads up if you're a loyal listener or a new listener who's tuned in to hear philip pullman or for our 100th episode that our christmas episode this year will be devoted to a la recherche de tom perdu by marcel proust so get reading folks you've got three months to crunch through it yes also we've done some big books this year right the anatomy of melancholy that you're about to hear about is like 1,400 pages.

It's a book, as somebody famously said, it's a masterpiece, perhaps not one to read from cover to cover in two sittings, which is more or less what I did. Anyway, thanks very much, everybody. Thank you. Join us on the Friday, the 19th of July, 2019, in the kitchen of Sir Philip Pullman for the 100th Backlisted Hello, Philip.

Hello, it's nice to see you all. And thank you for providing a kitchen table. Well, half a kitchen table. Philip needs no introduction. He's the author of more than 30 books for children adults and all those in between and most famously the worldwide best-selling his dark materials trilogy he and his work have been recognized with awards including the whitbread book of the year the guardian children's book award the carnegie medal the carnegie Carnegie's, the Eleanor Fargin Award, the Astrid Lindgren Award

and the J.M. Barrie Award. And this October, David Fickling and Penguin Books will publish The Secret Commonwealth, the second book in his The Book of Dust trilogy. And also the BBC One adaptation of his Dark Materials is due to air later this year. Have you had much involvement with the forthcoming BBC adaptation? Yeah, the sort of involvement I like. I didn't want to write the script. You know, having spent seven years writing the book, I didn't want to take it all apart and put it together again. But I've seen all the scripts.

I've approved them all. I've been to the set a couple of times. I've met some of the leading actors. I've said, good, you're doing fine, carry on. That's the sort of involvement I've had. Moral support. Yeah. Yeah, good.

Well, it's very exciting to be here. The book Philip's chosen to talk to us about today is The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, first published in 1621, but republished five more times over the following 17 years with substantial alterations and additions. I think it comes in at something like 1,200 pages and is pretty universally considered one of the great masterpieces

of English prose in perhaps the greatest period of English prose. So thank you. I'd intended to read this, The Anatomy of Melancholy, this year, but this rather bumped it up the list. Thank you very much. It's a book that perhaps needs a bit of bumping because although it's universally, well, not universally, by those who have read it, hailed as a great work,

not many people have read it because it's so big. Do you think it is the size or do you think people are just kind of, they find the whole idea of a book about melancholy? Maybe melancholy is, it's not as clear to modern readers what melancholy is. I mean, melancholy means sad now. Yes. It's not a great sales term, is it? Melancholy, of course, is one of the humours of ancient and medieval medicine. The idea that the body is governed by, now I'm going to have to try and remember what they were. There was black bile, there was blood, there was... Cholera.

That's, yeah, that's the kind of temperament that... Yellow bile. Yellow bile as well. And one more for the full house. Forgot forgotten it. Phlegm. How nice. Yes, this is now not scientifically held to be entirely reliable

as a way of making yourself better if you're ill. But it was a way of describing things according to an old schemer. And it had a reference to the four elements too, didn't they? Water, fire, earth and air. So this was a body of not knowledge so much as belief that had lasted a long time. It's managed to last. The point Burton is writing, it's held good for a couple of millennia.

We tend to forget that. Indeed it has. it's held good for a couple of millennia, hasn't it? Yeah, indeed it has. And he was writing at a time when William Harvey was about to make his discovery of the circulation of the blood. So modern medical knowledge, modern scientific knowledge was about to take a great leap forward in the 17th century. He loved science. I mean, he's as interested in science as he is in sort of long.

He's interested in everything. Absolutely everything. And it's all in the book. But he's a great classifier and putting things into categories and making lists and so on. And this is what he does in this book. We'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this. into categories and making lists and so on. And this is what he does in this book. We'll pick this up again after some adverts.

Stay tuned to this. The first question we always ask on the backlist, it is, when did you first come across, who and when were you when you first came across The Anatomy of Melancholy? Well, I can date it precisely because I got a copy of the book I bought when I was 16 years old. It's called, it's a selection from The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is called The Anatomy of Love. And it's the part which deals with love.

It was edited by Daniel George, who was a well-known literary figure at the time. And it was published, this paperback I've got, in 1962, at which point I was 16. I bought it and I, why did I buy it? Because I liked the cover, I think. And I was beginning, at the age of 16, I was beginning to be interested in words and language and how they're used, and especially in poetry, actually. But I did enjoy what I managed to read of that. So I'd been aware of it for a very long time, and aware of it too, in references to it by other people. You know, the famous account of Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson, saying that it was the only book that got him out of bed two hours before he actually wanted to get up.

