Memoir

THE MEMOIR BOOM OF THE BRITISH 1820s was duplicated in the United States some three decades later. Louis Kaplan’s definitive Bibliography of American Autobiographies lists 198 works published between 1850 and 1859—a fourfold increase in just thirty years—and the number kept going up for the rest of the century, reaching 448 in the 1890s.¹⁰ Most of the writers of these books were male, but not all. Three works by women particularly stand out, for both their literary qualities and the way they prefigured later subgenres. I start with the one published last. Poet Lucy Larcom’s A New England Girlhood (1889) was a memoir of an on-balance happy childhood, in the same vein as works written a hundred years later by Russell Baker, Annie Dillard, or Bill Bryson. At the time, the reading public did not expect a memoir by a more or less normal person that had no fire, brimstone, melodrama, or overarching moral, which led Larcom to an impressive compound justification in her preface. Among her points were that the book was written at the urging of friends; that it would forever excuse her from the many annoying requests she got for “personal facts, data for biographical paragraphs, and the like”; that it shed light on a vanished time and place; that since the “most enjoyable thing” about writing is the “mutual friendship” between author and readers, an autobiography is like the sharing of confidences among friends; that “there may be more egotism in withdrawing mysteriously into one’s self, than in frankly unfolding one’s life-story, for better or worse”; and, reflecting the pantheism she developed in her later life, that a true auto biography is actually “a picture of the outer and inner universes photographed upon one little life’s consciousness.” She explained, “If an apple blossom or a ripe apple could tell its one story, it would be still more than its own, the story of the sunshine that smiled upon it, of the winds that whispered to it, of the birds that sang around it, of the storms that visited it, and of the motherly tree that held it and fed it until its petals were unfolded and its form developed.”

Larcom, who was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1824, would become a protégée of none other than John Greenleaf Whittier and eventually achieve success enough that The Boston Globe faintly praised her as the “best of America’s minor poets.” Her comfortable and secure early childhood ended at the age of seven, with the death of her father, a sea captain. Her mother moved the family to Lowell, where she took in boarders, and Lucy, for ten years starting at the age of eleven, went to work, becoming one of the textile factories’ famous “mill girls.” While her description of the experience has been of great value to subsequent historians, it is in no way a brief against the system; the memoir uncovering the exploitation and suffering of young factory workers, so common in nineteenth-century Britain, never took hold in the United States. Rather, the book focuses on the way her time in the mills shaped her as a person and, eventually, a poet. Although she “loved quietness,” she grew not to mind the incessant din, finding “that I could so accustom myself to the noise that it became like a silence to me. And I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough. Even the long hours, the early rising, and the regularity enforced by the clangor of the bell were good discipline for one who was naturally inclined to dally and to dream, and who loved her own personal liberty with a willful rebellion against control.”

Another common type of modern-day memoir is the true-life saga of living through traumatic or at least dramatic historical events. The nineteenth-century precursor here is My Cave Life in Vicksburg (even the title has a modern tabloidy feel), whose author, listed on the title page as “A Lady,” in fact was Mary Ann Webster Loughborough, the wife of a major in the Confederate army. The book recounts several months, in the spring and summer of 1863, in which she and her two-year-old daughter and many other Vicksburg civilians lived in makeshift caves meant to protect them from Union mortar and artillery shells that poured down on the city day and night. The vividness and humaneness of the writing explain why the New York publishing firm Appleton would put out the book the following year, while the Civil War was still raging. Loughborough describes universal emotions in the face of war, as every sense is assaulted:

I shall never forget my extreme fear during the night, and my utter hope lessness of ever seeing the morning light. Terror stricken, we remained crouched in the cave, while shell after shell followed each other in quick succession. I endeavored by constant prayer to prepare myself for the sudden death I was almost certain awaited me. My heart stood still as we would hear the reports from the guns, and the rushing and fearful sound of the shell as it came toward us. As it neared, the noise became more deafening; the air was full of the rushing sound; pains darted through my temples; my ears were full of the confusing noise; and, as it exploded, the report flashed through my head like an electric shock, leaving me in a quiet state of terror the most painful that I can imagine—cowering in a corner, holding my child to my heart—the only feeling of my life being the choking throbs of my heart, that rendered me almost breathless.

