Abstract
Carl Westphal’s classic paper on ‘Agoraphobia’ of 1871 laid the foundations for the rapid development of work on phobias, fears and obsessions which sprang up in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This essay explores the intersection of medical and literary discourses of pathological fear as they emerged in the latter half of the century, looking particularly at the ways in which psychiatry turned to literature for case studies of phobia and obsession. I consider the work on fear of, amongst others, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and the Italian Angelo Mosso, before focusing on the role played by George Borrow’s neglected work, Lavengro (1851) in the development of late nineteenth-century psychiatric models of fear.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme ERC Grant Agreement number 340121.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
J. E. D. Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity , trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 200, 201.
- 2.
G. Stanley Hall , “A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear,” American Journal of Psychology 25 (1914): 171–72.
- 3.
David Trotter, “The Invention of Agoraphobia,” in The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 29. The essay offers an excellent reading of Daniel Deronda in the light of emerging theories of agoraphobia.
- 4.
Laboratory-based work in psychology is usually traced back to Wilhelm Wundt’s opening of the Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig in 1879.
- 5.
G. Stanley Hall , “A Study of Fears,” American Journal of Psychology 8, no. 2 (1897): 150.
- 6.
Hall, “Fears,” 232.
- 7.
Charles Dickens , Great Expectations, ed. C. Mitchell, intro. David Trotter (1861; London: Penguin, 1996), 64, 401.
- 8.
Hall, “Fears,” 177.
- 9.
Hall, “Fears,” 227.
- 10.
See Review, “‘La Neurasthénie, Maladie de Beard,’ par Dr Fernand Levillain”, Journal of Mental Science 37 (1891): 589. George Beard first used the term neurasthenia, to suggest a form of nervous exhaustion, brought on by the pressures of modern life, in 1869. His theories were developed in Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (1880) and American Nervousness (1881).
- 11.
Hall, who was at this time President of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, arranged for Freud and Jung to give a series of lectures at the University in 1909.
- 12.
Hall, “Synthetic Genetic Study,” 367, 167.
- 13.
Hall, “Synthetic Genetic Study,” 163.
- 14.
Hall, “Synthetic Genetic Study,” 151.
- 15.
Hall, “Synthetic Genetic Study,” 164.
- 16.
Hall, “Synthetic Genetic Study,” 163.
- 17.
Dickens, Great Expectations, 6, 15.
- 18.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; London: Penguin, 1979), 202–3.
- 19.
Hall, “Fears,” 193.
- 20.
Hall, “Fears,” 155, 211.
- 21.
Hall, “Fears,” 224.
- 22.
Hall, “Fears,” 228.
- 23.
Hall, “Fears,” 223.
- 24.
The song, which figures in Jane Eyre, is discussed in the chapter on “Lies and Imagination” in my book, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine , 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The book also has a chapter on ‘Fears, Phantasms, and Night Terrors’, to which this article is a form of sequel.
- 25.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), Chap. 12; “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 2 (1877): 285–94. Carl Westphal published his paper ‘Die Agoraphobie’ in the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten in 1871. He also published a highly influential paper on obsessive mental states, ‘Ueber Zwangsvorstellungen’ in the Berlin Klinic Wochenschriht in 1877. See Terry J. Knapp and Michael T. Schumacher, eds., Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie” (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988). Wilhelm Wundt founded one of the first psychological laboratories in 1875 (the same year that William James founded one at Harvard). Angelo Mosso was a follower of Darwin, and also one of the leading experimental physiologists in Italy.
- 26.
Angelo Mosso , Fear, trans. E. Lough and F. Kiesow (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 133.
- 27.
Mosso, Fear, 226.
- 28.
A drawing of the balance was included in Fear, but a group of Italian scientists have recently rediscovered Mosso’s original manuscripts, occasioning renewed interest in his work, with the balance being acclaimed as a forerunner to the MRI scan. See S. Sandrone et al., “Weighing Brain Activity with the Balance: Angelo Mosso ’s Original Manuscripts Come to Light”, Brain 137, no. 2 (2014): 621–33.
- 29.
Mosso, Fear, 96, 226–27.
- 30.
Angelo Mosso , La Fatica (1891), Fatigue, trans. Margaret Drummond and W. B. Drummond (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1904).
- 31.
Anon, “What do I Fear?” The Cosmopolitan 26, no. 2 (December 1898): 217–21.
- 32.
Elizabeth and Ben wrote under a joint pseudonym, Ellis Ethelmer. There is some dispute as to the attribution of individual articles. The Wellesley Index attributes this article solely to Ben, but given its content, which touches on patterns of female upbringing, it seems unlikely that it would have been written without input from Elizabeth. For this reason I have chosen to refer to the author as she.
- 33.
Ellis Ethelmer, “Fear as an Ethic Force,” Westminster Review 151, no. 3 (March 1899): 301–2. Elmy does not refer to Hall by name, but to a study by ‘an observant sociologist’ of children’s fears. There are direct quotations from Hall’s article, but no footnote.
- 34.
Elmy, “Ethic Force,” 306, 309.
