Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850-1880 (review)

In this lucidly written and erudite book, Rick Rylance reconstructs the turbulent, contested discursive world of nineteenth-century British psychology. He chooses to focus on three decades, 1850-1880, before psychology became firmly rooted in the experimental laboratory, before—most traditional histories of psychology would claim—it became a proper science. One of Rylance's aims is to break down hard-and-fast distinctions between psychology's "long past" and its "short history," between the "Victorian" and the "modern," and to show the persistence of Victorian problems—albeit in different contexts—well into the twentieth century. Another of his aims is to portray a culture in flux, one moving from the comfortable settled world of natural theology and discourse about the "soul," toward a serious engagement with relativism, materialism, and new forms of government. As centers of intellectual ferment shifted from Anglican Oxbridge to the provinces, and as communication with a broadening public became valued, certain hierarchies began to be broken down, while others (namely those of race and gender) were maintained as strictly as ever.

The participants in the debates of this new world upended by Darwin's writings were psychologists, philosophers, physicians, novelists, and churchmen. The third, most convincingly demonstrated of Rylance's aims is to show that the two-cultures art/science divide is a product of our own era and did not exist for the Victorians. From 1850 to 1880, he argues, scientists and literary figures took part in the same debates. In the case of the psychologist George Henry Lewes and the novelist George Eliot, living and working in the same house, the histories of science and literature took place "as close as a hallway apart" (p. 13). Rylance aims, and succeeds, at recovering a sense of that closeness; and as a literary critic himself examining scientific ideas, he emulates in his own writing the easy and expected ways in which Victorian literature and science were conversant.

The book falls into two parts. The first reconstructs the terms and contexts of debates about the mind-body problem in Victorian Britain; the second examines three important but largely neglected scientific figures—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and George Henry Lewes—and their engagement with the radical new ideas of the era. In the first part, Rylance discusses the major problems in psychology (what was the connection, if any, between mind and body? were ideas innate in the mind or formed through experience?), and the ways in which scientific, medical, and literary figures dealt with them. In the second part, he shows how the terms of the debate began to shift as a result of Bain's, Spencer's, and Lewes's serious engagement with evolutionary and developmental ideas (for all three, a mixture of Darwinian and Lamarckian theories). Rylance pays special attention to the reception of their ideas by examining reviews of their work in important Victorian periodicals, as well as to the charged political contexts in which they debated issues of evolution and the mind.

Rylance clearly sees as his most original contribution the restoration of Lewes, hitherto greatly neglected, to his scientific, political, and cultural contexts. Lewes emerges from Rylance's reading as a truly transitional figure without whom the history of psychology later in the century cannot be understood. His significance for William James is made clear; and an extended comparison between Lewes and the modern philosopher of mind John Searle underscores the persistence of the issues that concerned the Victorians. But Rylance is careful not to make Lewes out to be more modern than he really was, as a quotation demonstrating his very Victorian racial views (p. 300) reminds us.

Rylance is representative of a new school of literary critics attuned to science, and he argues forcefully that the literary canon needs to be broadened to include scientific texts. He also argues...