The Propagation of Lives: Sir John Who?

The intellectual multiplicity of Sir John Hill—apothecary, botanist, geologist, satirist, periodical writer, dramatist, perpetual opponent—makes him a hard subject to pin down. Is a life best understood in relation to its parts or to a whole, however provisional? In the light of George Rousseau’s magisterial biography, which has at least chronology to make its subject cohere, what can be added by a refraction of that subject back into discipline-specific components? Or, rather than adding anything, can subtraction clear away disciplinary jostle to show its subject in a clearer biographical light? I explore how approaches to Hill’s life and works contribute to methodological debate for biography, with history, psychology and celebrity studies brought to bear on Hill, a moving target. Hill’s biographer says ‘The narrative about him is one of uncanny ability wrecked by little loyalty to any professional group compounded by disturbed personality’. My essay analyses how a selection of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century discourses represent Hill or—Sir John Who?