A Tradition of Victorian Autobiography

Abstract

If, as Carlyle wrote, ‘History is the essence of innumerable Biographies’, then the history of the Victorian age may be regarded as the essence of innumerable autobiographies. Carlyle himself found it appropriate to write an autobiographical fiction to accompany and elucidate his ‘clothes philosophy’; John Henry Newman, when accused by Charles Kingsley of lying about his religious faith, responded by writing an autobiography as Apologia; Darwin sought to amuse himself and educate his children by leaving behind a record of the ‘Development of my mind and character’; Trollope took the opportunity in his memoirs to confess that his ‘first object in taking to literature as a profession’ was to make money; and John Stuart Mill revealed to his Victorian audience, albeit posthumously, that as a young man of twenty he had suffered a ‘crisis’ in his mental history.¹