CONVERSION AND BEYOND: THE CHANGING SELF IN VICTORIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY J. L. BROUGHTON D. PHIL. THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE SEPTEMBER 1988 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements Abstract iv INTRODUCTION 1 i The moment 2 ii The canon 18 iii The function of conversion 26 CHAPTER 1 To the Dark House: Leslie Stephen and the Mausoleum Book 39 CHAPTER 2 The Six Paper Bags: Thomas Carlyle and Autobiography 72 1 The paradigm: Conversion in Sartor Resartus 73 2 'Biography' and Sartor Resartus 85 3 Reminiscence as Autobiography 94 CHAPTER 3 William Hale White's The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford's Deliverance: A Commonplace Life? 113 CHAPTER 4 Thomas Cooper: The Foregone Conclusion 145 CHAPTER 5 Margaret Oliphant: The Impossible Life 183 CHAPTER 6 Women's Autobiography: The Self at Stake? 213 AFTERWORD 234 NOTES 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY 262 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For access to the manuscript of Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, I am indebted to the trustees of the National Library of Scotland. Lesley Watts, formerly of the Inter-library Loan Desk of the J. B. Morrell Library, has given me incalculable help in pursuing obscure works with the slenderest of clues. To Hermione Lee, who has been a source of energetic criticism and tireless support through all the vicissitudes of research, nothing fancy, just thanks. Thanks are also due to my father, Keith Broughton, for help with the hardware; to Robin Hart, for help with the software; to Jean Wall, for moral support; and to Roy Wallington, for putting up with it all. This thesis is dedicated to my mother, Betty Broughton, who helped with the worrying. iii ABSTRACT This thesis questions the idea that the Victorian autobiography is essentially a narrative of conversion. In the Introduction, I examine the empirical evidence supporting such a claim. I then go on to expose the theoretical underpinnings of the equation of autobiography as a genre with conversion. I attempt to point out where they might be faulty or inadequate. Chapter 1 makes a case for a re-reading of Victorian autobiography in the light of Leslie Stephen's strong resistance, in his Mausoleum Book, to the conversion-plot. I examine some of the roots of this aversion, and its effects on Stephen's own autobiographical practice. Chapter 2 assesses Thomas Carlyle's contribution, in Sartor Resartus, to the secularization of the conversion narrative, and attempts to ascertain his commitment to that mode of Life-writing. Arguing from the basis of the ambivalent views expressed in the essay 'Biography' (contemporary to both Sartor Resartus and the first of the Reminiscences), I explore the possibility that Carlyle's interest in the genre went even further - to the testing of alternative modes of autobiography in the Reminiscences. Chapter 3 takes a 'pseudo-' or 'fictionalized' autobiographical corpus, William Hale White's The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, and traces Hale White's love-hate relationship with conversion. I propose that, between the Autobiography and Deliverance, the hero Rutherford can be seen to lose faith in the conventional conversion structure, and begins to reconstruct his story on other grounds. Chapter 4 addresses the Life of Thomas Cooper, a Baptist convert whose relationship to autobiography and to literary tradition is never- theless skewed by his class position and his need to reclaim 'pre- conversion' experiences. Chapter 5 takes the Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, a work which bears few of the accepted signs of the conversion narrative, but which is self-evidently autobiography. I examine some of the alternative myths of self-hood devised by Oliphant for the purposes of autobiography, and offer an interpretation of these myths which takes into account the author's gender. Chapter 6 draws together a number of women's autobiographies, concentrating mainly of those of Annie Besant. I posit a female alter- native or addition to the pervasive conversion-plot, in the motif of self as 'failed martyr'. I conclude by shifting the focus away from the 'redemptive moment', and towards the related typological motif of 'wandering, exile and return'. Is there similar evidence of resistance to, and divergence from, the typological norm? iv INTRODUCTION 1 i THE MOMENT In his anthology The Unattended Moment, Michael Paffard speaks of 'ransacking' the shelves of autobiography and memoir - from de Quincey and Wordsworth to Koestler and Nabokov - for the epiphanies, visions, revelations, illuminations, fits and trances that make up his mystical and quasi-mystical collection. 