The rise of autobiography as a commercial genre during the first half of the nineteenth century was, in its way, one of the decisive developments of the Victorian period in England. Amid a growing culture of celebrity, a maturing literary market, and the broad social concussions caused by England’s transformation into a modern industrial state, autobiography’s commercial rise embodied the emerging relations between the Victorian subject and the capitalist market and made the commodification of identity an explicit and unsettling feature of the age. John Gibson Lockhart’s essay in the January 1827 Quarterly Review illustrates just how unsettling, turning a review of ten recent autobiographies into a fierce attack on this new and unaccountable tendency to textualize and commodify the self.