remember the big glass roof of the London terminus, presumably Paddington,at which I arrived on my way and which I thought inconceivably beautiful.What I remember of my ?rst day at Pembroke Lodge is tea in the servants’ hall.It was a large, bare room with a long massive table with chairs and a high stool.All the servants had their tea in this room except the house-keeper, the cook,the lady’s maid, and the butler, who formed an aristocracy in the house-keeper’s room. I was placed upon the high stool for tea, and what I remembermost vividly is wondering why the servants took so much interest in me. Idid not, at that time, know that I had already been the subject of seriousdeliberation by the Lord Chancellor, various eminent Queen’s Counsel, andother notable persons, nor was it until I was grown-up that I learned to knowof the strange events which had preceded my coming to Pembroke Lodge.My father, Lord Amberley, had recently died after a long period ofgradually increasing debility. My mother and my sister had died of diphtheriaabout a year and a half sooner. My mother, as I came to know her later fromher diary and her letters, was vigorous, lively, witty, serious, original, andfearless. Judging by her pictures she must also have been beautiful. My fatherwas philosophical, studious, unworldly, morose, and priggish. Both wereardent theorists of reform and prepared to put into practice whatever theorythey believed in. My father was a disciple and friend of John Stuart Mill,from whom both learned to believe in birth-control and votes for women.My father lost his seat in Parliament through advocacy of birth-control.My mother sometimes got into hot water for her radical opinions. At agarden-party given by the parents of Queen Mary, the Duchess of Cambridgeremarked in a loud voice: ‘Yes, I know who you are, you are the daughter-in-law. But now I hear you only like dirty Radicals and dirty Americans. AllLondon is full of it; all the clubs are talking of it. I must look at your petticoatsto see if they are dirty.’The following letter from the British Consul in Florence speaks for itself:Sept. 22, 1870Dear Lady AmberleyI am not an admirer of M. Mazzini, but have an utter detestation andabhorrence of his character and principles. The public position which I hold,moreover, precludes me from being the channel for his correspondence. Nothowever wishing to disoblige you in this instance, I have taken the onlycourse which was open to me with the view to his receiving your letter, viz.to put it in the Post to the care of the Procuratore del Re, Gaeta.I remain,Yours very faithfully,A. PagetMazzini gave my mother his watch-case, which is now in my possession.My mother used to address meetings in favour of votes for women, andI found one passage in her diary where she speaks of the Potter Sisterhood,which included Mrs Sidney Webb and Lady Courtenay, as social butter?ies.Having in later years come to know Mrs Sidney Webb well, I conceived aconsiderable respect for my mother’s seriousness when I remembered thatto her Mrs Webb seemed frivolous. From my mother’s letters, however, forexample to Henry Crompton, the Positivist, I ?nd that she was on occasionsprightly and coquettish, so that perhaps the face she turned to the world wasless alarming than that which she presented to her diary.My father was a free-thinker, and wrote a large book, posthumously pub-lished, called An Analysis of Religious Belief. He had a large library containing theFathers, works on Buddhism, accounts of Confucianism, and so on. He spenta great deal of time in the country in the preparation of his book. He and mymother, however, in the earlier years of their marriage, spent some months ofeach year in London, where they had a house in Dean’s Yard. My mother andher sister, Mrs George Howard (afterwards Lady Carlisle), had rival salons. AtMrs Howard’s salon were to be seen all the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and at mymother’s all the British philosophers from Mill downwards.In 1867 my parents went to America, where they made friends with all theRadicals of Boston. They could not foresee that the men and women whosedemocratic ardour they applauded and whose triumphant opposition toslavery they admired were the grandfathers and grandmothers of those whomurdered Sacco and Vanzetti. My parents married in 1864, when they werethe autobiography of bertrand russell 6both only twenty-two. My brother, as he boasts in his autobiography, wasborn nine months and four days after the wedding. Shortly before I wasborn, they went to live in a very lonely house called Ravenscroft (now calledCleiddon Hall) in a wood just above the steep banks of the Wye. From thehouse, three days after I was born, my mother