ABSTRACT
All good autobiographies are in some sense the story of a calling, they tell of the realisation of an urgent personal potentiality. Gandhi's autobiography, exceptional as it is in its homogeneity and clear purposefulness, illustrates the problems facing the statesman who writes his autobiography. Freud's an autobiographical study was written in the first place for a medical periodical aimed through autobiographical statements by leading scientists, to establish the actual state of medical science, and for this reason he had naturally to be concerned primarily with his scientific work. Beatrice Webb apprenticeship then traces the steps by which Harriet Martineau went beyond the position of the scientist and philanthropist to that of the active worker for Co-operation, Trade-Unionism, and finally Socialism. Darwin's autobiography though was written for his family, and it contains a certain amount of the anecdotal material an old man tells to his grandchildren, like the story of Carlyle's lengthy harangue at a dinner-party on the virtues of silence.
