pleasant visit to Dover Street.
Yours a?ectly.
Agatha Russell
Pembroke Lodge
Richmond, Surrey
Dec. 10, 1894
My dearest Child
As my voice fails me whenever I try to speak of what is coming, although it
is an event so full of happiness to you, it is natural that I should write you a
few farewell words. More especially on this anniversary of a day once among
the gladdest and most beloved of the year
25
– now as sad as it is sacred for me.
For the memories it brings me of my dear, my gentle, my noble and deeply
loving and hardly tried Johnny, naturally turn my thoughts to you, in whom
we have always felt that something was still left to us of him – My memories
of him are memories of unutterable joy, mingled with sorrow and anguish
hard to bear even now, when he is past all sorrows.
When he and your mother, in the bloom of youth and health, asked me to
look upon you as my own child in case of their death, I little thought that
I should be called upon to ful?l the promise I gave them. But ere long the day
came and your home was left empty. You came to us as an innocent,
unconscious little comforter in our darkened home, and have been to us
all three as our very own child. You were intertwined with our very being,
our life was shaped and ordered with a view to your good; and as you grew
in heart and mind you became our companion as well as our child. How
thankfully I remember that all through your childhood and boyhood you
would always cheerfully give up your own wishes for those of others, never
attempt an excuse when you had done wrong, and never fail to receive
warning or reproof as gratefully as praise. We trusted you, and you justi?ed
our trust, and all was happiness and a?ection.
Manhood came and brought with it fresh cause for thankfulness in your
blameless and honourable University career. But manhood brings also sever-
ance and change. You are leaving us now for a new life, a new home, new ties
engagement 113and new a?ections. But your happiness and welfare must still be ours and our
God will still be yours. May you take with you only that which has been best,
and ask His forgiveness for what has been wrong, in the irrevocable past. May
He inspire you to cherish holy thoughts and noble aims. May you remember
that humble, loving hearts alone are dear to Him. May such a heart ever be
yours, and hers who is to travel life’s journey by your side.
God bless you both, and grant you light to ?nd and to follow the
heavenward path.
Ever, my dear, dear Child
Your most loving
Granny
The following letter was my last contact with Edward Fitzgerald. He distinguished himself as a
climber in New Zealand and the Andes, after escaping in this way from a period of despair brought
about by his wife’s death after only a few months of marriage. In the end he ran o? with a
married lady and made no attempt to keep up with old friends.
Colombo, Ceylon
Nov. 18th, ’94
My dear Russell
Drop me a line occasionally to tell me how you are getting on and also
when your marriage is coming o?.
I have stopped here for a little while to look around. I went up country the
other day to Anuradhapura and to Vauakarayankulam (don’t try to pronounce
that name, I ?nd it worse than snakes) and got some big game shooting
which I enjoyed. The country was however all under water and they said very
feverish, but I did not feel that although I slept out several nights in the mists
and got drenched through. I am o? on a regular spree so to speak and am not
coming home for three years at least. I have planned Japan and some climbing
in South America before I return.
Drop me a line when you feel so inclined that I may know of your wander-
ing. I will write occasionally when I feel so inclined, which you will say is not
often. I suppose you have seen Austin’s new apartment in the Avenue
Hochell?
I will now draw this (letter?!) to a close.
Ever yours
Edw. A. Fitzgerald
the autobiography of bertrand russell 1145
FIRST MARRIAGE
Alys and I were married on December 13, 1894. Her family had been
Philadelphia Quakers for over two hundred years, and she was still a believing
member of the Society of Friends. So we were married in Quaker Meeting in
St Martin’s Lane. I seem to remember that one of the Quakers present was
moved by the Spirit to preach about the miracle of Cana, which hurt Alys’s
teetotal feelings. During our engagement we had frequently had arguments
about Christianity, but I did not succeed in changing her opinions until a
few months after we were married.
There were other matters upon which her opinions changed after marriage.
She had been brought up, as American women always were in those days, to
think that sex was beastly, that all women hated it, and that men’s brutal lusts
were the chief obstacle to happiness in marriage. She therefore thought that
intercourse should only take place when children were desired. As we had
decided to have no children, she had to modify her position on this point,
but she still supposed that she would desire intercourse to be very rare. I
did not argue the matter, and I did not ?nd it necessary to do so.
Neither she nor I had any previous experience of sexual intercourse when
we married. We found, as such couples apparently usually do, a certain
amount of di?culty at the start. I have heard many people say that this caused
their honeymoon to be a di?cult time, but we had no such experience. The
di?culties appeared to us merely comic, and were soon overcome. I remem-
ber, however, a day after three weeks of marriage, when, under the in?uence of
sexual fatigue, I hated her and could not imagine why I had wished to marry
her. This state of mind lasted just as long as the journey from Amsterdam
to Berlin, after which I never again experienced a similar mood.
We had decided that during the early years of our married life, we wouldsee a good deal of foreign countries, and accordingly we spent the ?rst three
months of 1895 in Berlin. I went to the university, where I chie?y studied
economics. I continued to work at my Fellowship dissertation. We went to
concerts three times a week, and we began to know the Social Democrats,
who were at that time considered very wicked. Lady Ermyntrude Malet, the
wife of the Ambassador, was my cousin, so we were asked to dinner at the
Embassy. Everybody was friendly, and the attachés all said they would call.
However, none of them came, and when we called at the Embassy, nobody
was at home. For a long time we hardly noticed all this, but at last we
discovered that it was due to Alys having mentioned to the Ambassador that
we had been to a socialist meeting. We learned this from a letter of Lady
Ermyntrude’s to my grandmother. In spite of my grandmother’s prejudice
against Alys, she completely sided with her on this matter. The issue was a
public one, and on all public political issues, both she and my Aunt Agatha
could always be relied upon not to be liberal.
During this time my intellectual ambitions were taking shape. I resolved
not to adopt a profession, but to devote myself to writing. I remember a cold,
bright day in early spring when I walked by myself in the Tiergarten, and
made projects of future work. I thought that I would write one series of books
on the philosophy of the sciences from pure mathematics to physiology, and
another series of books on social questions. I hoped that the two series might
ultimately meet in a synthesis at once scienti?c and practical. My scheme
was largely inspired by Hegelian ideas. Nevertheless, I have to some extent
followed it in later years, as much at any rate as could have been expected.
The moment was an important and formative one as regards my purposes.
When the spring came, we went to Fiesole and stayed with Alys’s sister,
who lived in a small villa, while Berenson lived next door in another small
villa. After leaving her, we travelled down the Adriatic coast, staying at Pesaro,
Urbino, Ravenna, Rimini, Ancona, and various other places. This remains in
my memory as one of the happiest times of my life. Italy and the spring
and ?rst love all together should su?ce to make the gloomiest person happy.
We used to bathe naked in the sea, and lie on the sand to dry, but this was a
somewhat perilous sport, as sooner or later a policeman would come along
to see that no one got salt out of the sea in de?ance of the salt tax. Fortunately
we were never quite caught.
By this time, it was becoming necessary to think in earnest about my
Fellowship dissertation, which had to be ?nished by August, so we settled
down at Fernhurst, and I had my ?rst experience of serious original work.
There were days of hope alternating with days of despair, but at last, when my
dissertation was ?nished, I fully believed that I had solved all philosophical
questions connected with the foundations of geometry. I did not yet know
that the hopes and despairs connected with original work are alike fallacious,
the autobiography of bertrand russell 116that one’s work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it
appears on good days. My dissertation was read by Whitehead and James
Ward, since it was in part mathematical and in part philosophical. Before the
result was announced, Whitehead criticised it rather severely, though quite
justly, and I came to the conclusion that it was worthless and that I would not
wait for the result to be announced. However, as a matter of politeness I went
to see James Ward, who said exactly the opposite, and praised it to the skies.