One of the ironies being is that if there is an enemy in this book, then idleness is the enemy. Idleness is one of the chief causes of melancholy. And of course, Johnson was famously a man who stayed in bed most of the day and really struggled with it. This is one of the points at which Burton has actually improved on by Johnson, because the doctrine that Burton's leading up to all the way through the book is be not solitary, be not idle. And Johnson improved that by saying, if you are idle, be not solitary. And if you are solitary, be not idle, which is very wise and very true where'd you be that book that's that's what i feel i we normally on the backlisted regular listeners will know we read the blurb on the back of the book

but we don't have to do that with the anatomy of melancholy more in sorrow than in admiration sadly in lots of cases but because burton blurbed his own book and included it as a frontispiece so it's an illustrated frontispiece at the beginning of the 1628 edition of the anatomy of melancholy and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to read out Burton's own blurb for this work of, I think this is the third edition. Yeah. the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it in three main partitions with their several sections, members, and subsections philosophically, medicinally, historically opened and cut up. One of the things that's so wonderful about the book is it it superficially does follow the pattern of an anatomy yeah it has these huge sections and subsections which are broken down on pseudo

scientific lines i use that yeah that term advisedly yeah to give the impression that the body of something is being taken to pieces in front of you he also calls himself in that blow he also calls himself not by his own name but but by the name of Democritus Junior. I don't know whether this was in order to hide his identity or whether he wanted to live off some of the fame of whoever Democritus was. Yeah, because he was a priest, wasn't he, at the time of writing? Burton?

Yeah. Well, yes, I think you had to be a priest to be a fellow of a college, didn't you? Well, so Democritus was known as the laughing philosopher. In contradistinction to Heraclitus, who was known as the crying philosopher. Is that right? I didn't know that. That's a wink to the knowing reader, isn't it? That's sort of saying, I will make you laugh. There are lots of examples of winks to knowing readers, and that was one of them. Yes, you're quite right. He might well have been the man who invented the wink to the knowing reader. There's so many of them.

The Democritus thing is important because Democritus famously is the person who first described what we would now call the atom, a tome, which could not be divisible any further, and saw the universe as infinite and didn't have a sense of a anthropomorphized creator that the universe existed and was infinite. So he was an interesting, very interesting model to take for Burton. Also, he tells the story of, because he laughed all the time, Democritus, the people in Abdera, which is where he lived, were worried about him, thought he was mad, and they call in Hippocrates, who's the great doctor of the ancient,

of the 4th century BC. And Burton tells the story of how Hippocrates listens, and the preface to this book, which is written by Democritus Junior, or Burton, a.k.a. 124 pages of preface, by the way. So this book, nothing about this book is for the faint-hearted. But for those who persevere, we will prove to you it's worth the perseverance. Anyway, he tells the story that Hippocrates actually passes judgment and says, it's you people who are mad. There is nothing mad about this man. This man is laughing because that is the

only response to the folly and madness of the world. Yeah, and that's very much Burton's attitude too. He was a pious man, I mean, he had to be as a priest, and the world he inhabits is very much a 17th century world in which Protestantism in this country was finally victorious, although there were big battles to come in the Civil War and later. And you had to be very careful as a Christian, because if you said the wrong thing in the wrong time and the wrong place, there might be serious trouble. He's interesting, isn't he, the way he doesn't like the Puritans.

No. And he really doesn't like the Catholics. The idolatry of the Catholics get a proper drubbing in this book. Maggot-infested relics. In a sense, he's the epitome of an Anglican. He's the compromising halfway stage, not quite the vicar of Bray, who changed his opinion with every succeeding king, but he's a great one for common sense, for broad-minded tolerance,

for acceptance of oddity and strangeness in other people's opinions. And that's what makes him so attractive a writer. So we should say that the book is in three partitions, which you've already said from the globe. And as you say, they're like sort of parts of the body. The three organs that controlled everything are the heart, the liver, and the brain. There are threes all the way through. But in the middle bit of the book, the first book is sort of description of melancholy.

The second part is about cures for melancholy. And the third part really is specifically about a certain kind of melancholy which is the melancholy connected to love but there is a brilliant bit in the in the in the middle bit the cures where he it he calls digression of air oh it's wonderful where he goes off completely goes off on a scientific exploration of air and currents and wind. Well, these are Burton extemporising, improvising, especially the air one, which is just wonderful. Suddenly he takes wing.