A fascinating hybrid text is Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, published in 1868.¹¹ The beginning is classic slave narrative (Frederick Douglass was a friend of Keckley’s, and no doubt an inspiration), with a key difference: writing after the end of slavery, Keckley recalls a vanished world, not the horrors of still-uncorrected wrongs, and so her main task is not abetting abolition but telling a good story (while at the same time making sure that the evils of the institution are not forgotten). That may be why she starts the book with the statement “My life has been an eventful one,” delaying until the second sentence the formulaic “I was born . . .” There are sadly familiar elements of lashings (the first one suffered at the age of five), family separation, and Keckley’s own impregnation by a white man (she says she was “persecuted” by him), but by the third chapter she is in St. Louis and, while still a slave, has started a business making dresses for the city’s elite women. Her clients lent her $1,200—enough to buy her freedom, which she did in 1855. Keckley moved to Washington in 1860 and set up a dressmaking business. She was an immediate success, making gowns for Mrs. Stephen Douglas, Mrs. Jefferson Davis, and, soon after her husband was inaugurated, Mary Todd Lincoln. Keckley became not only the First Lady’s regular dressmaker but also her confidante and, eventually, her “best living friend,” as Mrs. Lincoln put it in a letter quoted by Keckley. The book has been the principle source for all biographies of Mary Lincoln, as well as a prime one for any account of life in the Lincoln White House.

Today we’re used to celebrities’ underlings (or relatives) writing books that air all sorts of dirty laundry; Behind the Scenes may have originated the genre. It certainly had the behind-the-scenes intimacy we have come to expect. Keckley’s description of the family on the day after Lincoln’s assassination (she was, she characteristically informs the reader, Mrs. Lincoln’s “only companion, except her children, in the days of her great sorrow”) is, if anything, too raw in its baring of the family’s pain:

Returning to Mrs. Lincoln’s room, I found her in a new paroxysm of grief. Robert was bending over his mother with tender affection, and little Tad was crouched at the foot of the bed with a world of agony in his young face. I shall never forget the scene—the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul. I bathed Mrs. Lincoln’s head with cold water, and soothed the terrible tornado as best I could. Tad’s grief at his father’s death was as great as the grief of his mother, but her terrible outbursts awed the boy into silence. Sometimes he would throw his arms around her neck, and exclaim, between his broken sobs, “Don’t cry so, Mamma! don’t cry, or you will make me cry, too! You will break my heart.”

Mrs. Lincoln could not bear to hear Tad cry, and when he would plead to her not to break his heart, she would calm herself with a great effort and clasp her child in her arms.

The passive-aggressive attitude that often creeps into the book can be explained by its reason for being. By 1867, Mrs. Lincoln, who had moved to Chicago after the president’s death, was about $70,000 in debt from expenses incurred during the White House years. She devised a plan—savaged by the newspapers as beneath the dignity of a former First Lady—to get funds by selling her clothes and jewelry in New York. Undignified or not, it did not succeed in raising a cent. Keckley, summoned to New York by Mrs. Lincoln to help, had to stay there for several months “to look after her interests,” and was not too happy about it: “Mrs. Lincoln’s venture proved so disastrous that she was unable to reward me for my services, and I was compelled to take in sewing to pay for my daily bread.”

Clearly, and understandably, Keckley resented what she had been put through, but in 1868 there was no established discourse for an ex-slave to express resentment regarding a president’s widow. And so she wrote a book, and included in it excerpts from dozens of letters from Mrs. Lincoln to her. (Copyright law today would not let a kiss-and-tell tome publish correspondence from the subject in full without permission.) All of them were private—that was what letters were, when people still wrote letters—but some cut very close to the bone, for example, this one, mailed to Keckley just months before the book’s publication:

I am writing this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R. [her son Robert] came up last evening like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, looking like death because [Mrs. Lincoln’s letters regarding the proposed sale of clothing] were published in yesterday’s paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable. . . . I pray for death this morning. Only my darling Taddie prevents my taking my life.

Keckley’s justification for printing this material is tortured. Claiming that she has been “prompted by the purest motive,” she notes, in a typically qualified sentence, “Mrs. Lincoln may have been imprudent, but since her intentions were good, she should be judged more kindly.” And therefore, she writes,

if I have betrayed confidence in anything I have published, it has been to place Mrs. Lincoln in a better light before the world. . . . I have written nothing that can place Mrs. Lincoln in a worse light before the world than the light in which she now stands, therefore the secret history that I publish can do her no harm. . . . These letters were not written for publication, for which reason they are all the more valuable; they are the frank overflowings of the heart, the outcropping of impulse, the key to genuine motives.

