Late in life, from the chilling perspective of a posthumous self, Charles Darwin wrote a brief account of his own origins. ‘I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.’ Darwin pushes the act of self-objectification to its theoretical limits: he gazes into the autobiographer's mirror and sees, staring back, not Charles Darwin but an aged instance of the species homo sapiens. Writing of himself as a dead man is not at all difficult, he tells us, ‘for life is nearly over with me.’ The central activity of his life had been the collecting and interpreting of natural phenomena. Now, believing himself to be at life's end, he collects himself, a specimen dispassionately impaled on the keen pin of his selfobservation.

Darwin began his Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character late in May of 1876, when he was sixty-seven years old. He wrote quickly and casually and, except for some later additions, completed the work in ten weeks. Twice in the opening paragraph he refers to the Recollections as a 'sketch,’ with all the rapidity and informality the word implies. In no sense a full-scale selfportrait, the Recollections constitute a discontinuous narrative, by turns anecdotal and reflective, that captures the features of an old man in search of his formative self and desirous of preserving his past for his progeny.