Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural
Also by Gavin Budge CHARLOTTE M YONGE: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel ROMANTIC EMPIRICISM: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense 1780 1830 (editor)
Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789 1852 Gavin Budge Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Gavin Budge 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-23846-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-31564-2 ISBN 978-1-137-28431-0 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137284310 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
To my wife Sue, the inspiration for this book
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Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 Radcliffe and the Spectral Scene of Reading 27 2 Erasmus Darwin and Wordsworth s Poetics 48 3 Indigestion and Coleridge s Medical Imagination 77 4 Irritability and the Politics of Deerbrook 118 5 Slavery and Mass Society in Uncle Tom s Cabin 147 6 The Hallucination of the Real: Pre- Raphaelite Vision, Democracy and Masculinity 171 Conclusion: Nineteenth- Century Medicine and the Genealogy of English Studies 199 Notes 206 Bibliography 267 Index 287 vii
Acknowledgements In its early stages, work on the project that became this book took place during periods of research leave in 2000 and 2004 granted by the School of English, University of Central England. Completion of the book was made possible by research leave in 2010 supported by colleagues in the English Subject Group of the University of Hertfordshire s School of Humanities, to whom I am very grateful. I would like to express my thanks to Professor Tim Fulford, for his support over the years, and for commenting on drafts of much of the material in this book. Professors David L. Clark and Noel Jackson also provided useful comments at an early stage in the project s development. The reports supplied by the anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan were exemplary in their attention to detail, and helped substantially to improve the book. I am, of course, solely responsible for any remaining errors and shortcomings. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as Indigestion and Imagination in Coleridge s Critical Thought in my 2007 essay collection, Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780 1830, 141 81, and is included by permission of Bucknell University Press. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published as Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth: Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants in the British Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies 30:2 (2007) 279 308, and is printed here by permission of Wiley- Blackwell. A draft of Chapter 5 was published as Uncle-Tommery : Slavery and Romantic Medicine in Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Beecher Stowe in Liberating Medicine, 1720 1835 ed Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark, (2009) 41 53, and appears by permission of Pickering and Chatto. Some material in the Introduction was previously published under a Creative Commons Licence as part of my essay The Hero as Seer: Character, Perception and Cultural Health in Carlyle in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, no. 52 (2008). The cover image, A man suffering from indigestion, etching by George Cruikshank after Alfred Crowquill (1835) is reproduced by permission of the Wellcome Library, London. viii