Keckley’s publisher took a different tack, advertising the book as “The Great Sensational Disclosure by Mrs. Keckley.” And the newspapers, so quick to vilify Mrs. Lincoln just months earlier, now turned on Keckley. “Has the American public no word of protest against the assumption that its literary taste is of so low grade as to tolerate the back-stairs gossip of negro servant girls?” asked one reviewer. The New York Times resisted bringing up the subject of race but was equally disdainful: “We cannot but look upon many of the disclosures made in this book as gross violations of confidence. Mrs. Lincoln evidently reposed implicit trust in [the author], and this trust, under unwise advice no doubt, she has betrayed.” Mary Lincoln was indeed offended by the revealing of confidences and never spoke to Keckley again. Robert Lincoln was irate as well, and Keckley speculated that he made an effort to suppress the book. In any case, it sold poorly. The author returned to Washington and her seamstress business. In 1892, at the age of seventy-four, she took a position as head of the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Health problems compelled her to return to Washington again, and she died there in 1907, forgotten and destitute. A photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln hung on the wall of her room.

As prescient and interesting as these books are, they had little impact at the time. If American autobiography in the period could be said to have a face, it combined the features of three very famous white males who were connected in multiple ways. These men—Ulysses S. Grant, P. T. Barnum, and Mark Twain—also were emblematic of a sea change in the kinds of Americans who were inspired to write their autobiographies. In the first half of the nineteenth century, people whom the bibliographer Louis Kaplan classified as either Clergy/Religious or Criminal/ Deviant accounted for 57 percent of such books. Then the moral middle opened up. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Clergy/Religious was still the most common category, at 22.7 percent, but Criminal/Deviant was down to 4.4 percent, and other categories made strong showings, neatly exemplified by these three authors. Grant stood for Military Life (13.2 percent) and Politician (7.2 percent), Barnum for Business (6.3 percent), and Twain for Writer (5.6 percent) and Frontier Life (7.9 percent).¹²

The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself appeared in 1854, when the author was forty-four years old. Barnum gave detailed accounts of the deceptions and humbug he was well known for perpetrating—notably the Joice Heth hoax, and the “Feejee Mermaid,” one of the most popular exhibits ever at his American Museum, which he described in the book as “an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen” that was likely the result of someone surgically connecting a fish tail with a monkey’s torso and head. Reaction to the book tended to focus on Barnum’s candor, which was unapologetic and sometimes bordered on defiant. Some critics praised it, but it put off others, including a reviewer from The New York Times, who was shocked that Barnum so willingly admitted to “the systematic, adroit, and persevering plan of obtaining money under false pretenses from the public at large.” Harvard Magazine’s critic, meanwhile, was bothered by his honesty: “Excess of frankness is a fault of which it is seldom necessary to complain. But Mr. Barnum has carried his frankness too far. It is his very sincerity which makes his book so bad.” It was a peculiar criticism, suggesting that at this point, some members of the public preferred some boundaries even in true stories.

As in other cases before and since, bad reviews did not dissuade the public from buying the book, and it sold an impressive 160,000 copies. Considering Barnum’s unmatched commercial instincts, lack of shyness, and relatively young age at the time of publication, it’s not surprising that he should have eventually produced a second autobiography. This was Struggles and Triumphs, or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, published in 1869. I should say first published in 1869. By this point, Barnum was mainly involved in presenting circus and menagerie shows, and until his death (in 1891), at each year’s show he distributed a new edition of the autobiography carrying the story up to the present. Barnum biographer A. H. Saxon observes, wearily, “The subject of the continuing evolution of Barnum’s book becomes from this point on a bibliographer’s nightmare, further complicated by the showman’s grandiloquently announcing in the 1880s that anyone who wished to was free to publish his own edition.”

In one of the final editions of the book, Barnum wrote that during a dinner with Ulysses S. Grant in 1880, the former president talked of discovering on a recent round-the-world trip that Barnum’s name was “familiar to multitudes who had not heard of me.” A few years later, Grant, in poor health and reeling from the collapse of a banking firm of which he was a partner, needed money. He understood that he could, through an accumulation of words, mortgage his fame—which, while perhaps not on the level of Barnum’s, was considerable. He began writing articles for a Century Magazine series on the Civil War, at $500 a piece. Their success prompted him to embark on a book of memoirs. It’s hard to imagine today, when presidents—and their wives—characteristically finance their post-White House years with door-stopping narratives containing accounts of every meeting with a foreign potentate (Jimmy Carter alone has a double-digit backlist), but at the time only two such works had been written. The first had come from the pen of Martin Van Buren, the eighth president, who worked on his memoirs from 1854 until his death in 1862—largely, it would appear, because he didn’t have much else to occupy his time. His son’s widow gave the 1,247-page manuscript to the Library of Congress, and it was finally published in 1920. It is a long-winded and in some ways peculiar work: Van Buren does not mention his wife a single time, and devotes more space to a brief mission to England than to his two years as secretary of state or four years as vice president. (The manuscript breaks off before his election as president in 1840.) But it has its charms, including Van Buren’s sincere modesty, for example, in his regret over what he saw as a deeply ingrained resistance to scholarship and study, even when he was faced with important court cases or political debates: “I am now amazed that with such disadvantages I should have been able to pass through such contests as it has been my lot to encounter with such few discomfitures.”

