John Ferriar’s Psychology, James Hogg’s Justified Sinner, and the Gay Science of Horror Writing

Abstract

Such recent works as Frederick Burwick’s Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, Jennifer Ford’s Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination, David Vallins’s Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought, John Beer’s Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley, and Joel Faflak’s Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery document well Romantic-era writers’ fascination with psychology and madness. Other recent studies on Romanticism and psychology, such as Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind and Neil Vickers’s Coleridge and the Doctors, demonstrate the Romantics’ familiarity with such topics as neuroscience, nerve theory, hypochondria, the psychology of dreams, Hartleyan associationism, and Kantian psychology, and link these topics to the Romantics’ philosophical researches into the workings of society, the construction of language, and other weighty matters. Yet, Romantic-era psychologist John Ferriar’s influential psychological works—with which the young S. T. Coleridge was familiar, as Neil Vickers has shown (“Beddoes” 74), and with which, I will suggest, James Hogg may also have been conversant—demonstrate that Romantic writers also valued psychological knowledge for its entertaining qualities.