Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

This book explores a common concern among Victorian writers about the power of one person thinking about another.

Adela Pinch (Author)

9781107650763, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 November 2013

262 pages
22.6 x 15 x 1.8 cm, 0.39 kg

'The book's first surprise is to make a seemingly broad subject strikingly specific. Pinch's dazzling readings of a variety of literary forms ensure we will envision 'a Victorian world crowded with extra personal thought-energy' for a long time to come.' Debra Gettelman, The Review of English Studies

Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.

Introduction: love thinking
1. Thinking as action: James Frederick Ferrier's Philosophy of Consciousness
2. Foam, aura, or melody: theorizing mental force in Victorian Britain
3. Thinking in the second person in nineteenth-century poetry
4. Thinking and knowing in Patmore and Meredith
5. Daniel Deronda and the omnipotence of thought
Conclusion: the ethics of belief and the poetics of thinking about another person.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS]