THE VICTORIAN MENTAL SCIENCES

Abstract

In a 1990 review of Jenny Bourne Taylor's In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988), Lawrence Rothfield commented that the book explores what until recently might have seemed a bizarrely specialized cultural context and an equally obscure literary phenomenon (97). Rothfield argued that Taylor's study was representative of the recent move to new historicist methodologies, which made contexts and authors once considered to be historical footnotes important to scholarship. Prior to that shift, [n]ineteenth-century English psychology, a mishmash of scientifically dubious theories and practices such as phrenology, physiognomy, moral management, and mesmerism, hardly seemed key to understanding the broad cultural issues of concern as traditionally construed in Victorian studies (97). Strikingly, now some twenty-five years later, knowledge of nineteenth-century psychology seems essential to the field. Presses, alert to that shift, have republished out-of-print literary studies that explored Victorian literature in relation to psychology in the years preceding the current surge of interest in the subject. (Faas's 1989 Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry was reissued by Princeton University Press in a 2016 hardcover edition. Kearns's 1987 Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology was reissued in 2014 by the University of Kentucky Press.) Judging by the number of publications in the area, as well as by titles on the programs of recent conferences, the sciences of the mind have become one of the central topics in Victorian studies.