SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “Introduction: The Hermeneutic Imperative.” In Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation, pp. 1-28. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Peterson defines Victorian autobiography as principally a hermeneutic and interpretive, rather than a representative, genre and surveys its literary origins in the spiritual autobiographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

When John Ruskin traveled abroad for the first time without his parents, his mother slipped a copy of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners into his satchel. “What made you put that funny book of John Bunyan's in the bag,” Ruskin wrote back. “You know it is not at all in my way.” Bunyan's book—an autobiographical account of youthful depravity, conviction of sin, and dramatic conversion—was not to Ruskin's taste because, as he explained to his mother, it displayed a man who dwelt “painfully and exclusively on the...