The Anatomy of Melancholy (full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) is a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621 but republished five more times over the next seventeen years with massive alterations and expansions.
The book is a medical treatise about melancholy (depression). Over 500,000 words long, it discusses a wide range of topics besides depression – including history, astronomy, geography, and various aspects of literature and science – and frequently uses humour to make points or explain topics. Burton wrote it under the pseudonym Democritus Junior as a reference to the Ancient Greek "laughing philosopher" Democritus.
The Anatomy of Melancholy inspired several writers of the following centuries, such as Enlightenment figures like Samuel Johnson and modern authors like Philip Pullman. Romantic poet John Keats said Anatomy was his favourite book. Portions of Burton's writing were used by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy during the 1750s and 1760s.Ferriar (1798), chapter 3, pp. 55–59, 64.
Synopsis Although presented as a medical text, The Anatomy of Melancholy is often seen as much a sui generis work of literature as it is a scientific or philosophical text; when Anatomy was reprinted in 2001, The Guardian described it in a review as going beyond medicine: "Made out of all the books that existed in a 17th-century library, it was compiled to explain and account for all human emotion and thought." Both comedic and serious in tone, Anatomy has frequent "pervading humour"Émile Legouis, A History of English Literature (1926) among its scientific writing and often verges on stream of consciousness.
Anatomy starts with a roughly 200-page-long satirical introduction, "Democritus to the Reader", narrated by Burton's pseudonym Democritus Junior. Here he gives his often-quoted reason for writing the book: "I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy." He defines his subject as:
The main body of the book is divided into three partitions. The first partition is "The Causes of Melancholy", the second partition is "The Cure of Melancholy", and the third partition is "Love-Melancholy and Religious Melancholy". Each of these has a large number of sections and subsections.
The book regularly quotes ancient and medieval medical authorities, including Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, and Burton included a great deal of Latin poetry – much of it from ancient sources left untranslated. A significant number of these citations are incorrect, taken out of context, or simply fabricated. Karl Hagen speculated in his Project Gutenberg edition that Burton's misquotations may be the result of quoting from memory.
The second edition, published in 1624, contains the first recorded use of the word polymath in English. Burton uses it while describing the lengths scholars go to for fame:
Background
Much of Anatomy was inspired by Burton's own struggles with depression. His melancholy is the most widely acknowledged feature of his life; he wrote the book in part to relieve this melancholy but found it difficult to do so.Traister, B. H. (1976). "New Evidence about Burton's Melancholy?". Renaissance Quarterly. 29 (1): 66–70. doi:10.2307/2859991. JSTOR 2859991. PMID 11615595. S2CID 33995848. Fellow Oxfordian White Kennett wrote that Burton could flit between "interval[s] of vapours" in which he was lively and social, and periods of isolation in his college chambers where his peers worried he was suicidal.Bullen, Arthur Henry (1886). "Burton, Robert (1577–1640)" . In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 8. London: Smith, Elder & Co.Dewey, Nicholas (Winter 1970). ""Democritus Junior," alias Robert Burton". The Princeton University Library Chronicle. 31 (2): 103–121. doi:10.2307/26403977. JSTOR 26403977. PMID 11635553. His epitaph — which is believed to have been written by Burton himself – in Christ Church Cathedral states: "Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave both life and death."Nochimson, Richard L. (1974). "Studies in the Life of Robert Burton". The Yearbook of English Studies. 4: 109. doi:10.2307/3506685. JSTOR 3506685 Literary historian Jonathan Lamb sees Burton's depression as a counterpart to his academic knowledge:
Most of Burton's life was spent at the University of Oxford, and the majority of his information for Anatomy came secondhand through the books of the Oxford library; melancholy was a topic with which he had personal experience. Lamb notes that "he writes about melancholy in a melancholy manner, exhibiting in his treatise all the contradictions and irregularities that belong to the disease. Burton's real melancholy is both excited and controlled by books and his imitations of them".
Burton left no record of when he began his work on Anatomy. His biographer Michael O'Connell speculates the project grew piecemeal, with research beginning in his twenties and the work well on its way by his thirties.O'Connell, Michael (1986). Robert Burton. Twayne Publishers. Burton explicitly states that the study of melancholy was a lifelong fascination of his, and regularly "deducted from the main channel of my studies".Burton, Robert (1927). Dell, Floyd; Jordan-Smith, Paul (eds.). The Anatomy of Melancholy. New York: Tudor Publishing Company. However long the work took, it was finished by 5 December 1620 (when he was 43), which is the date he signed the conclusion of the book.