- 35.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; London: Penguin, 1996), 8.
- 36.
Isaac Watts , Divine and Moral Songs for Children (London: Routledge, 1865). Song XXIII. Although originally published in the eighteenth century, the songs were endlessly reprinted for children in the nineteenth century. This song is a response to Proverbs 30: 17: ‘The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it’ (King James Bible).
- 37.
Elmy, “Ethic Force,” 301.
- 38.
Joyce published Portrait in 1916, three years before the publication of Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ which explores Hoffmann’s tale, ‘The Sandman’, in which the child Nathaniel is terrified by the Sandman, or Dr Coppelius, who attempts to thrust red hot coals in his eyes. Freud’s commentary focuses on the ‘substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasises’. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works: Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, vol. 17 (1919; London: Vintage, 2001), 231.
- 39.
Westphal, Die Agoraphobie, 73.
- 40.
W. Julius Mickle , “Presidential Address delivered at the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, held in London, 23rd and 24th July, 1896,” Journal of Mental Science 42 (1896): 692.
- 41.
Mickle, “Presidential Address,” 693.
- 42.
Mickle, “Presidential Address,” 700.
- 43.
Mickle, “Presidential Address,” 700.
- 44.
Mickle, “Presidential Address,” 732. Mickle devotes eleven pages to Borrow’s novel. W. Julius Mickle was originally brought up in Canada, but moved to England in the 1860s after his initial medical training. He became medical superintendent at the Grove Hall Asylum, Bow, and lectured on mental physiology and mental disease at the Middlesex and University College Hospitals (Munk’s Roll of Physicians, http://munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk/Biography/Details/3083). He notes in his article that members of his family knew Borrow, and ‘In my youth a projected interview with him on a subject of mutual interest was not carried out’ (p. 733). The hint is tantalising, particularly since there is a marked similarity between his own description of Borrow as a ‘solitary recluse’ and the Munk’s Roll depiction of Mickle as ‘a reserved and solitary figure’. Given the precision with which he signs himself, W. Julius Mickle , it is probable that he was a descendant of the Scottish poet William Julius Mickle (1734/5–1788), a factor which could have reinforced his interest in, and identification with, Borrow.
- 45.
George Borrow , The Romany Rye: A Sequel to Lavengro , ed. W. I. Knapp (1857; London: John Murray, 1914), Appendix; Chap. 1, 302. Clive Wilkins-Jones, in his reading of one of the episodes in the novel, has suggested that Burrow suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. He has not, however, placed the text in the context of nineteenth-century medicine and psychology. “‘Is it possible that I am under the roof of an author?’: Borrow’s treatment of the creative sensibility in Lavengro ,” George Borrow Bulletin 34 (2007), 62–71. Deborah Epstein Nord has recently offered an excellent reading of Lavengro in Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), but does not address the psychological dimensions of the novel.
- 46.
George Borrow , Lavengro : The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest, ed. W. I. Knapp (1851: London: John Murray, 1908), 7. Further references will be given in the text. The narrator is never directly named; the title of the book comes rather from a title bestowed on him by the Gypsies, ‘Lavengro ’ meaning ‘word master’ in Romany.
- 47.
Borrow, Romany Rye, Appendix.
- 48.
Mickle, “Presidential Address,” 733.
- 49.
For clarity, I give the novel page reference in the text, and the Mickle reference in the note. Mickle, 736.
- 50.
Mickle, 738.
- 51.
Mickle, 740.
- 52.
Mickle, 743.
- 53.
Mickle, 744.
- 54.
Mickle, 697.
- 55.
Mickle, 697.
- 56.
Borrow, Romany Rye, Appendix; Chap. 9, 370.
- 57.
According to Borrow’s friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Borrow himself suffered from the impulse to touch objects, see Old Familiar Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), 61–62.
- 58.
Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 348–51.
- 59.
Borrow was close friends at this period with the physician poet, Thomas Gordon Hake, who wrote a review of Lavengro , which, whilst referring to the representation of the habit of touching, did not suggest Borrow was drawing on explicit medical knowledge. Thomas Gordon Hake, “Borrow and Lavengro ,” New Monthly Magazine, 91 (April 1851): 455–61.
- 60.
See Theodule Ribot who discusses the theories of Wilhelm Griesinger in “The Morbid States of Attention,” The Open Court 3 (1889): 1946, and The Diseases of the Will, trans. Merwin-Marie Snell (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1896), 46.
- 61.
P. J. Kowalewsky, “Folie du Doute,” Journal of Mental Science 33 (1887): 213. His name appears in various spellings, but I have adopted this one for consistency.
- 62.
W. E. Aytoun, “Lavengro ,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 69 (March 1851): 335.
- 63.
Hake, “Borrow and Lavengro ,” 456–57.
- 64.
See W. I. Knapp, Life, Writings and Correspondence of George Borrow , 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1899), 2: 14.
- 65.
Kowalewsky, “Folie du Doute,” 210.
- 66.
‘Autophobe’, “Fear in Many Forms: Nerve Specialists Recognize a Thousand and One Curious ‘Phobias ,’” New York Times, August 29, 1910, 6.
