I've always had a passion for making lists. Unfortunately, this passion usually sputters and dies when it comes to cataloging my library. (Hint for baby academics: start cataloging your books before you have 5,000 of them. You'll be much happier. Really.) There is a bright side, however: whenever an occasional burst of cataloging energy hits, I can rest happy in the knowledge that the books are already categorized and in alphabetical order. The only exception to this rule is the biography section, which, for some reason, has wound up in its own room; it's in alphabetical order by subject, rather than by author.
Last night, while taking a well-earned break from, ugh, house-cleaning (parents on the horizon!), I amused myself by ranking biographical subjects according to the number of lives I'd acquired of them. I've included formal autobiographies, but not collections of letters, unpublished notes (e.g., Disraeli's Reminiscences), or journals. Multi-volume biographies (e.g., Ehrman's Younger Pitt) count as one.
- Queen Victoria: 10
- Benjamin Disraeli: 9 (but not Monypenny & Buckle)
- W. E. Gladstone: 6
- George Eliot: 5
- Charlotte Bronte: 4+1 group biography
- Jane Austen: 4
- Charles Dickens: 4
- William Pitt the Younger: 4 (including John Ehrman's behemoth)
- John Ruskin: 4
- Sir Walter Scott: 4 (including Edgar Johnson, but only an abridged John Lockhart)
- Lord Byron: 3+1 group biography (but not Leslie Marchand)
- William Wordsworth: 3+1 group biography (including Mary Moorman)
- Prince Albert: 3
- Thomas Carlyle: 3
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 3
- Henry Fielding: 3
- John Keats: 3
- Horatio, Lord Nelson: 3
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan: 3 (including the nineteenth-century lives by Mrs. Oliphant and Thomas Moore)
- Anthony Trollope: 3
- William Blake: 2
- James Boswell: 2
- Robert Browning: 2
- Edmund Burke: 2
- Charles II: 2
- Richard Cobden: 2
- Charles Darwin: 2
- Daniel Defoe: 2
- Elizabeth Gaskell: 2
- George III: 2
- George IV: 2
- William Hogarth: 2 (including Ronald Paulson)
- Samuel Johnson: 2
- Eliza Lynn Linton: 2
- Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay: 2
- Harriet Martineau: 2
- John Henry Cardinal Newman: 2
- John Addington Symonds: 2
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson: 2
- W. M. Thackeray: 2 (including Gordon N. Ray)
- Mrs. Trollope: 2
- James McNeill Whistler: 2
- Mary Wollstonecraft: 2
As I was going through my collection more generally, I noticed that I tend to acquire biographies for their contextual value, rather than for their subjects per se. While some of the multiples reflect my personal enthusiasms, others are there primarily for background. There certainly can't be any other reason for me to have four biographies of William Pitt the Younger, to whom I have a weird personal aversion (if one can be personally averse to someone who's been dead nearly two hundred years...). You'd think I'd have more lives of, say, Charles Darwin. Including letters & whatnot, the total runs to about 600 biographies & autobiographies.