Next day I learned that I had been elected a Fellow, and Whitehead informed
me with a smile that he had thought it was the last chance anyone would
get of ?nding serious fault with my work.
With my ?rst marriage, I entered upon a period of great happiness and
fruitful work. Having no emotional troubles, all my energy went in intel-
lectual directions. Throughout the ?rst years of my marriage, I read widely,
both in mathematics and in philosophy. I achieved a certain amount of
original work, and laid the foundations for other work later. I travelled abroad,
and in my spare time I did a great deal of solid reading, chie?y history. After
dinner, my wife and I used to read aloud in turns, and in this way we
ploughed through large numbers of standard histories in many volumes. I
think the last book that we read in this way was the History of the City of Rome by
Gregorovius. This was intellectually the most fruitful period of my life, and I
owe a debt of gratitude to my ?rst wife for having made it possible. At ?rst
she disliked the idea of living quietly in the country, but I was determined to
do so for the sake of my work. I derived su?cient happiness from her and my
work to have no need of anything more, though as a matter of fact it was, as a
rule, only about half the year that we spent quietly in the country. Even
during that period, she would often be away making speeches on votes for
women or total abstinence. I had become a pledged teetotaller in order to
please her, and from habit I remained so after the original motive had ceased
to move me. I did not take to drink until the King took the pledge during the
?rst war. His motive was to facilitate the killing of Germans, and it therefore
seemed as if there must be some connection between paci?sm and alcohol.
In the autumn of 1895, after the Fellowship election, we went back to
Berlin to study German Social Democracy. On this visit, we associated almost
exclusively with socialists. We got to know Bebel and the elder Liebknecht.
The younger Liebknecht, who was killed just after the ?rst war, was at this
time a boy. We must have met him when we dined at his father’s house,
although I have no recollection of him. In those days Social Democrats were
?ery revolutionaries, and I was too young to realise what they would be like
when they acquired power. At the beginning of 1896 I gave a course of
lectures on them at the London School of Economics, which was at that time
in John Adam Street, Adelphi. I was, I believe, their ?rst lecturer. There I got
to know W. A. S. Hewins, who considerably in?uenced me from that time
first marriage 117until 1901. He came of a Catholic family, and had substituted the British
Empire for the Church as an object of veneration.
I was, in those days, much more high-strung than I became later on. While
I was lecturing at the School of Economics, my wife and I lived in a ?at at
90 Ashley Gardens, but I could not work there because the noise of the lift
disturbed me, so I used to walk every day to her parents’ house in Grosvenor
Road, where I spent the time reading Georg Cantor, and copying out the gist
of him into a notebook. At that time I falsely supposed all his arguments to
be fallacious, but I nevertheless went through them all in the minutest detail.
This stood me in good stead when later on I discovered that all the fallacies
were mine.
When the spring came, we took a small labourer’s cottage at Fernhurst,
called ‘The Millhanger’, to which we added a fair-sized sittingroom and
two bedrooms. In this cottage many of the happiest times of my life were
passed. I acquired a great deal of knowledge that interested me, and my
original work was praised by experts more highly than I expected. While I
was an undergraduate I did not think my abilities so good as they afterwards
turned out to be. I remember wondering, as an almost unattainable ideal,
whether I should ever do work as good as McTaggart’s. During the early years
of my ?rst marriage Whitehead passed gradually from a teacher into a friend.
In 1890 as a Freshman at Cambridge, I had attended his lectures on statics.
He told the class to study article 35 in the text-book. Then he turned to me
and said, ‘You needn’t study it, because you know it already’. I had quoted
it by number in the scholarship examination ten months earlier. He won my
heart by remembering this fact.
