KILLING ALTON: THE POLITICS OF SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN ALTON LOCKE.

This essay examines how the postsecular turn might encourage a reappraisal of the changes in literary form that transpired during the Victorian period. Specifically, I revisit Alton Locke (1850), Charles Kingsley's fictional autobiography of the eponymous "tailor and poet,'' who moves from working class obscurity, to literary notoriety, to political failure and eventual conversion to Christianity. Though often treated as an artistic failure, Alton's abrupt conversion can be read as an effort, on Kingsley's part, to re-present a phenomenon that Victorian studies has only recently brought to light: the spate of famous mid-Victorian radicals who reconverted to Christianity. I argue that the political implications of reconversion during this period, combined with the secularizing pressures of Victorian autobiography account for the novel s messy transformation from a religiously inflected bildungsroman to politically conscious spiritual autobiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]