ABSTRACT
It might seem strange at first to link Harriet Martineau to the birth of psychology as a discipline since her death in 1876 preceded the establishment of experimental psychological laboratories in the 1880s and 1890s as well as Freud’s formulation of psychoanalysis in 1896. However, thanks to cultural historians such as Alison Winter and Roger Cooter, studying Victorians’ interest in mesmerism and phrenology, and scholars such as Adam Crabtree, Graham Richards, Rick Rylance, Jenny Bourne Taylor, and Sally Shuttleworth, studying what has been called the ‘long history of psychology,’ we can better see Martineau’s position in this long history and the ways in which she participated in and contributed to it. 1 Martineau’s gender automatically excluded her from a university education, a fact that ruled out her becoming either a physician or a scientist; yet she was born at a time when intellectual discussions about the new sciences of the mind were conducted by everyone, generalists and specialists alike. Indeed, the term ‘scientist,’ coined in 1834, was not yet widely in use. Originally a non-believer in phrenology, Martineau followed the phrenological experiments of the 1820s and 1830s, especially the work of her friend George Combe. 2 In the 1830s and 1840s, Martineau remained interested in the mesmeric experiments after the second arrival of mesmerism from France. 3 Already intrigued by Charles Bell’s physiological work distinguishing sensory and motor nerves, Martineau carefully attended to the research of mental physiologists as they published more specialized work from the 1850s onwards. Victorian experiments in three areas – phrenology, mesmerism, and mental physiology – contributed to the cultural milieu in which all levels of Victorian society actively discussed the mind’s capabilities and what they might mean for individuals and society at large. Before psychology solidified into a scientific discipline, Victorians saw how the mind worked as an excitingly new and important area for investigation and debate. Martineau’s interest in the new sciences of mind resulted in her publishing on mesmerism in 1844; on phrenology, specifically phreno-mesmerism, in 1845; on all three areas – mesmerism, phrenology, and mental physiology – in 1851; and on mental physiology alone in 1868.