In England, Whitehead was regarded only as a mathematician, and it was
left to America to discover him as a philosopher. He and I disagreed in
philosophy, so that collaboration was no longer possible, and after he went
to America I naturally saw much less of him. We began to drift apart during
the ?rst world war when he completely disagreed with my paci?st position.
In our di?erences on this subject he was more tolerant than I was, and it
was much more my fault than his that these di?erences caused a diminution
in the closeness of our friendship.
In the last months of the war his younger son, who was only just eighteen,
was killed. This was an appalling grief to him, and it was only by an immense
e?ort of moral discipline that he was able to go on with his work. The pain of
this loss had a great deal to do with turning his thoughts to philosophy and
with causing him to seek ways of escaping from belief in a merely mech-
anistic universe. His philosophy was very obscure, and there was much in it
that I never succeeded in understanding. He had always had a leaning towards
Kant, of whom I thought ill, and when he began to develop his own phil-
osophy he was considerably in?uenced by Bergson. He was impressed by the
the autobiography of bertrand russell 118aspect of unity in the universe, and considered that it is only through this
aspect that scienti?c inferences can be justi?ed. My temperament led me
in the opposite direction, but I doubt whether pure reason could have
decided which of us was more nearly in the right. Those who prefer his
outlook might say that while he aimed at bringing comfort to plain people I
aimed at bringing discomfort to philosophers; one who favoured my outlook
might retort that while he pleased the philosophers, I amused the plain
people. However that may be, we went our separate ways, though a?ection
survived to the last.
Whitehead was a man of extraordinarily wide interests, and his knowledge
of history used to amaze me. At one time I discovered by chance that he was
using that very serious and rather out-of-the-way work Paolo Sarpi’s History
of the Council of Trent, as a bed book. Whatever historical subjects came up he
could always supply some illuminating fact, such, for example, as the connec-
tion of Burke’s political opinions with his interests in the City, and the
relation of the Hussite heresy to the Bohemian silver mines. He had delightful
humour and great gentleness. When I was an undergraduate he was given the
nick-name of ‘the Cherub’, which those who knew him in later life would
think unduly disrespectful but which at the time suited him. His family came
from Kent and had been clergymen ever since about the time of the landing
of St Augustine in that county. He used to relate with amusement that my
grandfather, who was much exercised by the spread of Roman Catholicism,
adjured Whitehead’s sister never to desert the Church of England. What
amused him was that the contingency was so very improbable. Whitehead’s
theological opinions were not orthodox, but something of the vicarage
atmosphere remained in his ways of feeling and came out in his later philo-
sophical writings.
He was a very modest man, and his most extreme boast was that he did try
to have the qualities of his defects. He never minded telling stories against
himself. There were two old ladies in Cambridge who were sisters and whose
manners suggested that they came straight out of Cranford. They were, in fact,
advanced and even daring in their opinions, and were in the forefront of
every movement of reform. Whitehead used to relate, somewhat ruefully,
how when he ?rst met them he was misled by their exterior and thought it
would be fun to shock them a little. But when he advanced some slightly
radical opinion they said, ‘Oh, Mr Whitehead, we are so pleased to hear you
say that’, showing that they had hitherto viewed him as a pillar of reaction.
His capacity for concentration on work was quite extraordinary. One hot
summer’s day, when I was staying with him at Grantchester, our friend
Crompton Davies arrived and I took him into the garden to say how-do-you-
do to his host. Whitehead was sitting writing mathematics. Davies and I stood
in front of him at a distance of no more than a yard and watched him
first marriage 119covering page after page with symbols. He never saw us, and after a time
we went away with a feeling of awe.
Those who knew Whitehead well became aware of many things in him
which did not appear in more casual contacts. Socially he appeared kindly,
rational and imperturbable, but he was not in fact imperturbable, and was
certainly not that inhuman monster ‘the rational man’. His devotion to his
wife and his children was profound and passionate. He was at all times deeply
aware of the importance of religion. As a young man, he was all but converted
to Roman Catholicism by the in?uence of Cardinal Newman. His later phil-
osophy gave him some part of what he wanted from religion. Like other men
who lead extremely disciplined lives, he was liable to distressing soliloquies,
and when he thought he was alone, he would mutter abuse of himself for his
supposed shortcomings. The early years of his marriage were much clouded
by ?nancial anxieties, but, although he found this very di?cult to bear, he
never let it turn him aside from work that was important but not lucrative.