His mind starts soaring over the whole landscape and all kinds of things come into it. And it's joyful, really. But what's interesting to me is not how far he goes in these digressions but how firmly and surely he comes back to his main subject he he always reminds me at points like this of um the painter Constable uh because if you look at a painting by Constable uh depicting for example one moment on a summer afternoon with the clouds racing across the sky and the shadows of the trees and the wind and the leaves and so on, that's a painting of one moment. But you know it didn't take him one moment to paint it.

It took him hours and hours and days and days and days. So memory plays a huge part in it. He knew exactly what he was doing. So does Burton. And there's a sort of roughness too, a kind of improvisatory quality about both Constable and Burton, the sense that, yes, he is straying from the main subject, but what fun he's having and the things he's going to tell us about on the way

and the huge delight he has. This is what makes it a book that almost contradicts its title. It is not a melancholy book. It's not a book about feeling sad and how awful it is to feel sad and, oh, I'm feeling sad and it's terrible and so on. It's a hugely funny book. It's a book bursting with life, a book which demonstrates

almost more than anything else that the opposite of melancholia, of depression, is not happiness but energy. Could we get you to read something that demonstrates what you've just been talking about? From the passage on love melancholy. How many decrepit, hoary, harsh, writhen, burst and bellied, crooked, toothless, bald, blear-eyed, impotent, rotten old men shall you see flickering still in every place. One gets him a young wife, another a courtesan, and when he can scarce lift his leg over a sill

and hath one foot already in Chiron's boat, when he hath the trembling in his joints, the gout in his feet, a perpetual room in his head, a continuant cough, his sight fails him thick of hearing, his breath stinks, all his moisture is dried up and gone. I may not spit from him a very child again that cannot dress himself or cut his own meat, yet will he build dreaming of and honing after wenches. What can be more unseemly?

One of the things I like about his style, and I say this, you know, as somebody who tries to write comic prose, is he's very, he does a brilliant thing, which I see writers that I like do a lot, which is he, as John suggests, he gets into this kind of musical, high-flown register of argument, synonym, you know, enjoying his own rhetorical talent. And then he'll end a section by going, you know, that's just what I think. It's like a Harry Hill, oh, you get the idea. And he's got the most marvellous line in his little throwaway comments. For example, when he talks about lustful monks.

Oh, yeah. They cannot, I say, contain themselves. They will be still not only joining hands, kissing, but embracing, treading on their toes, et cetera, diving into their bosoms as Philostratus confesses to his mistress, and Lampreus and Lucian feeling their paps. And that scares honestly sometimes. And that scares honestly sometimes. And that scares honestly sometimes.

One of the wonderful throwaway lines. And one of the things that I think that, you know, you'd want to recommend this book to modern readers, he's writing about depression. And he's writing about depression not in a 17th century sense, but very recognisably the depression that we're talking about now. He's extremely humane.

Yeah. He is full of… It's a disease of the mind. Yes, that's right. He's very clear about that. He's full of tenderness towards people who suffer from this dreadful condition. He's not making fun of it with all the jokes and the laughter.

He's not making fun of it at all. He suffered from it himself. He's very knowledgeable of all its effects and all its different phases. And above all, he's sympathetic. A great, broad, humane sympathy comes out of these pages. And you always feel slightly that he, because he set set himself this task that he wants to do it comprehensively that he goes through all the various kind of uh tinctures and plants and you know the borage and hellebore and all the things that you can take but where he really gets excited is to say try and do things that cheer you up try and be merry he says that's right have your

chamber light you know but don't sit in the dark he does i mean this is a bit from sorrow this is for people who have suffered from depression no sooner are their eyes open but after terrible and troublesome dreams their heavy hearts begin to sigh they are still fretting chafing sighing grieving complaining finding faults repining grudging weeping vexing themselves disquieted in mind with restless unquiet thoughts discontent either for their own other men's or public affairs such as concern them not things past present or to come the remembrance of some disgrace loss injury abuse etc troubles them now being afresh, as if it were new done. They're afflicted otherwise for some danger, loss, want, shame, misery that will certainly come as they suspect

