The Romantic Kinship of Medical Science, Sensory Experience, and Literary Aesthetics

Noel Jackson's Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008) is a study of the uses to which British Romantics put the science of aisthesis or sensory experience. While this book is not an easy read, it is a useful contribution to the growing body of work relating the Romantics to the sciences. Jackson argues that William Wordsworth and other Romantics called upon the discourses of the emerging human sciences of the brain, nerves, sensation, and perception to create a "vocabulary of embodied aesthetic experience" that they used to define and defend the political work of aesthetic culture (1). A "uniquely social logic" existed in the Romantics' "inward-turning language" (1), which he believes derived from the historical and cultural "kinship of medical science and literary aesthetics" (4) and the degree to which Romantic poets were attentive to emerging discourses about the brain and physical sensation. Understood in this way, Jackson asserts, Romantic literary products and their interiority (especially Wordsworth's "language of the sense") articulate a practical relationship between the mind and the world. This relationship amounts to an alternative form of political action and thereby demonstrates the usefulness of aesthetic experience (13).

By his own admission, Jackson does not attempt a broad accounting of the Romantic poets' engagement with the sciences of sensation, though he offers a useful index of contemporary scholars who have contributed to such work. Instead, he selects sites in Romantic literature where the literary and scientific domains converge. These include the concept of mental suggestion, the practice of scientific self-experimentation, the notion of the poet as physician or healer of society, and the theory of the divided nerve, which he believes is John Keats's model for the divided nature of poetic form. The book's three sections cover the historicity of poetic sensibility, the subjectivity of the Romantic lyric and its relation to society, and the legacies of early Romantic aesthetics in the work of Walter Pater and Wilkie Collins. Offering two chapters in each section, Jackson's method serves, in part, as a sketch of recent critical discussions, including what the Romantics contributed to understandings of human community and whether their endeavors made or escaped history. Portions of the book are devoted to William Blake, S. T. Coleridge, Keats, Pater, and Collins, but its primary focus is upon Wordsworth's early poetry and his aesthetic legacy.

The first chapter, "Powers of Suggestion: Sensation, Revolution, and Romantic Aesthetics," begins with a useful rehearsal of classic criticism of Wordsworth—from Irving Babbitt and W.J. Bate to M.H. Abrams and Marjorie Levinson—and a select history of the uses of the word "suggestion"—from William Shakespeare and John Milton, to the Common Sense philosophers, Erasmus Darwin, Wordsworth, and Keats. The high point of this chapter is Jackson's astute and wide-ranging march through Romantic-era texts to collect examples supporting his thesis that the language of the sense, while seemingly private, is actually public and political. He highlights specific uses of the word "suggestion" that are "scientized," selected from an impressively varied range of texts, including The Prelude (1805), The Watchman (1796), Keats's letters (1816–1820), Humphry Davy's notebooks (1839), Mary Hays's Jacobin novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study" (1825) and John Thelwall's Hope of Albion (1801). Jackson contends that this scientized sensual language would have been understood as a stimulus or "incitation" (55) to readers' minds, creating awareness that would almost necessarily lead to public action. While the textual work here is impressive, I longed for more evidence firmly establishing that the writers Jackson quotes were either schooled in the science implied in their language or that they fully and specifically anticipated that their readers' response would be significant public action.

In chapter 2 Jackson considers how Wordsworth and Blake reacted against an empiricist tradition dating from the Enlightenment that endeavored to "class the cabinet / Of their sensations." He invokes theories of Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish physician William Cullen regarding the senses...