Abstract
Long before Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in German in 1899,1 the consolidating field of psychiatry struggled with the interpretation of daydreams. In particular, an extreme form of introspection called ‘reverie’ provoked divided views in early Victorian Britain. Numerous mid-nineteenth-century mental theorists used this term to denote an undirected, trancelike cognitive mode, developing the notion from the associationist tradition initiated by Locke, who had described ‘Reverie’ as ‘When Ideas float in our mind, without any reflection or regard of the Understanding’.2 Reverie’s nineteenth-century scientific currency paralleled its contemporary literary prominence as a kind of powerful interiority, spread by such Romantic works as Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782) and Wollstone craft’s Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).3 But while autobiographical and imaginative writers often presented intense reverie as a generative experience of ontological pleasure and visionary inspiration, medical authors portrayed the condition as potentially harmful. In an age favouring self-control over sensibility, early Victorian psychology persistently regarded the unstructured, unguided mind with suspicion. A subject lost in deep daydreaming or ‘waking dreams’ was considered to reside on the borderline of so-called normality, at times drifting into derangement. Indulgence in reverie was therefore deemed unsafe behaviour which risked the slippage into solipsism and immorality, if not outright insanity.
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Notes
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 227.
On Wollstonecraft’s revision of Rousseauvian reverie, see Lawrence R. Kennard, ‘Reveries of Reality: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Poetics of Sensibility’, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, ed. Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), pp. 55–68
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, conected 3rd edn., 4 vols (London: Johnson, 1801), I, p. 285.
See OED ‘passion’ II.6.a, II.6.b. See also J. G. Millingen, Mind and Matter, Illustrated by Considerations on Hereditary Insanity, and the Influence of Temperament in the Development of the Passions (London: Hurst, 1847)
Rick Rylance’s gloss on Millingen’s use of the term in Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 118.
For enthusiastic, cynical, and disapproving contemporary responses to the ‘mesmeric sleep’ and the mid-century electrobiology mania, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 281ff.
Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology (London: Longman, 1852), p. 31.
Robert MacNish, The Philosophy of Sleep, rev. edn. (Hartford: Andrus, [1834]), p. 46.
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Ideologies of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 163–5.
In 1822 and 1835, Prichard related reverie to imagination and to manic ‘ecstasis’, significantly discussing both senses of reverie in the context of lunacy. See J. C. Prichard, A Treatise on Diseases of the Nervous System. Part the First: Comprising Convulsive and Maniacal Affections (London: Underwood, 1822), pp. 125
J. C. Prichard, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (London: Sherwood, 1835), pp. 454
Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 96–7
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman, 1974, introd. and notes Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 681.
Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 46.
On moral management as a cornerstone of Victorian psychiatry, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), p. 29.
Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 227–8.
See, for example, Laura Otis, ‘Introduction’, Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Otis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. xvii–xxviii
Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 59.
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 13.
Ibid., pp. 45–6. Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond Bernex (Paris: Bordas, 1985), pp. 96–8.
See, for instance, portrayals of lighter forms of reverie as meditative thought and nostalgic memory in Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, ed. Jennifer Foster (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), pp. 68
George Combe, Elements of Phrenology, enl. 4th edn. (Edinburgh: MacLachlan, 1836), pp. 56–7.
Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (London: Longman, 1841), p. 342.
Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 28.
See ‘On the Distinction between Active Thought and Reverie’ in [Edward Bulwer] Lytton, Caxtoniana: On Life, Literature, and Manners, Knebworth edn. (London: Routledge, 1875), pp. 126–34
[Edward Bulwer] Lytton, A Strange Story, Knebworth ed. (London: Routledge, 1897), pp. 102
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten, 1984, introd. and notes Tim Dolin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56–7
Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria De Profundis, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Frederick Burwick, vol. 15 (London: Pickering, 2003), p. 192.
In the fading children’s words, they, like the narrative’s reverie, are ‘nothing; less than nothing, and dreams’. Charles Lamb, The Essays of Elia, introd. Augustine Birrell (London: Dent; New York: Scribner’s, 1900), p. 207.
Mordecai C. Cooke, The Seven Sisters of Sleep, Fwd. Richard Evans Schultes and Michael R. Aldrich (Lincoln, MA: Quarterman, 1989), pp. 15 ff.
Althea Hayter’s study of opium and the Romantic imagination reflects the persistence of linguistic and ideological associations between opium and reverie. See Althea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination: Addiction and Creativity in De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire and Others, rev. edn. (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1988), pp. 227ff.
Natalie Ford, ‘Beyond Reverie: De Quincey’s Range of Reveries’, The Cambridge Quarterly 36.3 (2007): pp. 229–49.
I use ‘Romantic materialism’ in a more literary sense than Janis McLarren Caldwell, who extends Gillian Beer’s phrase, as elaborated by George Levine, to identify a ‘dialectic hermeneutic’ in pre-Darwinian scientific and imaginative texts. Janis McLanen Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 46 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–2.
Eliot’s established interest in nineteenth-century psychology seems to have extended to the ambiguous state of partial consciousness termed reverie. See, for instance, Mrs Transome’s distraught reveries in George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical (1867), ed. with introd. Lynda Mugglestone (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 22–6
George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1859–60), pp. 366–8
J. Crichton Brown, ‘Psychical Diseases of Early Life’, Asylum Journal of Mental Science 6 (1860), pp. 284–320
Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst with introd. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp. 45
See Laura Marcus, ‘Staging the “Private Theatre”: Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie’, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, Fwd. Lyn Pykett (Basingstoke: Palgrave — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 136–49
See Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de la rêverie, 3rd edn. (Paris: PUF, 1965).
W. R. Bion, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Aronson, 1967 [i.e. 1977]), p. 116.
See, for example, Thomas H. Ogden, Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (London: Aronson, 1997), pp. 9
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Ford, N.M. (2010). The Interpretation of Daydreams: Reverie as Site of Conflict in Early Victorian Psychology. In: Birch, D., Llewellyn, M. (eds) Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277212_6
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