Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography

About the book

George W. E. Russell organizes his autobiography around the institutions and activities that formed him: Harrow, Oxford, home, London, elections, Parliament, literature, and the Church. The result is less a continuous day-by-day record than a succession of social and intellectual settings, populated by remembered voices and characteristic incidents. Family history gives the opening a strong sense of inherited position, while later chapters show how that position intersects with public service. Anecdote is one of Russell's principal methods, and readers can ask what a well-told story includes or leaves out. The book offers a participant's view of a particular British social world, not a representative account of every Victorian life. Its pleasures include the changing relationship between personal memory and institutional custom.

• Education and society
• Public life
• Memory and belonging

Why read it

For a conversational memoir that makes institutions vivid through the people and habits remembered within them.

English autobiography · fifteen thematic chapters