What possessed the poet and writer Samuel Butler, in those heady years following the return of the monarchy to England, to produce a catalogue of the country’s strange and eccentric personalities? His Characters, written around 1668, comprise 188 satirical essays on such diverse figures as country bumpkins, mathematicians, tennis players, and playwrights. By this he did not presume that a scholar or rural villager could not pick up a racket (though to reside in all four categories at once would be impressive). Rather, he desired to map the general moulds into which most people fit.
Butler was not the first. Joseph Hall, a satirist and later Bishop of Norwich, made an attempt 60 years earlier. His Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608), though, was little more than an imitation of an effort made by the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus, in about 317 BC, to chart the world’s moral characters.
The court poet Sir Thomas Overbury essayed the task with more originality shortly before his fatal poisoning in 1613. The joke would usually be that the two were unrelated. In fact, his poetic sketch A Wife, which detailed the ideal qualities of a potential bride, was seen by one English noblewoman as a personal affront. The ensuing political feud saw Overbury locked up in the Tower of London, where he was murdered six months later.
Samuel Butler, born in 1612, was one of a later generation of literary wits to try their hands at an undertaking that many of us today still instinctively engage in when idling in public: people watching.
For him, the exercise was one of an almost scientific nature, verging on psychoanalysis. Thus Butler dissected his Characters‘ personalities with a near-psychopathic disregard for their humanity, as if the vast bulk of people were automatons whose actions and impulses could be precisely plotted. His scalpel was particularly employed in the study of a person’s posture, manner of speech, clothing, and countenance. “The Face,” Butler wrote, “is the dial of the mind; and where they do not go together, ’tis a sign that one or both are out of order.”
Vain men wore “stiff and uneasy expressions” in reflection of their insecurity; modern philosophers had long beards to signal — though really in lieu of — wisdom; some fashionistas hung jewellery on their noses or lips in pursuit of novelty; and pedants spoke in lengthy, rambling sentences with an air of condescension.
For many of his character profiles, he needed only draw on his memories. His time as a young attendant in the household of Elizabeth Grey, the Countess of Kent, undoubtedly exposed him to many a “Proud Lady”, self-conceited and narcissistic:
Her mind is swell’d with a tympany of vicious humours, that render her a monster of a kind, that Nature never purpos’d nor design’d. She is cloathed in jewels, but they all look upon her as if they were the very same with that which Aesop’s cock found in a dunghill.
In the 1640s, though personally a Royalist, Butler worked as a clerk for a number of country gentlemen who were fervent Puritans. One was the Cromwellian general Sir Samuel Luke. He surely helped inspire Butler’s idealistic “Republican”, who “builds governments in the air, and shapes them with his fancy, as men do figures in the clouds”.
Luke had also been the model for the eponymous protagonist of Butler’s mock-heroic poem Hudibras, which was first published in 1663. More than 11,000 lines of verse told the story of an incompetent Presbyterian knight whose exploits across the country tended to end in defeat and humiliation. The poem instantly propelled its creator into literary esteem. For brilliantly ridiculing his republican enemies in print, the newly-restored King Charles II rewarded Butler — who was perpetually impecunious — with £300.
But his masterpiece did not, as Butler had hoped, secure him a place at the royal court. Perhaps it was with a tinge of jealousy that he lashed out, in his list of Characters, at the “Huffing Courtier” whose “happiness consists in the opinion he believes others have of it”.
These sketches were caricatures of the people they surveyed. Nonetheless, they diagnosed the extremes to which certain professions or personalities could easily be drawn. Lawyers were known to stuff their speech with legal jargon (“he clogs it so with words, that the sense becomes as thick as puddle and is utterly lost”); many a constable patrolled the streets with a lantern “to seek … a knave by night”, happily extorting those he arrested or taking bribes from brothel-owners to overlook their establishments.
Butler comes closest to playing psychiatrist when he diagnoses — in a poetical but utterly pseudoscientific style — the character of a “Melancholy Man”. Such a person’s soul, we are told, “lives in his body, like a mole in the earth, that labours in the dark, and casts up doubts and scruples of his own imaginations.” Meanwhile his head “is haunted, like a house, with evil spirits and apparitions, that terrify and fright him out of himself, till he stands empty and forsaken”.
Only in 1756, nearly 80 years after his death, were most of Samuel Butler’s Characters first printed. The remaining descriptions followed in 1908. It is a puzzling matter why an author at the apex of his fame, and still languishing in relative poverty, chose not to publish a collection of writing that would almost certainly have sold well. It is unsatisfying to conclude that his essays were some private intellectual endeavour — but there may be some truth in it. After the upheaval of the English Civil War and Interregnum, one could hardly blame Butler for seeking to impose order on society by cataloguing the personalities contained within it.
