ABSTRACT
Towards the end of his life, James Fitzjames Stephen intermittently writes what he calls an Autobiographic Fragment. It was and remains unpublished. Unlike his other writings, this text is not a matter of reducing and systematising large masses of detail into the several departments of a life. Rather, it is a fragment, a part that takes on significance only by vir-tue of its place in an entire life now lost. And while at least one of his books has been described as ‘a self-portrait of unconscious fidelity’,3 this fragment is an autobiography the function of which Stephen describes as dogmatic: namely, to pass on the inherited truths of his life to his children and to ‘bury my dead out of sight’.4
