The dream as revelation in mid-nineteenth-century psychology

Mid-nineteenth-century psychological debate was open, dynamic and wideranging. It was also a public debate that took place in the great periodicals of the period – such as the Fortnightly Review, the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan’s Magazine, the Cornhill Magazine and the Westminster Review – and saw the establishment of the first journal dedicated to the new science, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy in 1876.1 Frances Power Cobbe, George Henry Lewes and James Sully, the central subjects of this chapter, were all actively engaged in the socio-intellectual networks that contributed to and generated a broader public engagement with psychological subjects, including the nature of consciousness, unconscious cerebration, evolutionary psychology, animal intelligence and, of course, dreams. Typifying the moral imperative driving the intensification of interest in the dream in particular, John Rutherford, an occasional contributor to the Cornhill Magazine, one of the more successful liberal periodicals of the period, urged his high-minded middle-class readership to put aside their suspicions of charlatanry and popular superstition and reconsider what dreams might reveal about the relationship between ‘life and spirit’.2