From God's Work to Fieldwork: Charlotte Tonna's Evangelical Autoethnography

This essay links the concept of autoethnography with spiritual conversion narrative in order to argue that evangelical autobiography contains the tools not only for spiritual but for cultural selffashioning. What I call spiritual autoethnography was a way of imagining the self in relation to knowledge that turns the (spiritual) self into the condition of (cultural) knowledge. I argue this by way of the radical evangelical social critic Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose autobiography Personal Recollections: Life of Charlotte Elizabeth (1841) harnessed the rhetorical contradictions of evangelical conversion narrative to fashion a method for negotiating ethnic and religious difference at the margins of Britain: in rural Ireland, but also in its London proxy, the Irish slum of St. Giles'. Tonna's spiritual autoethnography allowed for a form of textual selffashioning that transcended the genre of spiritual autobiography to become a model for cultural inquiry 'on the ground,' so to speak--the spiritual self-writer as fieldworker.