When Grant floated his idea for a memoir, the Century Company presented him with a contract offering a 10 percent sales royalty—which, on the basis of projected sales of the book, would bring him $20,000 to $30,000. Grant was apparently prepared to accept those terms. But then Samuel Clemens—the same Sam Clemens who wrote and published his own books as “Mark Twain”—intervened. Hearing of the proposed contract during a visit to Grant, he advised that its terms were unacceptable and proposed that the firm he had set up to bring out his own Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charles L. Webster & Company, publish the memoirs by subscription, paying the general 70 percent of net profits. Grant ultimately accepted the offer and set to work.

At one point during the writing process, Grant let it be known that he would be interested in Twain’s opinion of the manuscript. Twain recalled in his own posthumously published autobiography:

By chance I had been comparing the memoirs with Caesar’s “Commentaries” and was qualified to deliver judgment. I was able to say in all sincerity that the same high merits distinguished both books—clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, unpretentiousness, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice towards friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness and soldierly avoidance of flowery speech. I placed the two books side by side upon the same high level and I still think that they belonged there.

Twain’s praise does not, I should make clear, stem from the fact that he ghostwrote the memoirs, as rumors have persistently claimed. Grant’s best biographer, William McFeeley, and other historians agree that this wasn’t the case: Grant wrote the whole thing himself. The praise, in any case, is just. Rare if not unique among autobiographies, the book is almost completely lacking in ego, and thus a reader implicitly credits its characterizations and accounts; as for the writing, the clarity and simple diction and syntax make it, to this day, a paragon of the plain style. (Among its many admirers was Gertrude Stein.) All those qualities are on display in Grant’s description of his meeting with Lee at Appomattox:

When I had left camp that morning I had not expected so soon the result that was then taking place, and consequently was in rough garb. I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback in the field, and wore a soldier’s blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was. When I went into the house I found General Lee. We greeted each other, and after shaking hands took our seats. I had my staff with me, a good portion of whom were in the room during the whole of the interview.

What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the results, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.

The third member of the late-nineteenth-century autobiographical trio was Mark Twain himself, a Connecticut neighbor and friend of Barnum’s in the 1870s.¹⁴ Where Barnum and Grant were both early exemplars of the celebrity autobiography, a book justified in large or (in many future cases) complete part by the author’s fame, as opposed to his or her having anything to say, Twain was a writer who achieved fame through memoir. Twain’s posthumous official Autobiography, commenced late in life, is actually one of his weaker books, with too many long digressions, cranky asides, score settlings, and detailed accounts of royalties and book sales. But his early work, fresh and groundbreaking, was a kind of memoir in installments: four of his first seven books, and the ones that thrust him into the public consciousness, were nonfiction explorations of his past and his experiences.

The first of this series, The Innocents Abroad, was published in 1869, when Twain was thirty-four and at the end of an eight-year stint as a tramp newspaperman. His only published book to this point was a collection of sketches called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, but for several years he had been lecturing widely around the country, and was beginning to develop a reputation as the best of the Western humorists. Handsomely published, sold by subscription, and amply illustrated (many of the pictures included likenesses of the already recognizable author), The Innocents Abroad chronicled the first American organized tour of Europe and the Holy Land. It was an immense success, selling an estimated 500,000 copies in Twain’s lifetime. The book—like its eventual sequel, A Tramp Abroad (1880)—was more a comic travelogue than a memoir, but it absolutely depended on Twain as a character and personality.

