Masters Of Old Britannia

Across their pages march a colorful succession of familiar names–the architects of ideas and discoveries still vital to scientists, philosophers, politicians and writers today. While the hurricane raged and Cromwell died, a country schoolboy named Isaac Newton was amusing himself by measuring how far he could jump against the wind, calculating its force. Thirty years later his “Principia” would change the face of mathematics and mechanics. John Milton was writing “Paradise Lost” while toiling in the civil service. Pepys’s “Diary,” an un-self-conscious, shockingly frank account of life in Restoration England, created a new genre of literature when it was published in the 1800s. When Wren was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, a building in which he reached his pinnacle as an architect, the inscription placed above his tomb said it all: reader, if you require a monument, look about you.

Wren and Pepys were born within a year of each other in the 1630s, into families at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Wren spent his boyhood in Windsor Castle. Pepys, the son of a tailor, grew up near Fleet Street in a crowded apartment above his father’s shop. Their personalities, too, were poles apart-and infuse each biography with a distinct style. Pepys’s gregarious lust for life is seared on every page of his “Diary,” and Tomalin’s book is woven through with his vivid sketches of 17th-century London, its turbulent politics, bustling streets, sights and scandals. When in 1666 the most devastating fire in London’s history reduced 13,000 homes, 87 medieval churches and most of the city’s civic buildings to ashes, Pepys rowed himself down the River Thames, recording everything he saw. He was the first to inform the king, advising him to start pulling down houses in the fire’s path to slow the advance of the flames.

As the embers cooled over London, Wren also went to work drawing up plans for rebuilding the city, whose modern skyline, including the churches of St. Bride’s Fleet Street and St. Mary-le-Bow with their fine, prominent spires, he shaped. Beyond London, too, the landscape is studded with Wren gems like the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre. While Jardine’s is no less fascinating a study, it remains a picture of the science and esthetics of the era, hovering above the dramas that so engaged Pepys. Jardine conveys a shrewd understanding of Wren’s architectural vision, rooting it in a fresh look at the broader scientific milieu in which he worked. Had he not been an inventive and accomplished astronomer, experimenting with scientific drawing and mathematics, Wren might never have attempted to design the tricky, but perpetually inspiring, raised cupola of St. Paul’s, a structure unprecedented in English architecture.

Both biographies draw convincingly on wider cultural themes that relate their subjects’ work to the present. Tomalin compares Pepys’s descriptions of the civil war with similar key moments in history, like the fall of communism, when whole populations are forced to shift their political allegiances and ways of thinking. Wren’s proposal to redesign London after the Great Fire with a planned system of streets and wide boulevards was shelved as a result of the king’s new need to bow to the will of the people and to respect the rights of individual property owners–a priority that has become a national obsession, etched permanently on the city’s tangled alleys. Though Britain’s short political revolution left barely a mark on its government, the achievements of its subjects echo down the centuries in these two skillful biographies, both surprisingly modern, compelling and alive.

title: “Masters Of Old Britannia” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-03” author: “Molly Brooks”

Wren and Pepys were born within a year of each other in the 1630s, into families at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Wren spent his boyhood in Windsor Castle. Pepys, the son of a tailor, grew up near Fleet Street in a crowded apartment above his father’s shop. Their personalities, too, were poles apart–and infuse each biography with a distinct style. Pepys’s gregarious lust for life is seared on every page of his “Diary,” and Tomalin’s book is woven through with his vivid sketches of 17th-century London, its turbulent politics, bustling streets, sights and scandals. When in 1666 the most devastating fire in London’s history reduced 13,000 homes, 87 medieval churches and most of the city’s civic buildings to ashes, Pepys rowed himself down the River Thames, recording everything he saw. He was the first to inform the king, advising him to start pulling down houses in the fire’s path to slow the advance of the flames.