Bacon

Bacon is Charles Williams's 1933 biography of Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan and Jacobean lawyer, statesman, and philosopher of natural science. It belongs to a run of short biographies Williams wrote in the early 1930s for the publisher Arthur Barker, among them studies of James I, Rochester, and Queen Elizabeth, and it comes from the period when he was working as an editor at Oxford University Press in London and writing the supernatural novels for which he is best known.

The book does not sit naturally among Williams's explicitly devotional or theological writing, and it should not be approached as spiritual formation in the narrow sense. Its interest for readers of this library lies in the biographer rather than his subject: Williams read lives, whether historical or literary, with the habits of a Christian imagination, attending to how a person's ambitions, loyalties, and failures take shape under the pressures of power and intellect. Bacon, who rose to the highest legal office in England and fell in disgrace, offered him a case study of precisely that kind.

Who should read this: readers who already know Williams's novels, his criticism, or The Figure of Beatrice and want to see his mind at work on an English historical figure. It is not for those seeking a guide to prayer or a treatise on formation, nor for those who want an up-to-date scholarly account of Bacon, since this is a biography of its time by a writer whose strengths lay elsewhere.