| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: Russell in 1876, the year in which he was orphaned before he was four years of age. | |
Archive Box Number: 2,1 | |
Date: 1876 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: "Bertie" as recorded in his Aunt Agatha's photo album. This and the next 3 photos are courtesy of Newnham College, Cambridge. (haha, adorable! I want to pinch his face,hehe) | |
Archive Box Number: RA3 Rec. Acq. 941 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: "Bertie" as recorded in his Aunt Agatha's photo album. | |
Archive Box Number: RA3 Rec. Acq. 941 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: "Bertie" as recorded in his Aunt Agatha's photo album. These pictures were taken at Pembroke Lodge where he was privately educated until going up to Cambridge in 1890. (this one is so cool!) | |
Archive Box Number: RA3 Rec. Acq. 941 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: "Bertie" as recorded in his Aunt Agatha's photo album. | |
Archive Box Number: RA3 Rec. Acq. 941 | |
Date: c. 1880 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: Russell in 1893 as a BA in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. | |
Archive Box Number: 2,2 | |
Date: 1893 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: In defiance of his Grandmother's disapproval, Russell married the American Alys Pearsall Smith on 13 December 1894 in the Quaker Meeting House in St. Martin's Lane, London. The photograph of him as a young man is from his Aunt Agatha's album. Russell left Alys in 1911 but there was no divorce until 1921. | |
Archive Box Number: RA3 Rec. Acq. 941 | |
Date: Dec. 13, 1894 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: In 1907, the year of this photograph, Russell ran as the candidate for the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in the Wimbledon by-election. He later observed that the opposition he encountered during the Great War "was not comparable to that which the suffragists met in 1907". | |
Archive Box Number: 2,4 | |
Date: 1907 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: | |
Archive Box Number: 2,4 | |
Date: 1907 |
| Person(s) in Photograph: Bertrand Russell |
Description: | |
Archive Box Number: 2,5 | |
Date: 1916 |
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography
What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.