Search Results

This chapter considers two issues that were of vital importance to poetry in the 1830s and throughout the mid-nineteenth century: the complex relation between the lyric expression and the self-reflective analysis of psychological processes; and the competing claims of physical and metaphysical theories of mind. Using reviews of Tennyson's poetry by Arthur Henry Hallam and William Johnson Fox as starting points, it argues that Tennyson and Browning, in their early poetry, develop a poetics of psychological analysis. In addition, it shows that associationist psychology was a crucial influence on this psychological poetry, and that, in the work of these two poets, assocationism's account of the embodied mind clashes with theological notions of the soul. The chapter examines the tensions between expression and analysis, and between physical and metaphysical psychology in a range of poems, including Browning's Pauline and Sordello and Tennyson's ‘The Two Voices’.

This chapter introduces associationism, which was the dominant psychological theory during the latter portion of the nineteenth century. It first studies how John Stuart Mill's bouts of depression became symbolic of the destructive consequences of utilitarianism's conception of the human mind and of the aims and purposes of education. The chapter then looks at the development of nineteenth-century literature and the emergence of modernism and modern literary criticism during the twentieth century. It also discusses associationist and empiricist philosophy. Finally, the chapter considers the application and contribution of the association theory and associationism to the understanding of art and the development of scientific psychology.

The introduction presents a theoretical and historical overview of the mutual influence of poetry and psychological theory in the Victorian period. It argues that the rising popularity of psychological analysis as a subject for poetry in the mid-nineteenth century was linked to the growing prominence of psychology, particularly associationist psychology, within Victorian culture. The introduction uses readings of Tennyson's early poems, ‘The Poet's Mind’ and ‘Timbuctoo’, to examine the language used by Victorian poets to write about psychology, showing that, even before 1830, the relation between ‘mind’, ‘brain’, and ‘soul’ was a contentious issue within poetic writing. It also studies the poetic theories of Coventry Patmore and John Stuart Mill, which both affirm and challenge the centrality of psychological analysis to Victorian poetics. It closes by examining the use of contemporary poetic quotations in the writings of the psychologists Alexander Bain and G.H. Lewes.

Philosophical thinking about pleasure today, especially in the context of normative ethics, is deeply influenced by the concept’s function within Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism, according to which the moral quality of any action depends on its tendency to “maximize pleasure” and “minimize pain.” According to Mill’s own philosophy of science and language, the content and function of “pleasure” is determined by its role in scientific induction, specifically within the associationist psychological theory Mill shares with his father, James Mill. Pleasures, it turns out, are qualities of sensations with inductive links to other mental states, the power to explain actions, and the potential for being physiologically explained. The semantic content of “pleasure” as a general name, and thus the content of the moral precepts set up by Mill’s principle of utility, must be thought of as responsive to inductive progress in associationist psychology, ethology, and neuroscience.

This chapter tracks the efforts that critics, readers, anthologists, and publishers of almanacs made in the early-nineteenth century to incorporate aesthetic experiences into the continuum of everyday life, a time frame increasingly conceptualized as affection’s true home. Considering the alliances forged at this time between literature and discourses on health and domestic timetabling, it describes how the lover of literature came to be privileged as someone who was able in her reading life to “go steady” and who was prepared for married life accordingly. After discussing the accounts of the pleasures of poetic meter produced by the era’s associationist psychology--which centered on the human nervous system’s propensity for rhythm and repetition--the chapter outlines how later in the century, novels, Jane Austen’s especially, would absorb some of the therapeutic functions previously ascribed to poetry. Novels became loveable, literary, and healthy in measure as they became perennially rereadable.

Basil’s Robert Mannion, and No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone are both subject to monomaniacal impulses. In Basil, Collins draws on early-nineteenth-century theories of insanity and moral management, promoted by “alienists” such as John Connolly and J. C. Prichard, which warned of domination by unruly passions. Mannion allows himself to be swept away by his uncontrolled emotions, and therefore contributes to his own mental deterioration. In No Name, Collins makes use of mid-Victorian theories of the will, developed by mental physiologists such as William Benjamin Carpenter, to depict Magdalen as someone who has not been trained to manage her willpower correctly and is therefore overwhelmed by a monomaniacal urge when faced with sudden tragedy. Unlike Mannion, Magdalen also possesses intrinsic reserves of moral strength and endures a series of internal conflicts between her monomania and her ‘better’ nature. In his contemplation of the different aspects which comprise the individual personality, Collis asserts (and so counters mid-century associationist psychology as propounded by men like Alexander Bain) that we are not ‘born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper’, but also insists that our inborn traits may be cultivated for better or for worse.