Cultivating inwardness: Religious conversion and the Victorian novel from Newman to Gissing

Religious conversion in the Victorian era was a disturbing phenomenon, as epitomized by John Henry Newman's controversial Catholic conversion in 1845, which resulted in historic changes to the way creeds were taught and professed in Britain. This dissertation studies the representation of conversion in canonical and non-canonical novels from the late 1840s to the early 1890s, written by Newman, Bronte, Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, and Gissing. The dissertation argues that these writers transformed a highly controversial religious phenomenon into a powerful literary trope, a process that yielded several important developments for nineteenth-century narrative: first, by importing the theme of conversion into their novels, these writers not only informed their readers about key religious issues like ecclesiastical reform, but also taught their audience how to interpret them; second, by representing conversion as an inward change in intellectual and emotional development, they defused its volatility, thereby demonstrating the growing pedagogical function and cultural power of the Victorian novel; and, third, by cultivating inwardness in their protagonist-converts, they enhanced the capacity of the novel form to represent psychological interiority.;The first chapter focuses on how Newman reimagines conversion as an elite pedagogy. Loss and Gain defines Catholic conversion as the cognitive process of close reading, a development devoid of religious enthusiasm. Chapter two examines Villette as a Protestant romance, my term for Bronte's invention of a narrative genre that combines Protestant rhetoric and the romantic plots of domestic fiction to argue the case for female autonomy. Villette uses conversion to enable the romantic relationship between a Catholic teacher and his Protestant student. The chapter on Middlemarch analyzes how Eliot stakes the notion of female Bildung on religious deconversion and the mental crisis that arises from it. Chapter four discusses negative treatments of conversion: Thackeray, Trollope, and Gissing tend to devaluate the experience of conversion, defining it as a public, artificial performance. These chapters attempt to describe and to account for the impact of religious belief on Victorian literary culture.