and mistrust. It's a brilliantly accurate, forensically accurate description of the symptoms of depression that a modern reader would recognise straight off the page. Exactly. He's an exceptionally perceptive psychologist. He's also interesting on the pleasures of the early onset of melancholy. It's nice to lie on your couch. It's nice to be on your own and to wander about. And to sort of almost wallow in the kind of luxuriant depression or melancholy that you find in Baudelaire or the fall of the house of Usher something you know Poe's story but then he says be careful because this is the start of something that could be much

much worse he's familiar with all these he knows where it leads to I'm just going to run through the biographical side I'm drawing here on the introduction to the 1932 edition, which seemed to me perfectly reasonable that we haven't really increased our knowledge of Robert Byrne much over a century. So he was born at Lindley Hall in Leicestershire on the 8th of February 1577, the fourth of the family of nine. He went to the free school at Sutton Coldfield and later to Nuneaton Grammar School. He went to the Free School at Sutton Coldfield and later to Nuneaton Grammar School. He entered Brasenose College in 1593, was elected a student of Christ Church in 1599, became vicar of St Thomas Oxford two years later, and was presented with the living of Seagrave in Leicestershire in 1630.

It says here, he was a ready versifier in both Latin and English, contributed to several academic anthologies, and in his 31st year wrote Philosophasta, a satirical comedy in Latin verse, which was not translated, listeners, into English until 1931. And to wait 300 years. Didn't have a very big sale then either. Very funny, though.

The Anatomy of Melancholy was first published in 1621 and went through five editions during the author's life. The last edition, which he saw through the press, was that of 1638, for in the following year he died at the age of 63 and was buried in the cathedral of the university where his brother William, author of the Description of Leicestershire, 1622, erected a monument to his memory in the form of a portrait bust tinted to the life after the manner of those times.

And then it just says, his life was uneventful. There are two little details that we've got. One is that he was on the board, as it were, of the Oxford market, which I quite like. So he obviously had some kind of temporal skills. But there's a story that's told about him going down. He liked to go and listen to the bargemen talking and swearing. And the more they swore, the more he would laugh in his sort of,

you know, in his Democritus Junior kind of role. But he likes ordinary people. That's one of the things that comes out of this. But one of the great bits comes out of this. But one of the great bits in the introduction preface is his utopia, which is a rather kind of extraordinary utopia, where he suggests that there should be common ownership of hospitals and a sort of a proto-national health service. And though he likes fertile land and enclosure, but that fertile land and enclosure shouldn't be for the enrichment of landlords. It should be for the people who live on the land.

It's a meritocratic vision. It doesn't matter where you come from. So quite forward thinking for a priest. Yes, indeed. But again, this bears out what I was saying about his Anglicanism. He's a very moderate kind of man. It is an attractive vision. Some things we probably disagree with now and some things are too utopian ever to be put into practice. But there's a humanity there. There's a humaneness. There's a magnificent passage which I'm not going to read out because I genuinely think it would probably cause offence.

Very near the end of the book in the section on religious melancholy, which is sort of a plague on all your houses, he manages to run through every religion, including some very contemporary ones, and causing offence willy-nilly if you choose to take offence. But not absolutely condemning either Islam or Judaism. Look, there's a shared inconsistency in all these. His point really is that religion is one of the great things that will lead you into madness if you're not careful.

Be moderate. Don't go overboard with your enthusiasm. Even be moderate with scholarship. I mean, he's very good on that. Again, when he's going through all the symptoms, you can have melancholy by having too much sex and you have melancholy having too little sex yeah you can have you can have it from reading too many books or you can do it from not reading enough so but he's right on the cusp isn't he because you you you also see

him trying to get his head around copernicus and Kepler and Tycho Brahe and trying to figure out is the sun at the centre of the universe or is the earth? And he basically says, I don't know. This was a subject of passionate debate in the 17th century. Even Milton wasn't sure in the Paradise Lost, you know, 40 years later, whether the sun went round the earth or whether the earth went round the sun. And he has the angels debating it in Paradise Lost. But Burton still has one foot in the world of astrology, of course.

But then he's moderate about that too. The stars incline but do not enforce. Although there is a story that he'd forecast the date of his own death and in order not to be proved wrong uh hanged himself to be yeah to get it right i don't know if that's true or not but he the world he lives in was was it was half medieval and half modern you see this wherever you look there's an interest as you say in the the new scientific prospects opening up which would culminate later in the century

in the foundation of the Royal Society and Newton and so on. But there's also the world of the stars and the humours and the four elements and that sort of thing. He really is one of the most on-the-cusp writers in the whole of English literature. Philip, can I ask, I mean, you were saying that you first read a section of this at the age of 16. So this book has been a lifetime companion.

