Displaced Memories in Victorian Fiction and Psychology

In late-Victorian literature and psychology, memories were frequently thought to transgress mental boundaries, drifting from one mind to another or assuming a spectral existence. Objects with powerful—and often traumatic—associations acted as an especially potent conduit by which memories could pass between people who were distant in time and space. Examining literary, psychological, and parapsychological writings by Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Henry Lewes, Samuel Butler, and F. W. H. Myers, this essay argues that these works provide a distinctive set of narratives about the potential displacement and uncertain ownership of memory. By offering a range of speculations about how emotions, memories, and experiences adhere to the material world, such narratives dramatize the permeability increasingly attributed to memory, consciousness, and individual identity at the end of the Victorian period.