Overview

A biography of Sir Christopher Wren from one of Britain’s best writers and historians The figure of Sir Christopher Wren looms large in English national consciousness. The imposing beauty of St Paul's Cathedral stands forever for the nation's achievement – its undamaged dome towering above the rubble of the Blitz in the Second World War a symbol of the London's indomitable fighting spirit. The man behind the work was as remarkable as the monuments he has left us. Lisa Jardine takes us deep into Wren's imagination and discovers the unique, exacting nature of his mind and the emerging new world of late-seventeenth-century science and ideas. Wren was a versatile genius who could have pursued a number of brilliant careers with equal virtuosity. A mathematical prodigy, an accomplished astronomer, a skilful anatomist, and a founder of The Royal Society, he eventually made a career in what he described in later life as 'Rubbish' – architecture, and the design and construction of public buildings. But he remained committed to science. The Monument to the Great Fire was built with a subterranean laboratory; the south-west tower of St Paul's was used as a vertical telescope during construction – both were designed to function as public monuments and as oversized scientific instruments. Wren was a major figure at a turning point in English history. He mapped moons and the trajectories of comets for kings; lived and worked under six monarchs; pursued astronomy and medicine through two civil wars, the English Commonwealth, the Great Fire, the Restoration, and the eventual extinction of the Stuart dynasty. Jardine explores also Wren's personal motivations and passions. A sincere man with a remarkable capacity for friendship, his career was shaped by lasting associations forged during a turbulent boyhood, and a lifelong loyalty to the memory of his father's master and benefactor, the 'martyred' king, Charles I. Everything Wren undertook he envisaged on a grander scale – bigger, better, more enduring than anything that had gone before.

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9780007107766

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Of Ingenious Pursuits (1999): 'LJ has the knack of making science easy to understand. Her book brilliantly recaptures the excitement of the seventeenth-century scientists and the new word of objects they were finding and theorizing' Roy Porter Of Wordly Goods: 'A pleasure to read, as well as a pleasure to hold' Observer

A lucid portrait, abrim with encyclopedic detail, of the English architect, scientist, and inventor. Biographers, it is true, have long overlooked Wren (1632-1723), but British historian Jardine (Ingenious Pursuits, 1999, etc.) incorrectly claims that hers is the first integrated modern account of his career. Not so: Adrian Tinniswood's His Invention So Fertile (2002) was both integrated and modern, if a little on the slow side. Without supplanting Tinniswood's biography, which is more scientifically fluent, Jardine's is more pleasurable to read as it covers much of the same ground. The author marvels, and appropriately so, at Wren's scholarly attainments, extraordinary even in an age when such brilliant, multitalented individuals as John Locke, Samuel Pepys, and William Harvey were working their wonders. Jardine does not shy away from the gruesome subjects of Wren's early scientific experiments; he once claimed that he could easily contrive to convey any liquid Poison into the Mass of Blood and set about doing so by slicing open an unfortunate dog and introducing into it 2 ounces of Infusion of Crocus Metall: thus injected, the Dog immediately fell a Vomitting, & so vomited till he died. Fortunately for the dogs of London (and squeamish readers), Wren turned to architecture, designing St. Paul's Cathedral and other grand structures in the aftermath of the great London fire of 1666. Caught up in the complex, antimonarchical political struggles sweeping England, he had a way of picking the losing side, which diminished his reputation within his lifetime. Jardine remarks sympathetically that the failure of each of his royal patrons in turn . . . to see through to completion the great buildings Wren designed for them as their 'great Monuments' was symptomatic of their failure to give moral leadership, and symptomatic of the difficulties he faced as an artist dependent on a fickle, endangered audience. As solid as its subject's surviving buildings, and a useful addition to Restoration studies. (16-page color insert, b&w illustrations throughout) (Kirkus Reviews)

'He lived more than ninety years, not for himself, but for the public good', said Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph, and Lisa Jardine's new biography is a fascinating study of the architect who gave his nation what is still its pre-eminent public building, St Paul's Cathedral. Jardine, a writer and academic with an impressive string of publications, university posts and awards to her name, stands in proper awe of Wren's 'brilliant versatility of mind', which she explains in the context of the intellectual and political times in which he lived. She begins with an exciting discovery which sets the compass of the rest of the book. Wren's Monument to the Great Fire, the column that stands in the City of London to mark the site of the outbreak of the 1666 conflagration, has a hidden laboratory in the basement, to be used in conjunction with the hinged 'lid' on the urn that tops the structure to make observations and experiments. Similarly, Wren's genius was based on scientific pioneering as much as his understanding of aesthetic harmonies. He lived through a period of great transition in the arts, politics and learning. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Charles II, restored to the throne in 1660, and a leading scientist of an age that, while making ground-breaking discoveries in physics, chemistry, medicine astronomy and engineering, was also wedded to centuries-old 'knowledge' rooted in earthy folkloric cures and religious taboos and superstitions. The creation of his great buildings is dealt with in fascinating detail, from conception to completion. Greenwich and Chelsea hospitals, combining beauty and function with sublime grace, are another two masterpieces, though the drawings of some projects that never came to fruition leave a tantalizing sense of what might have been. And of course, St Paul's, the crowning achievement, though the brilliant, dedicated but truly modest polymath would, claims Jardine, have been mortified to hear it claimed as his 'monument'. (Kirkus UK)

Of Ingenious Pursuits (1999): 'LJ has the knack of making science easy to understand. Her book brilliantly recaptures the excitement of the seventeenth-century scientists and the new word of objects they were finding and theorizing' Roy Porter Of Wordly Goods: 'A pleasure to read, as well as a pleasure to hold' Observer

Author Information

Lisa Jardine CBE is Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and the Open University. She is a trustee of the V&A Museum, Chair of the V&A Museum of Childhood Board of Trustees, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institution. For the academic year 2007–08 she is seconded to the Royal Society as Advisor to its Collections. She writes and reviews for all the major UK national newspapers and magazines and for the Washington Post, and has presented and appears regularly on arts, history and current affairs programmes for TV and radio. She is a regular writer and presenter of A Point of View, on BBC Radio 4. She judged the 1996 Whitbread Prize, the 1999 Guardian First Book Award, the 2000 Orwell Prize and was Chair of Judges for the 1997 Orange Prize and the 2002 Man Booker Prize. She is the author of a number of bestselling general books, including Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, and biographies of Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Lisa Jardine is married to the architect John Hare and has three children.

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