wrote a description of me toher mother: ‘The baby weighed 8? lb. is 21 inches long and very fat and veryugly very like Frank everyone thinks, blue eyes far apart and not much chin.He is just like Frank was about nursing. I have lots of milk now, but if he doesnot get it at once or has wind or anything he gets into such a rage andscreams and kicks and trembles till he is soothed o?. . . . He lifts his head upand looks about in a very energetic way.’They obtained for my brother a tutor, D. A. Spalding, of considerablescienti?c ability – so at least I judge from a reference to his work in WilliamJames’s Psychology.1He was a Darwinian, and was engaged in studying theinstincts of chickens, which, to facilitate his studies, were allowed to workhavoc in every room in the house, including the drawing-room. He himselfwas in an advanced stage of consumption and died not very long after myfather. Apparently upon grounds of pure theory, my father and motherdecided that although he ought to remain childless on account of his tubercu-losis, it was unfair to expect him to be celibate. My mother therefore, allowedhim to live with her, though I know of no evidence that she derived anypleasure from doing so. This arrangement subsisted for a very short time, as itbegan after my birth and I was only two years old when my mother died. Myfather, however, kept on the tutor after my mother’s death, and when myfather died it was found that he had left the tutor and Cobden-Sanderson,both atheists, to be guardians of his two sons, whom he wished to protectfrom the evils of a religious upbringing. My grandparents, however, dis-covered from his papers what had taken place in relation to my mother. Thisdiscovery caused them the utmost Victorian horror. They decided that ifnecessary they would put the law in motion to rescue innocent children fromthe clutches of intriguing in?dels. The intriguing in?dels consulted SirHorace Davey (afterwards Lord Davey) who assured them that they wouldhave no case, relying, apparently, upon the Shelley precedent. My brother andI were therefore made wards in Chancery, and Cobden-Sanderson deliveredme up to my grandparents on the day of which I have already spoken. Nodoubt this history contributed to the interest which the servants took in me.Of my mother I remember nothing whatever, though I remember fallingout of a pony carriage on an occasion when she must have been present.I know that this recollection is genuine, because I veri?ed it at a much latertime, after having kept it to myself for a number of years. Of my fatherI remember only two things: I remember his giving me a page of red print,the colour of which delighted me, and I remember once seeing him in hischildhood 7bath. My parents had themselves buried in the garden at Ravenscroft, butwere dug up and transferred to the family vault at Chenies. A few days beforehis death my father wrote the following letter to his mother.Ravenscroft,Wednesday at nightMy dear MamaYou will be glad to hear that I mean to see Radcli?e as soon as I am able –sorry to hear the cause. This is that I have a nasty attack of bronchitis which islikely to keep me in bed some time. Your pencil letter came to-day, and I wassorry to see that you too were knocked up. Exhausted as I am I may as wellwrite, since I cannot sleep. It would be needless to say that this attack is notdangerous and I do not anticipate danger. But I have had too bitter experienceof the rapidity with which illnesses may go to believe in absolute safety, orcry Peace when there is no peace. Both my lungs are in?amed and may growworse. I beseech you not to telegraph or take any hasty action. We have a niceyoung Doctor in place of Audland, and for his own sake as just beginning topractise here, he will do all he can for me. I repeat that I expect to recover, butin case of a bad turn I wish to say that I look forward to dying as calmly andunmovedly as ‘One who wraps the drapery of his couch About him and liesdown to pleasant dreams’.For myself, no anxiety nor even shrinking; but I do feel much pain fora few others whom I should leave, especially you. Writing in pain and weak-ness I can o?er you only this most inadequate expression of my deep sense ofyour constant and immoveable love and goodness to me, even when I mayappear not to have deserved it. It is a great matter of regret to me that I wassometimes compelled to appear harsh; I did not wish to show anything buta?ection. I have done very little of all I should like to have done, but I hopethat little has not been of a bad kind. I should die with the sense that one greatwork of my life was accomplished. For my two darling boys I hope youwould see them much, if possible, and that they might look on you as amother. The