Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book exposes the novelist’s passion for lineage and its importance in giving definition to character in Victorian fiction. It examines the philosopher’s ideas as they appear in Tennyson’s poem ‘Lucretius’ of 1868 and as it was reworked, as she shows, in the scientist William Tyndall’s Belfast Address of 1874. The problem is one to which Pater alludes in his notorious Conclusion to The Renaissance and it is one of the interests which fills up the many idle moments of Edred Fitzpiers in Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders. The book deals with two aspects of Victorian psychology, the first touching on the dialectic between narrative and notions of the unconscious in this period. The second about the psychological drama being enacted within the family of Henry James, including an important role performed by the psychologist brother, William.