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On English Melancholy
An excerpt from Iris Moon’s “Melancholy Wedgwood,” an experimental biography of the ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood.
I am told that this saturnine image initiates a strain of melancholy tied to a peculiarly German notion of modernity, culminating in Max Weber’s idea of the “iron cage,” where we are captive to the rules of rationality. The Greek philosopher is pictured sitting under a tree, studying the anatomy of the animals around him for the “seat of black choler,” while “Over his head appears the sky, / And Saturn, Lord of melancholy.” To the right of the title is the Hypochondriac, who adopts the same pose as Dürer’s saturnine figure. Written decades before the Acts of Union in 1707 sutured England to Scotland and Wales (but not yet Ireland), and before the idea of a unified British Isles had fully ripened, Burton’s voluminous text intimates the full scale of the problems that confronted a man with too much time on his hands.
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