ABSTRACT

Many sensation novels explore social issues that caused great anxiety for the Victorians, such as the effects of industrialization, urbanism, and scientific development on gender roles, class stratification, and public wellbeing. The sensation novel responds with relish and alarm to these developments, representing characters who are nervous, characters with mental disorders, and characters injured in railway crashes or industrial accidents. Victorian period saw the first steps toward a 'modern' understanding of disability, including the 'medicalization' of disability and framing disability in relation to economics and the professions. Victorian science mixed seventeenth and eighteenth century biological and mental theories, new discoveries about physiology and neurology, and new theorizations of insanity. Victorian psychology and psychiatry show an overwhelming concern with biological determinism–the idea that biological inheritance determines destiny. Psychology increasingly incorporated knowledge from physiology, the study of the functioning of organs, and neurology, the study of nerves and the brain.