I've been aware of it and I've turned to it from time to time. I haven't read it constantly like Dr Johnson. But do you feel Burton manifesting in your work or is there a thing that you've taken away from the anatomy of melancholy that you you you know you feel sometimes you might be channeling that spirit i'd be i'd be happy if that were the case i think what i've taken away from him consciously is a tone of voice, perhaps, more than anything else. I hadn't read the whole thing in a disciplined way until about,

I don't know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 12 years ago. The Folio Society asked various people to suggest a book that they might do in their beautiful editions. And I said, airily, what about the Anatomy of Melancholy? They said, what a good idea. Why don't you write the introduction? So I was caught then, and I had to read it in a different kind of way. So I did and annotated this copy of mine with several hundred Post-it notes.

annotated this copy of mine with several hundred post-it notes. But that was the first time I'd read it in a sort of disciplined, studious way. I dipped into it from time to time. I normally operate a zero-tolerance policy for dipping in. But I would encourage listeners, I think this is a book that you can very happily dip into. And reading it from cover to cover is a challenge. We shouldn't pretend that it's not a challenge, but perhaps to get the feel for it before you tackle the whole thing. And it's a great, I have to say, it's one of the

great indexes. I don't know whoever did it, but it's an absolutely brilliant index. So you can have, you know, you can look up just Burton himself and you'll see, you know, a novice but not an expert in love, which is a great one. Or Drinks No Wine is another, which he's not against people drinking, but he doesn't drink any himself. It has to be a dip in book, doesn't it really? In practical terms, yes, it does. Apart from anything else, it's not the sort of thing

you can hold very comfortably on the beach. It's very heavy. But dipping in, yes, dipping in, you'll always find, what's the old nursery rhyme, stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum? Pulled out a plum, yeah. You can do that anywhere, really. Yeah. What was it you were saying about being against dipping?

You're a non-dipper. I'm a non-dipper. I'm a non-dipper. I'm something of a biblio-fundamentalist. A stern purist. I am, actually. I'm far from that. Really? It's the survival of the fittest with me,

and if I get a few pages in and it's not working, out it goes. I respect that. Moderation in all things, as we've discussed. I'm a reformed character, and like many reformed characters, I think I'm a bit of a Puritan on this. I realised quite a long time ago that I was starting far more books than I finished, and I was losing the knack of sticking with things. I saw somebody on Twitter the other day saying,

if a book isn't appealing to them by the second page, they stop reading it. That seems the opposite extreme to me. I mean, you know. I have a certain amount of sympathy with that. I have two rules which I apply in a broad sort of way. I don't like reading books in the present tense, novels in the present tense, and I don't like reading books in the present tense, novels in the present tense,

and I don't like books that begin with a pronoun. That's pretty good. It saves me a lot of reading. So when I read the first two words of, I think it was a book by Michael Ondaatje, and the first two words were, she stands out, finished, don't want to read any more. Done with that one.

You know, you famously once said that you were a Church of England atheist. Yeah. I wondered if there is something in your work of Burton's kind of openness to ideas. I mean, what he doesn't like, it seems to me, is the over-systematised, the O'Ton Bar telling people what to think. Yeah. And that feels to me like a very Pullman.

Absolutely, yes. The idea that one size fits all. And there is one answer and i have it and if you don't agree with me i'm going to shoot you or something that's that's yeah it's it's the totalitarian style of um of thinking and i think it's absolutely pernicious and you you get the sense that there are other thinkers paracelsus the the doctor comes as a as a as a bit of a rabid kind of ideologue from this and he's he's always saying that well of course that's Paracelsus, the doctor, comes out as a bit of a rabid kind of ideologue from this. And he's always saying, well, of course, that's Paracelsus and his team would say that.

That's the way they think. Whereas he, I mean, he's amazing, really. He says that you can get depression from your parents, that it's hereditary, which we now know is true. He also says that one of the best things is to talk to your friends, you know, and it's recommending the talking cure, you know. Yes, that's right. Which it's pretty extraordinary for something written

when it was written. He's full of good sense. I mean, the idea about keeping the lights on, you know, don't sit in the dark, that's a good one. He also recommends St John's wort, which we now use as a kind of alternative antidepressant. Yes, and don't be fanatical about things. Keep up your friendships, all those things.

