ABSTRACT
The movement of Victorian fiction has most often been taken as an aspiration towards realism, and as long as the familiar qualifications are offered and the usual provisos attached, there can be no quarrel with the general assessment. The energy of nineteenth-century psychology, together with its instability, provided a stimulus to the imagination but a burden for the moral sense. In the twentieth century, pictures of the mind have been given sharp outlines; although contemporary psychology can claim to understand more, it certainly imagines less. In taking the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot as the author subject, the author has confronted a diversity as provoking as any they faced. The phrenological skull, the mesmeric fluid, the mechanical equivalent of consciousness - these were images powerful enough to fascinate but too weak to sustain a working science.