Twain was a profoundly autobiographical artist, of a sort familiar today but unprecedented at the time. His appearances on the lecture circuit and, eventually, on the front pages of newspapers and in the public consciousness depended on the palpable sense of a real man telling his own real story (with a few stretchers thrown in). In his writing, he was drawn again and again to autobiographical forms. (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, no less than David Copperfield or Jane Eyre, is a memoir in fiction.) While deliberating on a follow-up to Innocents Abroad, he put together a peculiar sketch called “Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography.” Presumably in parody of a feature commonly overdone in the memoirs, he devoted about 95 percent of it to a faux genealogy of the “Twain” clan, with such knee-slappers as “Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a born humorist.” Twain paired this with another piece, equally unfunny, and published them as a pamphlet in 1870; later he had the sense to buy up all the plates and have them destroyed.¹⁵

His next proper book was less successful than The Innocents Abroad but more autobiographical. In Roughing It (1872), he decided to tell the story of his time in the West, commencing in 1861. The then twenty-six-year-old Twain, a riverboat pilot for more than a year, was at liberty because traffic on the Mississippi had been disrupted by the Civil War; he had just finished an extremely brief stint in the Confederate Army (he would tell that story a decade hence in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”). “My brother,” he writes in the opening sentence, referring to Orion Clemens, ten years his senior, “had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory—an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the Governor’s absence. A salary of eigh teen hundred dollars a year and the title of ‘Mr. Secretary,’ gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore.” So Twain lit out for the territory with Orion. The book tells the story of that journey, of his years as a freelance writer and newspaperman in Nevada and California, of the many colorful characters and locales he encountered, and finally his 1866 journey to Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands). The autobiographical details, of course, are far less important than Twain’s wonderful and enormously influential voice, which introduced to subsequent comic memoirists from James Thurber to David Sedaris the near-nuclear power of a self-deprecating narrator deploying hyperbole based on shrewd and perceptive observation.

Twain’s autobiographical books kept going farther back in time and getting less facetious. In Life on the Mississippi (1883), composed during the period when he was writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he went all the way back to his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, and his time as a riverboat apprentice and pilot on the Mississippi. It’s much too long—it was sold by subscription, too, and to achieve the required six-hundred-page length, Twain larded the manuscript with digressions, lengthy descriptions, assorted musings, and as much trivia about the river as Melville had on whales in Moby-Dick. But the stuff on his boyhood and youth is prime. In this characteristic passage he tells of his first day as a cub pilot, under the tutelage of the captain, Mr. Bixby:

Now and then Mr. Bixby called my attention to certain things. Said he, “This is Six-Mile Point.” I assented. It was pleasant enough information, but I could not see the bearing of it. I was not conscious that it was a matter of any interest to me. Another time he said, “This is Nine-Mile Point.” Later he said, “This is Twelve-Mile Point.” They were all about level with the water’s edge; they all looked about alike to me; they were monotonously unpicturesque. I hoped Mr. Bixby would change the subject. But no; he would crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affection, and then say: “The slack water ends here, abreast this bunch of China-trees; now we cross over.” So he crossed over. He gave me the wheel once or twice, but I had no luck. I either came near clipping off the edge of a sugar plantation, or I yawed too far from shore, and so dropped back into disgrace again and got abused.

The watch finally ends, but after what seems only a few minutes of sleep Twain is summoned back to the pilothouse: “Here was something fresh—this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them.” After a few minutes, Mr. Bixby asks him:

“What’s the name of the first point above New Orleans?”

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

“Don’t know?”

This manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment. But I had to say just what I had said before.

“Well, you’re a smart one,” said Mr. Bixby. “What’s the name of the next point?”

Once more I didn’t know.

“Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of any point or place I told you.”

I studied a while and decided that I couldn’t. . . .

“Look here! What do you suppose I told you the names of those points for?”

I tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation provoked me to say:—

“Well—to—to—be entertaining, I thought.”

This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who could talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen’s curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with. Presently he said to me in the gentlest way:—

“My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.”

MOST OF THE DIFFERENCE between American and British auto biography in the nineteenth century can be understood by a consideration of the year 1854. That was when the United States saw the autobiography of P. T. Barnum, who was perhaps the greatest self-promoter of all time. Embarking on his memoirs on the other side of the Atlantic that year was John Stuart Mill, who . . . wasn’t. Like many eminent Victorian autobiographers—including Harriet Martineau, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, John Addington Symonds, and Herbert Spencer—Mill stipulated that his memoirs not be published until after his death (which ended up occurring in 1873). Even from the grave, he was sheepish about the seeming egotism involved in presenting the story of his life to the public: “I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting to the public as a narrative, or as being connected with myself,” he wrote in the first chapter. “But . . . it may be useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable.”