Sound common sense. The word depression doesn't do it, really. No. It's not a big enough word. It sounds as if you're a bit sad and, you know, you'll cheer up a bit when your favourite programme comes on the telly. That's not really what she's talking about.

That's not what Burton is talking about. That's not what we really mean when we say depression. not what Burton is talking about. That's not what we really mean when we say depression. My sense of it is as a sort of like the legendary maelstrom in the sea, a kind of vortex. I had a period of profound depression in my 20s. I've come sort of near that since, but what it gave me was a feeling for this current in the water. If I feel the current, feel the pull of this thing, I quickly take steps to go away from it. And it's something which if you haven't actually experienced, it's very hard to convince people of the intensity of it.

And I think you get that sense that, you know, when he darkens the tone, you know, he'll say, you know, there's more than one in a thousand that are afflicted by it. And he does really, really give you the dark side as well as the light. There's no doubt at all that he knew exactly what he was talking about. There's a brilliant list in his remedies, which I wouldn't give all of them, but, you know, if you want one of the sort of modern kind of self-help stuff, he's got be temperate in four things,

speech, going about, looking and in drinking, and then jest without bitterness, be not a slave to money, flatter no man, undervalue not thyself, go not to law without great cause. Undervalvalue not thyself. That's a good one. Go not to law without great cause. Undervalue not thyself. If thou come as a guest, stay not too long. This one I should have had hammered above my door when I was a kid. Make not a fool of thyself to make others merry.

This is good. Keep good company. Love others to be beloved thyself. It's full of very, very good, solid wisdom, isn't it? It is. It's a desert island book, I think, really. Philip, where do you see Burton's influence in literature after Burton? We know that Keats said that The Anatomy of Men and Colleagues was his favourite book, that the poem Lamia is a retelling

of a story told by Burton in The Anatomy. Bourget, there's the epigraph to his story, The Library of Babel is taken from. Yeah. But I wonder if there are other writers who you see channelling Burton or who have that same quality of you know discursive humanity well there's something of um burton interest from shandy and lawrence stern's extraordinary um almost cut up novel tristram shandy which sam johnson didn't like he said

he said nothing old will do long and and sh Shandy, in Shandy there's definitely parodies, Burton, I think, doesn't he? Yes, but there's also the sense of wide-ranging tolerance and an ability to laugh at the foolishness of people without being spiteful, without being bitter. I mean, it's quite hard to think, isn't it? I kept having to remind myself that there was no novel when Burton was writing.

The novel as a form didn't really exist. It was Don Quixote about the same time. About the same time. But he wouldn't have, I mean... No, he wouldn't have known. So he was, I'm always struck by, he's writing something that it's clearly he wouldn't consider it as being made up. But that sort of baggy, he obviously liked Boccaccio.

He mentions Boccaccio. He liked the idea of collecting tales and stories and of using stories almost as parables or as asides. There's always a great story about somebody who deflowers a whole nunnery in Gloucestershire. In Gloucestershire. The specificity is a constant charm. He got up most of their bellies, which is just, you know,

this brilliantly kind of direct. Yes, there's no… He doesn't pussyfoot. There's another bit where he said he was dried out from chamber work, which is chamber work being a euphemism for sex. Yeah, Dickens reminds me of him. But Dickens, as a conductor of this extraordinary energy, there's a sense I have in Dickens, especially in the early books,

Oliver Twist, for example, and Nicholas Nickleby, of someone who could scarcely contain the energy that was in his body. He sees a pot boy, I don't know, and he does see some curious little thing and that pot boy comes to life. Dickens is like a big house with all the lights on and it's full of company and full of things going on and lots of guests and so on. That's exactly right.

Well, you feel that with Burton because the sources are so huge. Every couple of sentences, there's another book being cited. But he said, I lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life. But then he also says, he's like a ranging spaniel after game, which is exactly, that's the feeling that you get with him. He can't resist. He's off one way and another way.

I'd like to ask John a question. Which books that we've done on Backlisted does The Anatomy of Melancholy remind you of? That's a very good question. It reminds me of Journal of the Play year, clearly, because it has that same, you know, as you were saying, Philip, about the language that's been pulled in from all different sources. And also the sense that the rules haven't been set when the book is written. Yes.

So Defoe can do what he likes, to some extent. Also, in a slightly mad way, this unexpected connection, which has just occurred to me, Haunts of the Black Masur by Charles Sprawson, just in the take a subject and exhaust it with sources and research and telling your own story in the middle of it. The book, it really reminded me of, and I got quite near the end. I thought, okay, I know what this is.

