Correspondence

Abstract

“I was born in the century of pain,” the American philosopher and scholar Charles S. Peirce [1839–1914] wrote toward the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the violent events of the twentieth century, the periodic wars and famines that swept through Europe in the early modern period, or the fear and defenselessness of medieval life, the nineteenth century seemed rather a monotonous period marked by the sacrosanct and tedious principles of bourgeois morals. In light of the significant transformations of the previous century, we could consider the Victorian era as a time suited to the order and progress that positivism turned into a political proclamation, one even fit for exportation to the colonies. Economic development, trade, and new social relations based on consumption brought about large-scale events for the masses and universal exhibitions. The novel without heroes, the new form of narrative, extended the passions to the landowners of Jane Austen’s novels, the shady citizens in the impersonal apartments of Tolstoy’s Russia, the morally decadent beaus depicted in the books of the Italian Alexandro Manzoni, the mediocre soldiers and proprietors of Chekhov’s stories, and the inhabitants of the stifling Vetusta, the imaginary and oppressive city Leopoldo Alas Clarín depicted in his novel La Regenta. And yet, in the nineteenth century pain took on a leading role within the social, political, and scientific arenas as never before. Physical anguish and psychological suffering became progressively more central both in private life and the public sphere.

How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself! ¹