The Anatomy of Melancholy - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Admirers of The Anatomy of Melancholy range from Samuel Johnson, Holbrook Jackson (whose Bibliomania was based on the style and presentation), George Armstrong Custer, Charles Lamb, and John Keats (who said it was his favourite book), to Stanley Fish, Philip Pullman, Jorge Luis Borges (who used a quote as an epigraph to his story "The Library of Babel"), Nick Cave, Samuel Beckett, and Jacques Barzun (who sees in it many anticipations of 20th century psychiatry). According to The Guardian literary critic Nick Lezard, the Anatomy "survives among the cognoscenti".

Burton's solemn tone and his endeavour to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations were ridiculed by Lawrence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Sterne also mocked Burton's quaint and old-fashioned divisions in the ludicrous titles of his chapters, and parodied his grave and sober account of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia.