"To surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry": Walter Pater, Many-Sidedness, and the Conversion Novel

This essay uses Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885) to explore why certain Victorian liberals preferred to see religion as a matter of collective inheritance rather than personal belief. Recent commentators have portrayed the Protestant emphasis on individual conversion as one of the foundations of liberal individualism. Pater's liberalism, however, sees radical breakage with the past as a threat to the humanist ideal of many-sidedness and instead imagines the path of a rich individuality as running precisely through a surrender to the inscriptions of cultural heritage. Indeed, Pater virtually transforms the idea of self-culture into that of ethnographic culture, with the detached aesthete becoming a participant-observer who can both submit to the determinations of history and reflect on them through an anthropological lens.