It really reminds me of All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook. In as much. It's a book called All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook. In as much. It's a book called All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook, which we did on quite an early episode of Batlisted. We will send you a copy. I'd love to. It's wonderful. And the thing it has in common.

We haven't even mentioned the devil section of this book, by the way. The book exists because the author wants it to. Yeah. Not because it's being done to fulfil a contract, but because they have something they want, they need to tell you. And they need to spend time with you. And in Seabrook's case, as we said, it's like being cornered in a bar while somebody pokes you in the chest.

Burton isn't like that. Burton's a much more kind of avuncular chap. But he still wants to make eye contact with you and say, now, we're going to have a little chat about this. Yeah, yeah. This is something which is of profound importance to him. And he wants to tell you what he knows and share it with you. And he does good one-liners as well.

If there be hell on earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart. Yes. God. That's tweetable. Or all other diseases whatsoever are but flea bitings to melancholy in extent. Tis the pith of all of them. That's pretty good. Yeah.

How would he have dealt with Twitter? Do you think he'd have been on twitter that's such a good question lots of quotes yeah lots of quotes lots of quotes original content yeah um i'd like to read a little bit from the it's a famous section and uh i'm just going to give it a slightly unexpected context, I hope. This is from the Symptoms of Love section. This tends to divide audiences, and I know it divides audiences, because the first time I ever read anything by Robert Burton, I had it read to me, and it was a literary festival slash music festival festival and it was read to a completely unsuspecting room by the author dan rhodes who took to the stage and read the following passage and uh divided the room between me uh who was laughing and laughing and laughing and other people people who could not get their heads around what was happening.

So this is from member three, part three, section two, Symptoms of Love. Love is blind, as the saying is. Cupid's blind, and so are all his followers. Who loves a frog thinks that frog a Diane. Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself. Ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler's platter face or a thin, lean, chitty face. Have clouds in her face. Be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed or with staring eyes.

She looks like a squished cat. Hold her head still awry. Heavy, dull, hollow-eyed. Black or yellow about the eyes or squint-eyed. Sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a shunk fox nose, a red nose, China-flat great nose, nare simo patchiloque,

snub and flat nose, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven brown teeth, beetle-browed, a witch's beers, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer. And that's only the first half page of the magnificent screen. But then as you read the part earlier where he then goes on to say,

and it's not just women. That's right. Here's the men. Yes. I say in the foreword I wrote or the introduction I wrote, the old man he describes so well, I saw that old man himself getting out of a limo in New York, accompanied by a young maiden who was probably not his crown daughter,

although she looked young enough to be. The things he says are still true. Yes, he says somewhere, it's hard not to write satire. Well, yeah. Which is true, which I think, I mean, he, but there is no better compiler of lists, I think, in English. And that's one of the things I think you would go back to, that passages like that, which are, I mean, simply the joy,

the pleasure of the words and the language. As I think people have said, the greatest prose work at the period of the greatest moment in the development of English. There's one other thing I'd like to refer to. Yes, this is a man who's deranged by love. Of all passions, as I have already proved, love is most violent, and of those bitter potions which this love melancholy affords, this bastard jealousy is the greatest, as appears by those prodigious symptoms which it hath and that it produces but besides fear and sorrow which is common to all melancholy anxiety of mind

suspicion aggravation restless thoughts paleness meagerness neglect of business and the like these men are farther yet misaffected and in a higher strain And he goes on to describe someone who's obsessed by his wife or his mistress. Can he trust her? Can he not? As a heron when she fishes, still prying on all sides, or as a cat doth a mouse, his eye is never off hers. He gloats on him, on her, accurately observing on whom she looks,

who looks at her, what she saith, doth, at dinner, at supper, sitting, walking, at home, abroad, here's the same, still inquiring, maundering, gazing, listening, affrighted with every small object. Why did she smile? Why did she pity him, commend him? Why did she drink twice to such a man? Why did she offer to kiss, to dance, etc.? A whore, a whore, an arrant whore. Is it not a man in woman's apparel? Isn't that somebody in that great chest? Isn't there somebody behind the door or hanging on some of those barrels? May not a man steal in at the window with a ladder of ropes or come down the chimney, have a false key, get in when he's asleep. If a mouse do but stir or the wind blow, a casement clatter, that's the villain, there he is,

by his good will no man see her. Salute her, speak with her, she shall not go forth of his sight, and so on. This is, this is good. He shall not go forth of his sight, and so on. This is good. If we say, you know, you can buy this book online in the self-help category, and I suppose it falls into that category in the way we've been talking about. But if you describe it as a book about depression, first of all, that isn't accurate.