He had practical abilities which at the time when I knew him best did not
?nd very much scope. He had a kind of shrewdness which was surprising
and which enabled him to get his way on committees in a manner astonish-
ing to those who thought of him as wholly abstract and unworldly. He might
have been an able administrator but for one defect, which was a complete
inability to answer letters. I once wrote a letter to him on a mathematical
point, as to which I urgently needed an answer for an article I was writing
against Poincaré. He did not answer, so I wrote again. He still did not answer,
so I telegraphed. As he was still silent, I sent a reply-paid telegram. But in the
end, I had to travel down to Broadstairs to get the answer. His friends grad-
ually got to know this peculiarity, and on the rare occasions when any of
them got a letter from him they would all assemble to congratulate the
recipient. He justi?ed himself by saying that if he answered letters, he would
have no time for original work. I think the justi?cation was complete and
unanswerable.
Whitehead was extraordinarily perfect as a teacher. He took a personal
interest in those with whom he had to deal and knew both their strong and
their weak points. He would elicit from a pupil the best of which a pupil
was capable. He was never repressive, or sarcastic, or superior, or any of the
things that inferior teachers like to be. I think that in all the abler young men
with whom he came in contact he inspired, as he did in me, a very real and
lasting a?ection.
Whitehead and his wife used to stay with us in the country, and we used to
stay with them in Cambridge. Once we stayed with the old Master, Montagu
Butler, in the Lodge, and slept in Queen Anne’s bed, but this experience
fortunately was not repeated.
My lectures on German Socialism were published in 1896. This was my
the autobiography of bertrand russell 120?rst book, but I took no great interest in it, as I had determined to devote
myself to mathematical philosophy. I re-wrote my Fellowship dissertation,
and got it accepted by the Cambridge University Press, who published it in
1897 under the title An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. I subsequently came to
think this book much too Kantian, but it was fortunate for my reputation that
my ?rst philosophical work did not challenge the orthodoxy of the time. It
was the custom in academic circles to dismiss all critics of Kant as persons
who had failed to understand him, and in rebutting this criticism it was an
advantage to have once agreed with him. The book was highly praised, far
more highly in fact than it deserved. Since that time, academic reviewers have
generally said of each successive book of mine that it showed a falling-o?.
In the autumn of 1896, Alys and I went to America for three months,
largely in order that I might make the acquaintance of her relations.
1
The ?rst
thing we did was to visit Walt Whitman’s house in Camden, N.J. From there
we went to a small manufacturing town called Millville, where a cousin of
hers, named Bond Thomas, was the manager of a glass factory which had, for
a long time, been the family business. His wife, Edith, was a great friend of
Alys’s. According to the Census, the town had 10,002 inhabitants, and they
used to say that they were the two. He was a simple soul, but she had literary
aspirations. She wrote bad plays in the style of Scribe, and imagined that if
only she could get away from Millville and establish contact with the literary
lights of Europe, her talent would be recognised. He was humbly devoted to
her, but she had various ?irtations with men whom she imagined to be of
?ner clay. In those days the country round about consisted of empty wood-
land, and she used to take me long drives over dirt tracks in a buggy. She
always carried a revolver, saying one could never know when it would come
in handy. Subsequent events led me to suspect that she had been reading
Hedda Gabler. Two years later, they both came to stay with us in a palace in
Venice, and we introduced her to various writers. It turned out that the
work she had produced with such labour during the ten years’ isolation in
Millville was completely worthless. She went back to America profoundly
discouraged, and the next we heard was that, after placing her husband’s
love letters over her heart, she had shot herself through them with the
revolver. He subsequently married another woman who was said to be
exactly like her.