Those last two adjectives are good examples of Mill’s propensity for very British understatement. His father, the historian, philosopher, and economist James Mill, used young John as a laboratory for his theories of education, commenting to his friend and colleague Jeremy Bentham that the boy was being brought up “to be a successor worthy of both of us.” (James Mill was the dominant parent in the household; John does not mention his mother a single time in his autobiography.) John embarked on the study of Greek at age three, Latin at seven, logic at twelve, and political economy at thirteen. That was all well and good, perhaps, except that all the cramming kept him away from other things, like friends, fun, and feelings. “For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt,” Mill writes of his father. “He regarded them as a form of madness.” At the age of twenty, Mill had a mental and emotional breakdown—the chapter describing it is called “A Crisis in My Mental History”—stemming from a fear that he would never be able to feel happiness or pleasure. He emerged from it when he found he was moved to tears by an emotional passage in Jean-François Marmontel’s Mémoires: “I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone.”

In the hands of a current-day memoirist, this material would be gold, with a high concept of intellectual abuse at the hands of a salably eccentric dad. But Mill, even from the safe fortress of the grave, is determined to play down any intrafamily conflict, and to blunt the edges of his hurt feelings. In an early draft, he noted, “It must be mentioned . . . that my father’s children neither loved him, nor, with any warmth of affection, anyone else.” The line was gone in the final version. Repeatedly, when Mill bared his soul in the draft, or mentioned Mrs. Mill, the passage would be excised. In the published text, he writes that his father “carefully kept me from having any great amount of intercourse with other boys. He was earnestly bent upon my escaping not only the ordinary corrupting influence which boys exercise over boys, but the contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling; and for this he was willing that I should pay the price of inferiority in the accomplishments which schoolboys in all countries chiefly cultivate.” Only in the original manuscript does he give a detailed description of that price, which was steep:

I grew up with great inaptness in the common affairs of every day life. I was far longer than children generally are before I could put on my clothes. I know not how many years passed before I could tie a knot. My articulation was long imperfect; one letter, r, I could not pronounce until I was nearly sixteen. I never could, nor can I now, do anything requiring the smallest manual dexterity. . . . I was continually acquiring odd or disagreeable tricks which I very slowly and imperfectly got rid of. I was, besides, utterly un-observant: I was, as my father continually told me, like a person who had not the organs of sense: my eyes and ears seemed of no use to me, so little did I see or hear what was before me, and so little, even of what I did see or hear, did I observe and remember. . . . He could not endure stupidity, nor feeble and lax habits, in whatever manner displayed, and I was perpetually exciting his anger by manifestations of them. From the earliest time I can remember he used to reproach me, and most truly, with a general habit of inattention; owing to which, he said, I was . . . judging and acting like a person devoid of common sense; and which would make me, he said, grow up a mere oddity, looked down upon by everybody, and unfit for all the common purposes of life.

Posthumously published or (as in the cases of John Ruskin and Cardinal Newman) not, almost all Victorian autobiographies were circumspect, sometimes defiantly so. Consider:

• Novelist Anthony Trollope, on why he devoted very little space to his relationship with his wife: “My marriage was like the marriage of other people and of no special interest to any one except my wife and me.”

• Herbert Spencer, the theory-of-everything philosopher: It would “be out of taste to address the public as though it consisted of personal friends.”

• The politician Samuel Smith: “Things essentially private are rarely touched upon, and only when necessary to the general narrative.”

• The judge Sir Edmund Parry: “I do not propose to write of my mother in these pages, since I could do no justice to the grace of her memory, and the dim vision of it is my own affair.”

The poet and painter William Bell Scott, in his Autobiographical Notes (posthumously published in 1892), was a little more thoughtful and less defensive, noting that “to write one’s mental history is too difficult as well as too dreadful.” He said such an attempt would be “like walking into the street naked, and it only likely to frighten our neighbors.” The critic Wayne Shumaker comments that in nineteenth-century memoirs, one only rarely comes upon “the flavor of real living, the feeling of immediacy, of the confrontation of pressing problems in the here and now.”

The marvel is that, in the face of this reticence by consensus, auto biography was so extraordinarily popular among the Victorians. Harriet Martineau was not alone in the sentiment she expressed at the outset of her work: “From my youth upwards I have felt that it was one of the duties of my life to write my autobiography.” The extremely minor writer Augustus Hare produced a staggering six volumes of memoir between 1896 and 1900, consisting of, in the words of critic A. O. J. Cockshut, “immense prolixity and innumerable boring anecdotes.” The Irish novelist George Moore put forth six separate memoirs as well, published between 1888 and 1933. (The first, Confessions of a Young Man, was published when he was a mere thirty-six; in the words of critic Ann Thwaite, “No one earlier had thought of writing an autobiography before reaching the age of fifty.”)

