The Victorian Approach to Autobiography

Abstract

IN RECENT years the consideration of as a kind of literature has been seriously neglected. For the study of as a literary form, the standard works in print are Mrs. Burr's Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study (1909) and Georg Misch's History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1907). Misch's book, the more detailed of the two, does not touch on English autobiography, anid Burr's tries to include all the autobiographies of European literature in a rather hasty survey. Apart from these two books, the most important modern studies available are a few unpublished Ph.D. theses.' Literary scholars have apparently not yet decided that deserves the attention they have given to biography or the novel. It would not be true to say that the Victorians studied more than we do today, but it is true that they seem to have been more eager and more curious about it than we are. And this is a very natural attitude for them to have had, for the publication of autobiographies increased enormously during the era2 and the word autobiography itself was coined in their century (Southey, 1809, see NED).3 The emphatic state-