burial you know would be here in my beloved wood and atthe beautiful spot already prepared for me. I can hardly hope you would bethere, but I wish it were possible to think of it.Perhaps it is very sel?sh of me to give the pain of this letter; only I fearanother day I might be too weak to write. If I can I shall let you know daily.I also have met with nothing but kindness and gentleness from my dear Papaall my life, for which I am deeply grateful. I do earnestly hope that at the endof his long and noble life he may be spared the pain of losing a son. I can onlysend my best love to Agatha and Rollo and poor Willy if possible.Your loving son,A.the autobiography of bertrand russell 8Pembroke Lodge, where my grandfather and grandmother lived, is a ram-bling house of only two storeys in Richmond Park. It was in the gift of theSovereign, and derives its name from the Lady Pembroke to whom George IIIwas devoted in the days of his lunacy. The Queen had given it to my grand-parents for their life-time in the forties, and they had lived there ever since.The famous Cabinet meeting described in Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea, atwhich several Cabinet Ministers slept while the Crimean War was decidedupon, took place at Pembroke Lodge. Kinglake, in later years, lived atRichmond, and I remember him well. I once asked Sir Spencer Walpole whyKinglake was so bitter against Napoleon III. Sir Spencer replied that theyquarrelled about a woman. ‘Will you tell me the story?’ I naturally asked. ‘No,sir,’ he replied, ‘I shall not tell you the story.’ And shortly afterwards he died.Pembroke Lodge had eleven acres of garden, mostly allowed to run wild.This garden played a very large part in my life up to the age of eighteen. Tothe west there was an enormous view extending from the Epsom Downs(which I believed to be the ‘Ups and Downs’) to Windsor Castle, withHindhead and Leith Hill between. I grew accustomed to wide horizons andto an unimpeded view of the sunset. And I have never since been able to livehappily without both. There were many ?ne trees, oaks, beeches, horse- andSpanish chestnuts, and lime trees, a very beautiful cedar tree, cryptomeriasand deodaras presented by Indian princes. There were summer-houses, sweetbriar hedges, thickets of laurel, and all kinds of secret places in which it waspossible to hide from grown-up people so successfully that there was notthe slightest fear of discovery. There were several ?ower-gardens withbox-hedges. Throughout the years during which I lived at Pembroke Lodge,the garden was growing gradually more and more neglected. Big trees fell,shrubs grew over the paths, the grass on the lawns became long and rank, andthe box-hedges grew almost into trees. The garden seemed to remember thedays of its former splendour, when foreign ambassadors paced its lawns, andprinces admired its trim beds of ?owers. It lived in the past, and I lived in thepast with it. I wove fantasies about my parents and my sister. I imaginedthe days of my grandfather’s vigour. The grown-up conversation to whichI listened was mostly of things that had happened long ago; how my grand-father had visited Napoleon in Elba, how my grandmother’s great-uncle haddefended Gibraltar during the American War of Independence, and how hergrandfather had been cut by the County for saying that the world must havebeen created before 4004 ?? because there is so much lava on the slopes ofEtna. Sometimes the conversation descended to more recent times, andI should be told how Carlyle had called Herbert Spencer a ‘perfect vacuum’,or how Darwin had felt it a great honour to be visited by Mr Gladstone.My father and mother were dead, and I used to wonder what sort of peoplethey had been. In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternatelychildhood 9collecting birds’ eggs and meditating on the ?ight of time. If I may judge bymy own recollections, the important and formative impressions of childhoodrise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of childishoccupations, and are never mentioned to adults. I think periods of browsingduring which no occupation is imposed from without are important inyouth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitivebut really vital impressions.My grandfather as I remember him was a man well past eighty, beingwheeled round the garden in a bath chair, or sitting in his room readingHansard. I was just six years old when he died. I remember that when on theday of his death I saw my brother (who was at school) drive up in a cabalthough it was in the middle of term, I shouted ‘Hurrah!’, and my nursesaid: ‘Hush! You must not say “Hurrah” today!’ It may be inferred from thisincident that my grandfather had no great importance to me.My grandmother, on the contrary, who was twenty-three years youngerthan he was, was the most important person to me throughout my child-hood. She was a Scotch Presbyterian, Liberal in politics and religion (shebecame a Unitarian at the age of seventy), but extremely strict in all mattersof morality. When she married my grandfather she was young and very shy.My grandfather was a widower with two children and four step-children, anda few years after their marriage he became Prime Minister. For her this musthave been a severe ordeal. She related how she went once as a girl to one ofthe famous breakfasts given by the poet Rogers, and how, after observing hershyness, he said: ‘Have a little tongue. You need it, my dear!’ It was obviousfrom her conversation that she never came anywhere near to knowing what itfeels like to be in love. She told me once how relieved she was on herhoneymoon when her mother joined her. On another occasion she lamentedthat so much poetry should be concerned with so trivial a subject as love. Butshe made my grandfather a devoted wife, and never, so far as I have been ableto discover, failed to perform what her very exacting standards represented asher duty.As a mother and a grandmother she was deeply, but not always wisely,solicitous. I do not think that she ever understood the claims of animal spiritsand exuberant vitality. She demanded that everything should be viewedthrough a mist of Victorian sentiment. I remember trying to make her seethat it was inconsistent to demand at one and the same time that everybodyshould be well housed, and yet that no new houses should be built becausethey were an eye-sore. To her each sentiment had its separate rights, and mustnot be asked to give place to another sentiment on account of anything socold as mere logic. She was cultivated according to the standards of her time;she could speak French, German and Italian faultlessly, without the slightesttrace of accent. She knew Shakespeare, Milton, and the eighteenth-centurythe autobiography of bertrand russell 10poets intimately. She could repeat the signs of the Zodiac and the names ofthe Nine Muses. She had a minute knowledge of English history according tothe Whig tradition. French, German, and Italian classics were familiar to her.Of politics since 1830 she had a close personal knowledge. But everythingthat involved reasoning had been totally omitted from her education, and wasabsent from her mental life. She never could understand how locks on riversworked, although I heard any number of people try to explain it to her. Hermorality was that of a Victorian Puritan, and nothing would have persuadedher that a man who swore on occasion might nevertheless have some goodqualities. To this, however, there were exceptions. She knew the Miss Berryswho were Horace Walpole’s friends, and she told me once without anycensure that ‘they were old-fashioned, they used to swear a little’. Like manyof her type she made an inconsistent exception of Byron, whom she regardedas an unfortunate victim of an unrequited youthful love. She extended nosuch tolerance to Shelley, whose life she considered wicked and whosepoetry she considered mawkish. Of Keats I do not think she had ever heard.While she was well read in Continental classics down to Goethe and Schiller,she knew nothing of the Continental writers of her own time. Turgeniev oncegave her one of his novels, but she never read it, or regarded him as anythingbut the cousin of some friends of hers. She was aware that he wrote books,but so did almost everybody else.Of psychology in the modern sense, she had, of course, no vestige. Certainmotives were known to exist: love of country, public spirit, love of one’schildren, were laudable motives; love of money, love of power, vanity, werebad motives. Good men acted from good motives always; bad men, however,even the worst, had moments when they were not wholly bad. Marriage wasa puzzling institution. It was clearly the duty of husbands and wives to loveone another, but it was a duty they ought not to perform too easily, for if sexattraction drew them together there must be something not quite nice aboutthem. Not, of course, that she would have phrased the matter in these terms.What she would have said, and in fact did say, was: ‘You know, I never thinkthat the a?ection of husbands and wives is quite such a good thing as thea?ection of parents for their children, because there is sometimes somethinga little sel?sh about it.’ That was as near as her thoughts could come to such atopic as sex. Perhaps once I heard her approach a little nearer to the forbiddentopic: that was when she said that Lord Palmerston had been peculiar amongmen through the fact that he was not quite a good man. She disliked wine,abhorred tobacco, and was always on the verge of becoming a vegetarian. Herlife was austere. She ate only the plainest food, breakfasted at eight, and untilshe reached the age of eighty never sat in a comfortable chair until after tea.She was completely unworldly, and despised those who thought anything ofworldly honours. I regret to say that her attitude to Queen Victoria was farchildhood 11from respectful. She used to relate with much amusement how one timewhen she was at Windsor and feeling rather ill, the Queen had been graciouslypleased to say: ‘Lady Russell may sit down. Lady So-and-So shall stand in frontof her.’After I reached the age of fourteen, my grandmother’s intellectual limita-tions became trying to me, and her Puritan morality began to seem to me tobe excessive; but while I was a child her great a?ection for me, and herintense care for my welfare, made me love her and gave me that feeling ofsafety that children need. I remember when I was about four or ?ve years oldlying awake thinking how dreadful it would be when my grandmother wasdead. When she did in fact die, which was after I was married, I did not mindat all. But in retrospect, as I have grown older, I have realised more and morethe importance she had in moulding my outlook on life. Her fearlessness,her public spirit, her contempt for convention, and her indi?erence to theopinion of the majority have always seemed good to me and have impressedthemselves upon me as worthy of imitation. She gave me a Bible with herfavourite texts written on the ?y-leaf. Among these was ‘Thou shalt notfollow a multitude to do evil’. Her emphasis upon this text led me in later lifeto be not afraid of belonging to small minorities.My grandmother, when I was a boy, had four surviving brothers and twosurviving sisters, all of whom used to come to Pembroke Lodge from time totime. The oldest of the brothers was Lord Minto, whom I knew as UncleWilliam. The second was Sir Henry Elliot, who had had a respectable diplo-matic career, but of whom I remember little. The third, my Uncle Charlie,I remember chie?y because of the length of his name on an envelope: he wasAdmiral the Hon. Sir Charles Elliot, ???, and he lived at Devonport. I was toldthat he was Rear Admiral and that there is a grander sort of admiral calledAdmiral of the Fleet. This rather pained me and I felt he should have donesomething about it. The youngest, who was a bachelor, was George Elliot, butwas known to me as Uncle Doddy. The chief thing that I was asked to noticeabout him was his close resemblance to his and my grandmother’s grand-father, Mr Brydon, who had been led into regrettable heresy by the lava onEtna. Otherwise, Uncle Doddy was undistinguished. Of Uncle William I havea very painful recollection: he came to Pembroke Lodge one June evening atthe end of a day of continual sunshine, every moment of which I hadenjoyed. When it became time for me to say good-night, he gravely informedme that the human capacity for enjoyment decreases with the years and thatI should never again enjoy a summer’s day as much as the one that was nowending. I burst into ?oods of tears and continued to weep long after I was inbed. Subsequent experience has shown me that his remark was as untrue as itwas cruel.The grown-ups with whom I came in contact had a remarkable incapacitythe autobiography of bertrand russell 12for understanding the intensity of childish emotions. When, at the age offour, I was taken to be photographed in Richmond, the photographer haddi?culty in getting me to sit still, and at last promised me a sponge cake ifI would remain motionless. I had, until that moment, only had one spongecake in all my life and it had remained as a high point of ecstasy. I thereforestayed as quiet as a mouse and the photograph was wholly successful. ButI never got the sponge cake.On another occasion I heard one of the grown-ups saying to another‘When is that young Lyon coming?’ I pricked up my ears and said ‘Is there alion coming?’ ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘he’s coming on Sunday. He’ll be quite tameand you shall see him in the drawing-room.’ I counted the days till Sundayand the hours through Sunday morning. At last I was told the young lion wasin the drawing-room and I could come and see him. I came. And he wasan ordinary young man named Lyon. I was utterly overwhelmed by thedisenchantment and still remember with anguish the depths of my despair.To return to my grandmother’s family, I remember little of her sister LadyElizabeth Romilly except that she was the ?rst person from whom I heard ofRudyard Kipling, whose Plain Tales from the Hills she greatly admired. The othersister, Lady Charlotte Portal, whom I knew as Aunt Lottie, was more colourful.It was said of her that as a child she had tumbled out of bed and withoutwaking up had murmured, ‘My head is laid low, my pride has had a fall.’ Itwas also said that having heard the grown-ups talking about somnambulismshe had got up during the following night and walked about in what shehoped was a sleep-walking manner. The grown-ups, who saw that she waswide awake, decided to say nothing about it. Their silence next morning sodisappointed her that at last she said, ‘Did no one see me walking in my sleeplast night?’ In later life she was apt to express herself unfortunately. On oneoccasion when she had to order a cab for three people, she thought a hansomwould be too small and a four-wheeler too large, so she told the footman tofetch a three-wheeled cab. On another occasion, the footman, whose namewas George, was seeing her o? at the station when she was on her way to theContinent. Thinking that she might have to write to him about some house-hold matter she suddenly remembered that she did not know his surname.Just after the train had started she put her head out of the window and calledout, ‘George, George, what’s your name?’ ‘George, My Lady’, came the answer.By that time he was out of earshot.Besides my grandmother there were in the house my Uncle Rollo and myAunt Agatha, both unmarried. My Uncle Rollo had some importance in myearly development, as he frequently talked to me about scienti?c matters, ofwhich he had considerable knowledge. He su?ered all his life from a morbidshyness so intense as to prevent him from achieving anything that involvedcontact with other human beings. But with me, so long as I was a child, hechildhood 13was not shy, and he used to display a vein of droll humour of which adultswould not have suspected him. I remember asking him once why they hadcoloured glass in church windows. He informed me very gravely that informer times this had not been so, but that once, just after the clergyman hadgone up into the pulpit, he saw a man walking along with a pail of white-wash on his head and the bottom of the pail fell out and the man was coveredwith whitewash. This caused in the poor clergyman such an uncontrollable?t of laughter that he was unable to proceed with the sermon, and ever sincethis they had had coloured glass in church windows. He had been in theForeign O?ce, but he had trouble with his eyes, and when I ?rst knew himhe was unable to read or write. His eyes improved later, but he never againattempted any kind of routine work. He was a meteorologist, and did valu-able investigations of the e?ects of the Krakatoa eruption of 1883, whichproduced in England strange sunsets and even a blue moon. He used to talkto me about the evidence that Krakatoa had caused the sunsets, and I listened tohim with profound attention. His conversation did a great deal to stimulatemy scienti?c interests.My Aunt Agatha was the youngest of the grown-up people at PembrokeLodge. She was, in fact, only nineteen years older than I was, so when I camethere she was twenty-two. During my ?rst years at Pembroke Lodge, shemade various attempts to educate me, but without much success. She hadthree brightly coloured balls, one red, one yellow, and one blue. She wouldhold up the red ball and say: ‘What colour is that?’ and I would say, ‘Yellow’.She would then hold it against her canary and say: ‘Do you think that it isthe same colour as the canary?’ I would say, ‘No’, but as I did not know thecanary was yellow it did not help much. I suppose I must have learned thecolours in time, but I can only remember not knowing them. Then she triedto teach me to read, but that was quite beyond me. There was only one wordthat I ever succeeded in reading so long as she taught me, and that was theword ‘or’. The other words, though equally short, I could never remember.She must have become discouraged, since shortly before I was ?ve years oldI was handed over to a kindergarten, which ?nally succeeded in teaching methe di?cult art of reading. When I was six or seven she took me in hand againand taught me English Constitutional history. This interested me very muchindeed, and I remember to this day much of what she taught me.I still possess the little book in which I wrote down her questions andanswers, both dictated. A few samples will illustrate the point of view.Q. What did Henry II and Thomas Becket quarrel about?A. Henry wished to put a stop to the evils which had arisen in consequenceof the Bishops having courts of their own, so that the church law wasseparated from the common law of the land. Becket refused to lessen thethe autobiography of bertrand russell 14power of the Bishops’ Courts, but at last he was persuaded to agree to the