Personalities From Times Past, First-Hand

¶ … personalities from times past, first-hand accounts of personal biography are among the most important historical accounts available to us. By presenting an "I was there!" perspective, authors who specialize in the first-hand account provide us with rich detail and interpretive credibility in a way that other historical writers do not. In this brief paper, the accounts provided by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, George Orwell in his Homage to Catalonia, and Vladimir Korolenko in his Pogrom At Kishinev, will be reviewed in order to determine how the authors structured their personal accounts and what they hoped to achieve with them.

Franklin begins his account of his life as an address to his son. He is writing, he says, because he has taken great pleasure throughout his life in knowing the personal histories of his ancestors and he wants to tell his son the story of his own development in the hopes that his son may take pleasure in reading it. He goes on to relay details of his life in the early 1700s colonial period, including his upbringing, and people and places he knew. He recalls events which he believes will appeal to his son and will also instruct him, such as when he writes that he wasn't very good at math but he was good at writing, his skills thereby pointing him in a direction that would impact his development as a printer. He tells of a story in which he was caught in a lie and learned the value of honesty. He tells of his apprenticeships and relationships in ways that give insight into the economic and social conditions of the era. Throughout, Franklin has a couple of underlying purposes, consisting of (1) an honest effort to lay down the account of an earlier time in a way that tells how both he and his society developed, and (2) an attempt to build his own credibility so that when he indulges in teaching life lessons he is accepted in his authority. The account is warm, insightful, and interesting and gives a good picture of the industriousness which is necessary to reach the heights that a man like Franklin achieved.

Korolenko tells his tale of a mob massacre of Jews in 1903 with a view of relaying the horror and injustice of the events in question. He writes from the perspective of a journalist recounting the events after having arrived in town some two months following the massacre. However, he relays the events as they occurred in a first-hand manner, telling the details as though he had been there amongst the crowd. He had gathered his information from interviews with survivors conducted soon after the events and this first-hand approach feels real and credible. He gives a convincing portrait of the madness of crowds and the bloodlust of anti-Semitism. His overarching purpose is to convince the reader of the injustice of the events, and he gathers credibility for his story by telling the story of a man who led the riots, only to repent later and commit suicide. In doing so he suggests that even the crowd knew it was wrong.