Conclusion: Nineteenth-Century Medicine and the Genealogy of English Studies

Abstract

Although in the preceding chapter I have argued that the Pre- Raphaelite debate marks a breakdown and reformulation of the claims to authority represented by Romantic vision, the bodily spectre of overstimulated nerves and hallucinatory perceptions continues to haunt the latter part of the nineteenth century. It underlies, for example, the Decadents’ emphasis on the ‘unhealthiness’ of their own writing,¹ and is an important theme in Thomas Hardy’s poetry, as several critics have recognised.² I do not have space here to pursue these further ramifications in detail, but would like to conclude by indicating briefly how the medical ideas about morbid neurophysiological states whose influence we have traced in this study, make their way into academic literary criticism around the turn of the twentieth century. These medical concepts, I will suggest, play an important role in legitimating the nascent discipline of English as an intellectual extension of the pursuit of ‘national efficiency’ in other areas.³ The ability to discriminate between the popular writing which merely elicits morbidly overdeveloped ‘stock responses’⁴ and writing which challenges the reader to perceive something afresh becomes, for critics such as the Leavises, an exercise in mental hygiene which is indispensable for responsible citizenship in a mass democracy. In the view of I. A. Richards and the Leavises, the study of English helps purge the mind from the hallucinations engendered by mass culture, whose illusions were held responsible for causing the Great War.⁵