Publication + Bibliographical information for Burton's AnatomyDuff, E. G. (1 September 1923). "The Fifth Edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy". The Library. 4th ser. IV (2): 81–101. doi:10.1093/library/s4-iv.2.81.Blair, Rhonda L.; Faulkner, Thomas C.; Kiessling, Nicolas K. (1989). "Textual Introduction". In Blair, Rhonda L.; Faulkner, Thomas C.; Kiessling, Nicolas K. (eds.). Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy. Vol. 1. pp. xxxvii–lx. Date Edition Binding Location 16211st4toOxford353,36916242ndfoOxford423,98316283rdfoOxford476,85516324thfoOxford505,59216385thfoOxford514,11616516thfoOxford516,38416607thfoLondon516,38416768thfoLondon516,384 Burton was an obsessive editor of his own work, and published five revised and expanded editions of The Anatomy of Melancholy during his lifetime. The first edition was a single quarto volume nearly 900 pages long; subsequent editions were even longer.
It has often been out of print, particularly between 1676 and 1800.The Complete Review discussion of The Anatomy of Melancholy Because no original manuscript of Anatomy has survived, later reprints have drawn more or less faithfully from the editions published during Burton's life.William H. Gass, Introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy, New York Review of Books 2001
Early editions have entered the public domain, with several available from online sources such as Project Gutenberg. In recent decades, increased interest in the book, combined with its public domain status, has resulted in new print editions, most recently in 2021 under the Penguin Classics imprint, edited by Angus Gowland (), and before that, a 2001 reprinting of the 1932 Everyman's Library edition by The New York Review of Books under its NYRB Classics imprint ().
Legacy and influence Medical historian Roy Porter called The Anatomy of Melancholy "that omniumgatherum of anecdotes of insanity whose burden was that mankind — including the author himself — was quite out of its mind." Despite its origins as a medical treatise, studies of Anatomy over the last 400 years have almost entirely focused on its value as literature. Burton's numerous anecdotes, which tackle melancholy with both sobriety and humour, as well as the overarching influence of his personal sadness on the book, are often cited as making Anatomy his "one truly great work".
In the 18th and 19th centuries, melancholy became somewhat fashionable for the upper classes – owing in part to the popularity of works like The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Gothic genre, and Romanticism. This so-called "Age of Melancholy" resulted in a rediscovery of Burton's Anatomy, which had seen a dwindling audience over the previous century and had been out of print since 1676. Charles Lamb's push for a 9th edition in 1800 revitalised interest in the book, and it became a "literary phenomenon".
Samuel Taylor Coleridge regularly annotated his copy of Anatomy. William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, William Green, and Herman Melville were all known to own the book.
Figures like O. Henry, Anthony Powell, Northrop Frye, and Cy Twombly cite Anatomy as influential in their own work. Jorge Luis Borges used a line from Burton as an epigraph to his story "The Library of Babel", and Washington Irving quotes from it on the title page of The Sketch Book. Holbrook Jackson based the style and presentation of his Anatomy of Bibliomania on The Anatomy of Melancholy. The book "lurks behind the writing" of Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy, and Jacques Barzun believed it predicted 20th-century psychiatry.Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 221–224.
John Milton English poet John Milton used Anatomy as the basis for his poem about melancholy, "Il Penseroso" ("the thinker"). It was most likely composed around ten years after the first edition was published.Kerrigan, William; Rumrich, John; and Fallon, Stephen (eds.) The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. New York: The Modern Library, 2007. Thomas Warton described Milton as "an attentive reader of Burton's book".
Several of his works, including the epic poem Paradise Lost, exhibit parallels to Anatomy. This includes the "golden chain" attached to "this pendant world", as well as descriptions of demons and theories of predestination. Milton scholar George Wesley Whiting writes that "in addition to agreeing upon the fundamental points of theology, demonology, cosmography and morality, Burton and Milton condemn war and military glory". "Il Penseroso" (and its companion poem "L'Allegro") contrasts melancholy with mirth in a similar way to Burton's distinction between "bad" melancholy and "good" melancholy.
Samuel Johnson
Writer Samuel Johnson called Anatomy "a valuable work", saying "there is a great spirit and great power in what Burton says". Johnson suffered from bouts of "horrible melancholia" and, at one point, "strongly entertained thoughts of suicide", according to his biographer James Boswell.Bate, Walter Jackson (1977), Samuel Johnson, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that writers such as himself were especially predisposed to melancholy. Most of his attempted remedies for his own depression came from treatments prescribed by the Anatomy of Melancholy. Chief among these was "constant occupation of mind"; Johnson found that staying busy helped ward off melancholy, which was a significant reason his writing was so prolific. He described Anatomy as "the only book that ever got him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise".
Laurence Sterne In 1798, John Ferriar published the paper Illustrations of Sterne, which pointed out that Laurence Sterne's 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman used passages from Anatomy almost word for word.Petrie (1970) pp. 261–262.Petrie (1970) pp. 261–66. Sterne also took sections from Of Death by Francis Bacon and several other books. Besides copying text, Sterne referenced Burton's book divisions in the titles of his chapters, and he parodied his account of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia. These accusations of plagiarism further fuelled the revived interest in Burton's work at the turn of the 19th century.
John Keats