ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the scientists and philosophers of mind who contributed to the development of mainstream psychology. It focuses on Victorian psychology as the Victorians knew it. Treating the emergent discipline as historians of psychology record it, it indicates both the points of contact with Victorian literature and the missed connections generated by literary Victorian studies’ traditional focus on madness, mesmerism, phrenology, and sexuality. Before academic psychologists opened their first laboratories in the 1870s, Victorians were already debating and theorizing about fundamental questions concerning human and animal minds, perception, emotions, the physiology of the nervous system, consciousness and the unconscious, the soul, mental diseases, and evolved human nature. Reminding readers of this pre-history and of important Victorian figures all but forgotten by literary studies, such as James Ward, helps scholars of nineteenth-century literature better understand the complexity of psychology’s interpenetration of the imaginative writing of the period.