We went next to Bryn Mawr to stay with the President, Carey Thomas,
sister of Bond Thomas. She was a lady who was treated almost with awe by all
the family. She had immense energy, a belief in culture which she carried out
with a business man’s e?ciency, and a profound contempt for the male sex.
The ?rst time I met her, which was at Friday’s Hill, Logan said to me before
her arrival: ‘Prepare to meet thy Carey.’ This expressed the family attitude. I
was never able myself, however, to take her quite seriously, because she was
first marriage 121so easily shocked. She had the wholly admirable view that a person who
intends to write on an academic subject should ?rst read up the literature, so I
gravely informed her that all the advances in non-Euclidean geometry had
been made in ignorance of the previous literature, and even because of that
ignorance. This caused her ever afterwards to regard me as a mere farceur.
Various incidents, however, con?rmed me in my view of her. For instance,
once in Paris we took her to see ‘L’Aiglon’, and I found from her remarks that
she did not know there had been a Revolution in France in 1830. I gave her
a little sketch of French history, and a few days later she told me that her
secretary desired a handbook of French history, and asked me to recommend
one. However, at Bryn Mawr she was Zeus, and everybody trembled before
her. She lived with a friend, Miss Gwinn, who was in most respects the
opposite of her. Miss Gwinn had very little will-power, was soft and lazy, but
had a genuine though narrow feeling for literature. They had been friends
from early youth, and had gone together to Germany to get the Ph.D degree,
which, however, only Carey had succeeded in getting. At the time that we
stayed with them, their friendship had become a little ragged. Miss Gwinn
used to go home to her family for three days in every fortnight, and at the
exact moment of her departure each fortnight, another lady, named Miss
Garrett, used to arrive, to depart again at the exact moment of Miss Gwinn’s
return. Miss Gwinn, meantime, had fallen in love with a very brilliant young
man, named Hodder, who was teaching at Bryn Mawr. This roused Carey to
fury, and every night, as we were going to bed, we used to hear her angry
voice scolding Miss Gwinn in the next room for hours together. Hodder had
a wife and child, and was said to have a?airs with the girls at the College. In
spite of all these obstacles, however, Miss Gwinn ?nally married him. She
insisted upon getting a very High Church clergyman to perform the cere-
mony, thereby making it clear that the wife whom he had had at Bryn Mawr
was not his legal wife, since the clergyman in question refused to marry
divorced persons. Hodder had given out that there had been a divorce, but
Miss Gwinn’s action showed that this had not been the case. He died soon
after their marriage, worn out with riotous living. He had a very brilliant
mind, and in the absence of women could talk very interestingly.
While at Bryn Mawr, I gave lectures on non-Euclidean geometry, and Alys
gave addresses in favour of endowment of motherhood, combined with pri-
vate talks to women in favour of free love. This caused a scandal, and we were
practically hounded out of the college. From there we went to Baltimore,
where I lectured on the same subject at the Johns Hopkins University. There
we stayed with her uncle, Dr Thomas, the father of Carey. The Thomases were
a curious family. There was a son at Johns Hopkins who was very brilliant
in brain surgery; there was a daughter, Helen, at Bryn Mawr, who had the
misfortune to be deaf. She was gentle and kind, and had very lovely red hair.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 122I was very fond of her for a number of years, culminating in 1900. Once or
twice I asked her to kiss me, but she refused. Ultimately she married Simon
Flexner, the Head of the Rockefeller Institute of Preventive Medicine. I
remained very good friends with her, although in the last years of her life I
saw her seldom. There was another daughter who had remained a pious and
very orthodox Quaker. She always alluded to those who were not Quakers as
‘the world’s people’. They all of them used ‘thee’ in conversation, and so did
Alys and I when we talked to each other. Some of the Quaker doctrines
