The Victorian passion for progress has many iterations, not least in the voracious appetite for accounts of the individual's moral, intellectual and spiritual formation. The public relish for genres like the Bildungsroman and the novel of religious faith and doubt shows how certain fictive narratives took up territory occupied by the memoir and biography in order to illuminate the evolution of an individual subject. Crisis and transformation are key themes in the Victorian ‘spiritual quest’ plot where self-development is characterized by progress from ignorance to enlightenment, and thence salvation. Whether the focus is secular or religious, maturity is encoded as a form of redemption, and the process of growth a conversion from illusion and misapprehension to a new – and true – insight into selfh ood. In its analysis of three best-selling novels from the later Victorian period – Lothair (1870), John Inglesant (1880), and Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) – this chapter shows how, in the last three decades of the century, emotionalized representations of Catholic conversion provide an imaginative structure for exploring the hidden forces that shape personality and determine belief and action. Joseph Childers has suggested that, in periods of cultural upheaval and transition, ‘a discourse will discover its own shortcomings and begin to look to other public discourses as a means of shoring up its enterprise’. Childers’ assertion is borne out in the nineteenth-century treatment of the conversion experience. As secularism and material sciences gain currency, the discourses of moral philosophy and psychological investigation are increasingly invoked to account for the transformation of an individual's beliefs.

Through their focus on the authority of personal emotion as a guide and impetus to action, Victorian conversion narratives – both fictive and biographical – provide a testing-ground for two contradictory models of the individual's ‘feelings, states of feelings, pleasures, pains, passions, sentiments, affections’.