1 As Paffard points out, what connects many of these sudden, unlooked-for, transcendental experiences is that, however 'worked over' they might have been in the imagination, the memory and the process of writing, they are very often pivotal in an autobiographer's life. They are moments of conversion: one of the things that makes the unattended moment important and a subject of our special wonder, is that it does often seem to the people who have it that it transforms them.2 A. 0. J. Cockshut, reversing Paffard's procedure and coming to conversion from the starting point of an analysis of autobiography, has elaborated the unattended moment thus: But when [conversion] does come it appears as the practical enactment of something settled long before. It encapsulates a long process of thought, of weighing arguments, of rejecting old ideas and adopting new ones, or of developing old ideas in a new direction. Its momentary quality does not make it sudden. The thoughts that existed on the other side of the gulf of oblivion return, now vivid and opertive, speculative no longer. A new life is waiting to be lived.' It is the possibility of a relationship between Victorian autobiography and conversion - the moment which is momentous but not momentary - which is the starting point of this thesis. I shall examine the case in favour of the conventional reading of English autobiography as conversion narrative, before moving on, in the main body of the thesis, to suggest ways in which this reading might fail to take account of the complexity and variety of nineteenth-century experiments in the genre. Literary historians have made many connections between the development of autobiography and the evolution of the spiritual 'conversion' narrative. The problems inherent in the construction of such a history I shall discuss in Section Two, but for the moment I shall simply sketch its outline. Conveniently, Augustine provides, in his Confessions, (c. 400,) the first recognized example of both genres, and a gesture is often made to this work as representing the beginning of autobiographical history. But the real 'seed-time' of both genres is deferred in most accounts another twelve hundred years, to the Puritan revolution of the seventeenth century. The conglomeration of factors involved in the generation of an 'autobiographical consciousness' - from the development of a concept of individuality and the Puritan horror of wasted time, to the technological advances in mirror-making and printing—has been discussed elsewhere, 4 but most historians agree in seeing the particular character of Protestant theology as crucial. I follow George Landow in citing Karl Mannheim's view that the Protestant movement set up in place of revealed salvation, guaranteed by the objective institution of the Church, the notion of the subjective certainty of salvation ... It was not a long step from the doctrine of the subjective certainty to a psychological standpoint in which gradually the observation of the psychic process, which developed into a veritable curiosity, became more important than the harkening to the criteria of salvatlon which men had formerly tried to detect in their own souls. Roger Sharrock likewise regards autobiography as receiving a special impetus from the Calvinist emphasis on election. From informal diaries and confessions, in which the writer, by enumerating doubts, sins and blessings, would gauge the state of his or her soul, there evolved a recognized literary form 'cultivated especially by the Puritans, and developed on more specialized lines after 1640 by the leaders of the radical sects.' 6 Sharrock suggests a link, as early as the mid- seventeenth century, between this nascent genre and the idea of social and moral authority: There was a new development in spiritual autobiography in the period of religious ferment between 1640 and 1660. Baptists, Quakers, and Seekers injected fresh vitality into the form and applied it to new purposes. Bunyan and his like, socially inferior to the Presbyterian and Independent clergy and without formal education for the ministry, attempted to justify themselves and to establish their special galling by detailed accounts of the work of grace upon their souls./ Such documents gradually became more detailed and more public, feeding off, and contributing to the 'psychological' novel and the 'method' of Methodism in the eighteenth century, and emerging, in about 1800, as an identifiable (that is to say, named) genre distinguishable from biography on the one hand, and fiction on the other. The proliferation of autobiographical writing from this point onwards was such that by 1826 J. G. Lockhart could complain that 'England expects every driveller to do his Memorabilia'.8 It has been remarked many times that the 'classic' autobiographers of the Victorian period tend to describe the major event or events in their Lives in terms of conversion. It has also been observed that virtually none of these celebrated conversions represents a simple Pauline acceptance of Christianity. (In his extensive survey of English autobiography, Wayne Shumaker played down the importance of religious confession altogether because, as he saw it, 'of the "great" English autobiographies of the nineteenth century and later, only one, Newman's focuses on religion 9) Most of them, indeed, involve reactions against some aspect of Victorian Protestantism: its defunct theology, its sectarianism, its sabbatarianism, its threadbare rituals, Its perpetuation of intricate class distinctions, its repressiveness or its double standards in the areas of sexual behaviour or commerce.