Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (review)

Nothing fascinates us more than other people—except ourselves. Thinking about others accounts for much of what we spend our lives thinking about. The title of Adela Pinch’s tantalizing new book, Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing names with literal clarity its focal idea. Whereas thinking about others seems inevitably to invite the question “What are they thinking?,” Pinch resists that inevitability to attend instead to what she calls “the interpersonal effects of thinking conceived as a kind of action” (21). Pinch’s work fascinates for her commitment to understanding thinking as an end in itself, as a display of the social nature of the mind, and as a recurring speech act of nineteenth-century British writing. Much of the existing scholarship on the Victorian concern with thinking about others focuses its attention on the problem of other minds. Pinch asserts that her project is not about this problem: the book “is not concerned with nineteenth-century attitudes toward knowing other minds, beliefs about other minds, or skepticism about other minds. It is about the act of thinking about another person” (14). What occurs or results from the position of thinking about others is what Pinch works to reveal: does a speaker imagine the possibility of efficacy through thinking? Does the speaker deny any such efficacy? Do we as a text’s readers understand its formal structures differently as the “you” being thought about or not thought about? And when there is a relational commitment between the thinker and the one thought about, or what Pinch calls “love thinking,” how does moral psychology or ethical behavior come into play (2)?

The opening chapters of the book engage the more obscure ideas of the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier on the thinking “I” and the work of a host of other psychologically minded metaphysicians, including the philosophical idealist J. M. E. McTaggart, in relation to German idealism. What could read like a dutiful and deadly assemblage of obscure texts gathered together to prove a point moves with an energy that stems from Pinch’s delight in the story she tells. Throughout the book, in fact, I felt I was in the presence of a highly informed guide who not only knew the lay of the land but had feelings and attitudes of her own about it, about which I appreciated learning. The two chapters to follow look to nineteenth-century British poetry: one sets Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s second person poetic address in relation to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the other reads George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862) in relation to Coventry Patmore’s “The Kiss” in The Angel in the House (1854–62). Pinch has a fine ear for form and, at her best, thinks with a creativity that dares to push thinking past the need to make sense. She concludes the third chapter with the evocative: “‘I do not think of thee—I am too near thee’ is really not the opposite of ‘I think of thee.’. . . They are experiments in the intimacy and efficacy of writing, of the soundless words that feel like thought” (111). Pinch most explicitly trespasses on her desire to keep thinking about another and knowing another separate by giving in to the urge when she writes about how Patmore and Meredith “grapple with the difference between thinking about someone, and knowing them, in courtship and marriage” (113). What emerges is the sense that thinking about another or even thinking with another does not necessarily mean knowing that other—it is a stance Pinch alludes to throughout the book but makes most evident here.

The final chapter posits the possibility of the thinking that can be “most sociable when most in error” as a structuring principle of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). For Pinch, Deronda’s thinking about Gwendolen’s “omnipotence of thought”— that her wish killed Grandcourt—however delusional, is productive and sociable...