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Moab Is My Washpot

autobiography of Stephen Fry

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ2389945 ↗
Source-derived summary

Moab Is My Washpot (published 1997) is Stephen Fry's autobiography, covering the first 20 years of his life. In the book, Fry is candid about his past indiscretions, including stealing, cheating, and lying. The book covers some of the same ground as Fry's first novel, The Liar, published in 1991. In that work, public schoolboy Adrian Healey falls in love with a boy called Hugo Cartwright; in the autobiography, 14-year-old Fry becomes besotted with 13-year-old "Matthew Osborne".

Fry also writes about his older brother Roger, Bunce (the new boy at his prep school, Stouts Hill), Jo Wood (his best friend at Uppingham), and Oliver Derwent (a prefect who "seduces" Fry).

Title

The title, never explained in the text of the book, is a verse found in Psalm 60 and Psalm 108. Through wearing sandals, people's feet would become filthy in the dusty desert environment and upon entering a house, they would wash their feet by pouring water over them into a washpot. Moab, which had threatened Israel, was to be so completely subdued that it became likened to a washpot or basin. Fry selected this title because he saw his book as "scrubbing at the grime of years".

Matthew Osborne

In a 2001 article for the Evening Standard, Andrew Billen wrote that Fry was reunited with "Osborne" after the publication of the book:

Many pages of the deepest purple are devoted to this Matthew Osborne, "the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life".

Editorial summary

“Moab Is My Washpot” enters the record as autobiography of Stephen Fry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Moab, Washpot and autobiography can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1997, 1991, 2001—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1997. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Moab, Washpot and autobiography.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Moab Is My Washpot” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Moab, Washpot and autobiography provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2389945. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1991 and 2001.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Moab Is My Washpot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.