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I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. … I have not great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men. … My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; I should, moreover, never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy. … With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that thus I should have influenced to a considerable extent the beliefs of scientific men on some important points.
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I recognized what I had to do, though I shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. … I may be accused of laying stress on little things, of being beside the mark, of going into impertinent or ridiculous details, of sounding my own praise, of giving scandal; but this is a case above all others, in which I am bound to follow my own lights and to speak out my own heart. It is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical; nor to be criticized for being so. It is not pleasant to reveal to high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early years. It is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts.
These gobbets, from autobiographies of two distinguished—one might say archetypal—Victorians, reveal rather different ways of taking the measure of a self. One displays a downplaying of accomplishment and achievement; the other writes from compulsion and consternation. One gestures toward obituary, the other toward testimony. One minimizes the role of self unveiling in assessing his significance, the other maximizes it. One is a scientist, the other a cleric. One is Charles Darwin1; the other John Henry Newman.2
In cases such as these, autobiographical styles express something of their authors' respective stations in life. The vocation of one—the scientist—virtually required self-erasure in the cause of intellectual advancement; at one point, Darwin actually described his mind as "a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts." The calling of the other—the theologian—impressed upon him the central importance of personal conviction and individual pilgrimage; Newman wanted "to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes" and so he intended—as he put it himself—to "draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind."
As these commentaries already make clear, the art of telling a life, whether autobiographical or biographical, is never a straightforward matter. Motivations differ. Strategies vary. Interests condition. Expectations constrain. Besides, autobiography and biography find themselves implicated in a wider universe of moral values, epistemological commitments, and interpretive languages. For this reason each age asks different questions of biography as it redefines itself. Accordingly, reconsidering the genealogy of autobiography and biography may give us clues to appreciating something of the character of the different societies in which such narratives are broadcast.
On the face of it at least, science doesn't seem to sit well with biography. Science, so the standard story goes, is to do with excising the personal, with minimizing the individual, with eliminating the intimate. Replication, detachment, control, peer review, and the like are intended to downgrade the ego. Science, we are encouraged to imagine, subverts the self; technology transcends biography; objective knowledge expels subjective sensibility. So we have long thought. Indeed, the Darwin autobiography, to which I have already referred, displays a remarkable inclination toward scientific self-effacing. The same is true of Einstein's autobiography, which, after the first page or two, plunges into the highly technical world of physics on the precise understanding that—as Einstein put it himself—the "essential being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers."
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