And secondly, it's selling the book short. John said at the start this is a book about everything. It is a book about everything. That's one of the fascinating things about it. I just wanted to say, I think one of the things that the book short. John said at the start, this is a book about everything. It is a book about everything. That's one of the fascinating things about it. I just wanted to say, I think one of the things that the book is about, I was reading one, somebody was writing about it, and they described this, it seemed very appropriate for our 100th episode of Backlisted, as a test of bookishness.

And they don't mean a test to the reader. They mean that it's a book about books. That's one of the things it's about. It's made of books of his reading. It's a commentary on reading at the same time. Yes, it is. And it's also, and this is the thing I found the most remarkable about reading it actually, it's a book about what you can create and recreate within a book so that

you read it and if you spend a a few weeks it's like being given uh the tour of them of a mind of a man who's been dead for 400 years. It's a remarkable thing. And that's not the point I'm trying to make in my long-winded way is that's not accidental. The artistry of it is all leading towards that impression, I think. Well, yes. I mean, writers and other practitioners of the arts do things that they're not aware that they're doing all the time.

People sometimes ask me, did I intend such and such? And, of course, I say, yeah, of course I intended it. I didn't know because I didn't know I was doing it. Some part of Robert Burton's mind was working to organise this thing towards the end that he believed in consciously, but also believed in with every fibre of his being. It's necessary to be kind to one another. It's necessary to be tolerant.

It's necessary to allow yourself to enjoy things. It's necessary to avoid things that make you unhappy. This is, yes, common sense, and, yes, it would fit into a corner of the mind, body, and spirit section of your nearest neighborhood bookseller, but it's also so much more. It is. It's the revelation of a mind which is curious, funny, lively, immensely energetic, always always entertaining always sympathetic

um you feel you know this man yes and you like him yes you like him immensely and wonderfully self-confident as well if you not like not this uh get you to another inn i resolve if you like not my writing go read something else. And that's just lovely to see written down. How many, I mean, every writer must feel this. If you don't want this, go and read something else. I don't care. I don't need your approval.

Phil, do you think this book could have been written 100, 200 years later? Or does it benefit from being created in a period where there were fewer rules about what you could and couldn't do in a book? I think it came at the right time from the point of view of English prose, for example. 17th century prose is wonderfully rich and full of full of eccentrics who were nevertheless gloriously sane. Thomas Brown is another one.

Yes. And because it stands, as we were saying earlier, between the medieval world and classical world and the modern world of science, it is looking two ways. It's looking back and it's looking forward. It gives us an immensely intimate and powerful feeling of what it was like to live at that time between these worlds and between doctrines as well, between doctrines passionately felt and dangerously threatening, if you felt the

wrong one. But he's also able to summon from his knowledge of literature and from his experiences among the barge men of the river all sorts of language, language that's coarse and earthy and rich, as well as learned and subtle and intricate. It's just simply wonderful stuff. It's just simply wonderful stuff. My only reaction to this, my steadfast and continuing and eternal reaction to this book is one of love, love for him and love for what he's done. It's the most wonderful book I know. Was it Nick Lezard who said that it's the greatest book ever written he's the he's a great burtonian yeah yes but you wouldn't want to read you wouldn't want to read it cover to cover

and i think that might be the most sensible advice we leave people with is to is to is to find a way in uh unlike burton uh we have to draw a line no significant revisions and added material for us except where our patient and not at all melancholic producer Nicky Birch seems fit a huge thank you to you Philip and to Jude for your hospitality and a low bow to Unbound

for enabling such riches you can download all 100 count them 100 episodes of Backlisted, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. And we'd just like to add that neither John nor myself,

nor our fallen comrades, nor our producer Nikki, thought for a moment when we asked Lyssa Evans to join us for a hastily assembled chat about JL Cars A Month In The Country back in November 2015 that we would still be here doing this 100 episodes later and that is thanks to you

thank you so much for your loyalty and your support and your enthusiasm and your feedback. The whole thing means much more to us than certainly I ever show. But perhaps that's true of John as well. So thank you, Philip. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you for listening. And we'll be back in a fortnight. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky

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