Anthony Sharp, vintner, died
I’ve always preferred a list to a narrative, and one of my favourite books is The Obituary of Richard Smyth.[1] The subtitle explains its ambitions: ‘Being a catalogue of all such persons as he knew in their life: extending from A.D. 1627 to A.D. 1674.’ (I like the monumentalising ‘A.D.’). Smyth (1590-1675) was a city law-officer, and an avid book-collector, and his text is a chronological roll call of people who Smyth (no relation) knew. It is an intriguing and powerful thing to do, to write down a list through time of everyone you know who has died. My first thought on imagining the task is how thankfully short mine would be, until I start to track beyond my immediate community into people I knew a bit, or once, or in passing, and then names start to pile up.
Here is a sample from Richard Smyth from 1640-1.
Decemb. 21 Mr. Edward Sherborn, secretary to the East India Company, and clerk of the Ordinance at the Tower, a courteous gentlm., died.
29 Tho. Sharples, a taylor, prisoner in Wood Street Comptter (who had before gotten a great hurt by a fall down a paire of staires), died.
Febr. 10 John Masters, goldsmith at Fleet Bridg, died.
15 Mis Zouch, wife to Tho. Zouch, blacksmith, buried.
17 Sir Geo. Crook, judge of the King’s Bench, died.
April 9 Edw. Woodhouse, attorn. died at a tavern in Newgate Markett.
May 29 Old Lady Camble, in Coleman Street, about this time died.
March 19 Anthony Sharp, vintner, died.
April 29 Mr. Skinner, out neighbour in ye Old Jury, died.
May 3 Wagstaff, brick layer in Aldersgate Street, buried.
12 Tho. Earle of Strafford, beheaded on Tower Hill.
The men, women and children flicker for a second – alive for the length of a line – and then they’re gone. Some of the names are famous, but most, like Anthony Sharp, vintner, are not, and for many, Smyth’s brief note is their only presence in historical memory. That’s partly why I feel a powerful pull towards reading carefully – this is their one chance; I have an obligation to attend – that stands in counter-balance to my urge to skim over these similar sounding people. There are pages and pages of them!
There are some refrains that echo across the entries: many of these figures are residents of Smyth’s local parish; lots of them are booksellers and printers; and Smyth’s extended family recur. But because the lives are ordered through time, the main impression is a jumbling of hierarchies, a sharp chopping between different kinds of people that builds into a kind of celebration, even as it laments:
Sept. 19 Mr. Fran. Quarles, a famous poet, died
Octob. 24 Sam. Dye died soddenly in Mr. Oglethorp’s office
May 29 Old Mr. Grice, in Aldersgate Street, who wore trunck breeches, died
Augt. 8 My son Thomas died
In lots of ways Smyth’s record keeping grows out of the parish register, a form of enumerative writing introduced by Thomas Cromwell in 1538 that powerfully shaped how individuals imagined lives and communities. Burial records in parish registers are generally terse (‘May 13 Thomas Crannoway buried’) but sometimes, through a tipping in of detail by the scribe, perhaps for reasons of intimacy or affection or hostility towards the deceased, the records blossom into something like proto-obituary (‘Philippe Winchly of Ware, an owld notorious bedlam rogue, died suddanly in the fields within our parish as hee travelled alonge, and was buried with us the xijth of October’).[2]
But Smyth’s record of lives has other co-ordinates, too. The one that comes to mind, because I like it a lot, is David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel (2001), a work that resists narrative and instead presents staccato points of literary history, a kind of commonplace book of curiosities (‘Plato talked to much, Diogenes said’), a great pile of shards or a ‘mural’ (in Markson’s words). Like Smyth’s catalogue of brief lives, Markson’s list produces refrains that are audible, or nearly audible, but his records are also joltingly particular (‘Botticelli spent his last years on crutches’) and many of them concern deaths:
John Milton died of gout.
Chekhov died of consumption.
Alain-Fournier was killed in action in France less than two months into World War I.
Lamark died blind. And was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Isaac Newton died of complications from a kidney stone.
Markson’s book’s last words are ‘Farewell and be kind’ (a quote, probably, from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)). The final entry in Smyth’s text is his own obituary, written by his colleague Augustin Newbold on 11 April 1675:
March 26 Friday, old Mr, Richard Smyth, my honoured friend, aged 85 years, dyed and was buried in Criplegate Church on ye 1st of April following; he was ye collector of the aforesaid Catalogue, and of many most excellent Books; he was a just man and of good report, and worthy of imitation.
The only edition I’m aware of is Henry Ellis, ed., The Obituary of Richard Smyth, Secondary of the Poultry Compter (London, Camden Society xliv, 1849).
Vanessa Harding has done some great work on Smyth, particularly in relation to plague – as, for example, here.
[1] The text exists as a manuscript in Cambridge (CUL MS Mm.iv.36) but I’ve rather jauntily been using the 1849 edition.
[2] Parish register of St Alfrege, Dulwich, London Metropolitan Archives, P78/ALF/1, 1616; The Parish Register and Tithing Book of Thomas Hassall of Amwell, ed. by Stephen G. Doree (Hertfordshire Records Publications vol. 5; Hertfordshire Record Society: Hertfordshire, 1989), p. 95.
Coming at this from the other end is Sam Winston's "Birth-Day" (2013). He started off drawing small circles to "chart the 183,600 lives that come into being on the planet over a period of 12 hours" but that turned into an exhibition at the Southbank Centre where the public were invited to chart the births and deaths with circles on one mural and with text on another (https://www.samwinston.com/projects/birth-day). So moving from raw, large-scale statistics or lists to the personal within them -- and vice versa.
There is so much left unsaid by these entries that the imagination instantly fills in. I want to know more about whether Mr Oglethorp’s office got much work done that day, for example. But the brevity of the entry about his son makes it all the more brutal.
And there is something very democratic and levelling in the great and the good rubbing shoulders with ordinary people - Strafford as next door neighbour to Wagstaff the bricklayer.