A special case, for multiple reasons, is My Secret Life, which was first printed in a small private edition of eleven volumes, containing some 4,200 pages and well over a million words, beginning around 1888. (Its first public edition did not appear until 1966.) The book is a first-person history, staggering in its capaciousness and detail, of the sexual experiences of the author, who calls himself “Walter.” His professed rationale for the venture is a sort of public-spirited sharing of information: he wonders, “Have all men had the strange letches which late in life have enrap tured me, though in early days the idea of them revolted me? I can never know this; my experience if printed may enable others to compare as I cannot.” Walter insists, at the outset, on the truthfulness of the contents: he was determined, he says, “to write my private acts freely as to fact, and in the spirit of the lustful acts done by me, or witnessed; it is written therefore with absolute truth, and for without any regard for what the world calls decency.” Nevertheless, it has never been conclusively determined whether My Secret Life is autobiography or fiction or something in between; Walter’s identity is an unresolved question as well. In his 2001 book The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee, Ian Gibson makes a convincing though admittedly circumstantial case that the book was fiction and the author was Henry Ashbee (1834-1900), an obsessive collector and bibliographer of erotica.

But even less acceptable to Victorian society was the secret life of John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), a poet, critic, biographer, translator, and scholar of the Renaissance, who concluded, roughly at the age of twenty, that he was a homosexual. Some thirty years later, inspired by the candid memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi and of Benvenuto Cellini, both of which he had recently translated from the Italian, he embarked on his autobiography. A principal subject—perhaps the principal subject—of it was his sexual feelings and life. “This is a foolish thing to do,” he wrote to a friend, Henry Graham Dakyns, “because I do not think they will ever be fit to publish.” (Even if there were no other reasons for this assessment, Symonds was well aware of the customary sentence for someone convicted of sodomy: two years’ hard labor.) He went ahead, he wrote in the same letter, with reasoning similar to Walter’s, because a study of his evolution and development, “written with the candour & precision I feel capable of using, would I am sure be interesting to psychologists and not without its utility. There does not exist anything like it in print; & I am certain that 999 men out of 1000 do not believe in the existence of a personality like mine.”

Parts of Symonds’s memoir make for riveting reading today, not so much for the incidents it describes as for the continuing but never resolved internal debate it contains. The culture in which Symonds has been formed tells him that his sexuality is unnatural and depraved. Part of him accepts this, yet another part knows that, though the way he is has caused him considerable unhappiness, it has also given him great joy and fulfillment, and so there must be something wrong with society’s standards. Near the end of the book, a short passage contains both views. Symonds writes, “I carry within me the seeds of what I know to be an incurable malady . . . that . . . deeply rooted perversion of the sexual instincts (uncontrollable, ineradicable, amounting to monomania) . . . expose which in its relation to my whole nature has been the principal object of this memoir. It is a singular life history; and yet, for aught I know, it may be commoner than I imagine.” When he prepared a final version of the manuscript, he inserted a footnote after the word “imagine” that read: “When I wrote the above, I had not yet read . . .” and here he listed several contemporary works by German scholars that protested laws against homosexuality and suggested it was more common than had been thought. He concluded: “I have recently done so, and am now aware that my history is only one out of a thousand.” So the same percentage of the population Symonds had previously given (in his letter to Dakyns) as being aware of “a personality like mine,” he now estimates possesses such a personality. It was a remarkable change in perception, and after completing the memoirs, Symonds was moved to write and actually publish (albeit in a private edition of just fifty copies) a pamphlet called A Problem in Modern Ethics, described by the Dictionary of National Biography as the first “psychological-sociological analysis of homosexuality in English, exposing vulgar errors by a well-judged mixture of sarcasm, science, and com mon sense.”¹⁶

One of the people to whom Symonds sent the pamphlet was his friend Edmund Gosse, a prominent and prolific poet, critic, and biographer. (Gosse was so much the prototypical Victorian man of letters that shortly after his death in 1928, T. S. Eliot remarked that “the place that Sir Edmund Gosse filled in the literary and social life of London is one that no one can ever fill again, because it is, so to speak, an office that has been abolished.”) Gosse responded with a letter that some, though not all, critics have taken to be an acknowledgment of his own “inversion”: “I know all you speak of,—the solitude, the rebellion, the despair. Yet I have been happy, too; I hope you have also been happy,—that all with you has not been disappointment & the revulsion of hope? Either way, I entirely & deeply sympathise with you. Years ago I wanted to write to you about all this, and withdrew through cowardice.” Whatever Gosse was acknowledging in private, in public he was and would continue to be a pillar of heterosexual rectitude. In an unsigned obituary for The Saturday Review after Symonds’s death in 1893, Gosse damned him with faint praise as “one who aimed at the highest things and came a little short.” Decades later, Gosse helped to burn a mass of the older man’s more compromising papers; Symonds’s granddaughter later reported being disgusted by the “smug gloating delight” with which Gosse recounted the incident.

