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In his work, The English Novel, Walter Allen locates an important aspect of the Victorian revolt:
Every age has its own brand of romanticism, its special line in cant, which the next generation must debunk, and Butler was a great debunker, and for those in revolt against the Victorian father figure a liberator. The sequence of autobiographical novels of the Edwardian period is an indication of this.1
It was natural, in such a revolt, that the son would assume the role of liberator. The revolt of son against father is an ancient theme; we remember the wounding of Heaven by Cronus, but what is new in the Victorian period is the growing self-consciousness by the son of his role as liberator. The life and work of Freud, an eminent Victorian, is itself a profound expression of a new consciousness in Victorian family relationships.
We begin to see the initial restiveness of a repressed anger against the father's authority in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and as the century moves foward the awareness of the father-son conflict finds explicit expression in autobiography and autobiographical fiction. A comparison of Butler's The Way of All Flesh () and Gosse's Father and Son () dramatizes the close relationship between autobiography and the autobiographical novel. As inner conflict, expressed traditionally in “private” writings, memoirs, diaries, confessions, and so forth, becomes a symbol of a reading public's wish, autobiography merges with autobiographical fiction—the conflict