- 67.
In addition to Knapp’s Life and editions, Clement Shorter produced George Borrow and His Circle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913). Leslie Stephen was a champion of Borrow’s work, and 1924 saw the publication of Borrow: Selections with Essays by Leslie Stephen and George Saintsbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press). For the influence of Borrow on Joyce see Angus Fraser, “Borrow as a Source for James Joyce, and for Vita Sackville West and Violet Trefusis,” George Borrow Bulletin 14 (1997): 50–54.
- 68.
Helen Southworth, “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Wild England’: George Borrow , Autoethnography and Between the Acts,” Studies in the Novel 39 (2007): 197.
- 69.
Virginia Woolf, Essays III (1988), 13–20, cited in Gillian Fraser, “An Annotated Checklist of References to Borrow in Virginia Woolf’s Writings,” George Borrow Bulletin 4 (1992): 15.
- 70.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety ,” in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 15 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), Part III, Chap. 25, 393. Freud had first written on phobias in his 1895 paper, ‘Obsessions and Phobias ’ in which he had distinguished sharply between obsessions and phobias . His first major study of a case of phobia was that of the child, Little Hans (1909).
Bibliography
Primary
Autophobe. “Fear in Many Forms: Nerve Specialists Recognize a Thousand and One Curious ‘Phobias’.” New York Times, August 29, 1910.
Aytoun, W. E. “Lavengro.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 69 (March 1851): 322–37.
Borrow, George. Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest. Edited by W. I. Knapp. 1851. London: John Murray, 1908.
———. The Romany Rye: A Sequel to Lavengro. Edited by W. I. Knapp. 1857. London: John Murray, 1914.
Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray, 1872.
———. “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 2 (1877): 285–94.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Edited by C. Mitchell. Introduction by David Trotter. London: Penguin, 1996.
Editorial. “What do I Fear?” The Cosmopolitan 26, no. 2 (December 1898): 217–21.
Esquirol, J. E. D. Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity. Translated by E. K. Hunt. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845.
Ethelmer, Ellis. “Fear as an Ethic Force.” Westminster Review 151, no. 3 (1899): 300–9.
Freud, Sigmund. “Anxiety.” In Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, translated and edited by James Strachey. Vol. 15, 398–99. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
———. “The Uncanny.” In An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud. Vol. 17. London: Vintage, 2001.
Gordon Hake, Thomas. “Borrow and Lavengro.” New Monthly Magazine, 91 (April 1851): 455–61.
Hall, G. Stanley. “A Study of Fears.” American Journal of Psychology 8, no. 2 (1897): 147–249.
———. “A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear.” American Journal of Psychology 25, no. 2 (1914): 149–200.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin, 1996.
Knapp, W. I., ed. Life, Writings and Correspondence of George Borrow. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1899.
Kowalewsky, P. J. “Folie du Doute.” Journal of Mental Science 33 (1887): 209–18.
Levillain, Fernand. “La Neurasthénie, Maladie de Beard.” Journal of Mental Science 37 (1891): 587–90.
Mickle, W. Julius. “Presidential Address Delivered at the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, held in London, 23rd and 24th July, 1896.” Journal of Mental Science 42 (1896): 691–744.
Mosso, Angelo. Fatigue. Translated by Margaret Drummond and W. B. Drummond. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891.
———. Fear. Translated by E. Lough and F. Kiesow. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896.
Ribot, Theodule. “The Morbid States of Attention.” The Open Court 3 (1889): 1944–1948.
———. The Diseases of the Will. Translated by Merwin-Marie Snell. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1896.
Watts-Dunton, Theodore. Old Familiar Friends. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916.
Watts, Isaac. Divine and Moral Songs for Children. London: Routledge, 1865.
Secondary
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1979.
Fraser, Angus. “Borrow as a Source for James Joyce, and for Vita Sackville West and Violet Trefusis.” George Borrow Bulletin 14 (1997): 50–54.
Fraser, Gillian. “An Annotated Checklist of References to Borrow in Virginia Woolf’s Writings.” George Borrow Bulletin 4 (1992): 13–17.
Knapp, Terry J., and Michael T. Schumacher, eds. Westphal’s “Die Agoraphobie.” Lanham: University Press of America, 1988.
Sandrone, S. “Weighing Brain Activity with the Balance: Angelo Mosso’s Original Manuscripts Come to Light.” Brain 137, no. 2 (2014): 621–33.
Shuttleworth, Sally. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Southworth, Helen. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Wild England’: George Borrow, Autoethnography and Between the Acts.” Studies in the Novel 39, no. 2 (2007): 196–217.
Trotter, David. “The Invention of Agoraphobia.” In The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film, 29–39. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Wilkins-Jones, Clive. “‘Is it Possible that I am Under the Roof of an Author?’: Borrow’s Treatment of the Creative Sensibility in Lavengro.” George Borrow Bulletin 34 (2007): 62–71.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shuttleworth, S. (2018). Fear, Phobia and the Victorian Psyche. In: McCann, D., McKechnie-Mason, C. (eds) Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55948-7_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55948-7_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55947-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-55948-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)