Given this snippy behavior, it’s ironic that Gosse should have received a precious literary gift from Symonds. In 1890, Gosse had written a biography of his father, Philip. After it appeared, Symonds wrote him a letter of praise, but added: “I wish there were more of you in your Father’s Life. You could write a fascinating autobiography if you chose; and I hope you will do this.” It took Gosse about fifteen years to follow that counsel, but he ultimately did so. The result, Father and Son: A Study of Conflicting Temperaments (1907), is the only one of his approximately eighty-five books that is still in print. And deservedly so. Not only did it break the impasse of the Victorian autobiography, but it stands as the progenitor of the modern memoir

Unlike Symonds, Gosse was willing to let his autobiography appear in his lifetime; unlike Butler or White, he was willing to present it as nonfiction without any novelistic veneer. But he did take the absurd measure of initially publishing the book anonymously. Absurd, because any educated person of the time would recognize “my Father” as Philip Gosse. Gosse the elder is a great character, who would not be out of place in a Dickens novel. He had developed a reputation as a naturalist but ran into a major roadblock when Darwin’s early publications and the emerging geologic and fossil evidence demonstrated that the world was much, much older than any literal reading of the Bible would allow. The central challenge of Philip Gosse’s life was to reconcile his fundamentalist religious beliefs with his scientist’s values.

As challenges go, this was a beauty, and some of the best passages of Father and Son describe Philip Gosse’s effort to meet it in a misguided earlier-day version of intelligent design. His 1857 book Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (the title is the ancient Greek word for “navel”) argued that just as Adam showed up with a superfluous belly button, so, too, when God created the Earth, he furnished it ancient fossils and rocks that were brand-new but had the appearance of being millions of years old. Gosse felt his hypothesis would reconcile science and religion. “He offered it,” his son writes, “with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! Atheists and Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.”

Among the many prophetic aspects of Father and Son, maybe the most striking is the way it prefigures the narrative of a beleaguered, constricted, abusive, or otherwise troubled childhood, in the manner of Angela’s Ashes, Running with Scissors, The Glass Castle, and dozens of new additions every year. Young Edmund, an only child, suffers his mother’s death, of cancer, when he is seven. After that his father becomes warped by his religious fanaticism, and single-handedly tries to mold the boy into a sort of pint-sized holy man, not letting him read anything secular, and keeping him away from all other kids, and pretty much all human contact outside the church, till the age of ten or eleven. The book also anticipates later memoirs in its form. The earlier model, in secular as well as religious autobiographies, had been a movement toward resolution and acceptance of society or God or both. At the end of Father and Son, Edmund breaks with Philip Gosse and his church.

Subtler, but equally prescient, are the book’s literary qualities. Throughout, one is aware of the presence of two Edmund Gosses: the fifty-eight-year-old littérateur—he comes through clearly in the sentences quoted above—and the boy who went through it all and is presented via the grown man’s memory, induction, and imagination. Throughout the book, Gosse looks at himself looking at the strange stuff that transpired, and the dual perspective deepens the sadness and our understanding. The household gloom over the Omphalos debacle, he writes, “thickened day by day, as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin clouds of disappointment.” Philip, no barrel of laughs to begin with, turned more morose; he assumed that his book had failed because he had offended God:

In brooding tramps, round and round the garden, his soul was on his knees searching the corners of his conscience for some sin of omission or commission, and one by one every pleasure, every recreation, every trifle scraped out of the dust of past experience, was magnified into a huge offence. He thought that the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human instinct, might lead the weaker brethren into offence.

A groundbreaking feature of the book is its use, seen in few previous autobiographies and only sparingly in those, of the kinds of scenes normally found in novels. In one of them, Gosse records, heartbreakingly, the last bit of his father’s levity to go. Philip sometimes sang songs from his Dorsetshire youth. One day a workman heard him and made an approving comment; then, Gosse reports, “my Father, who was holding my hand loosely, clutched it, and looking up, I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a secular song again during the whole of his life.”