ABSTRACT
John Owen King takes up Tocqueville's observation anew in his book The Iron of Melancholy, 2 tracing the way melancholy figured in the Puritan conversion experience and then became a component of Victorian neurosis. Along the way, he pays special attention to such figures as John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, the elder Henry James, William James, Josiah Royce, and James Jackson Putnam. More is involved: King connects conversion with work and works, and both of these with Max Weber and the "iron cage" of industrial civilization. It is all linked together by the elder James reading Jonathan Edwards, Max Weber being inspired in his writing of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by William James, and all four men being classic depressives.
