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Victorian Empiricism

Peter Garratt

Empiricism, one of Raymond William's keywords, circulates in much contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr Johnson, it should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort to restore historical depth to the term, this book examines epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Ruskin, Alexander Bain, G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot, developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century scientific culture occurred at a time when empiricism itself was critically dismantling any such naive representationalism.

Dr. Garratt argues that by the 1860s empiricism was both a dominant cultural language and a reflexive epistemic theory, producing a model of contingent self hood conceived simultaneously as the route towards knowledge and its obstacle. For this reason, Victorian empiricism predicated its search for knowledge on a profound instability, one embodied within the textual language through which it sought its articulation. By examining familiar works, such as Ruskin's Modern Painters and George Eliot's fiction, alongside the voluminous psychological and philosophical prose of Bain, Lewes, and Spencer, he illustrates, using detailed examples, how the imperatives of empiricist thought shaped the aesthetic of realism, as well as nineteenth-century views towards perception, human embodiment, and relativism. In all cases, their works give shape to empiricism's skeptical impulse. In Ruskin, for example, the narrative journey into knowledge is one of haphazard progress and fraught autobiographical engagement; in Bain's psychology it forms a story of precarious accumulation; in Lewes and Spencer, sprawling form expresses the proliferating potential of knowledge itself.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 244 •

978-1-61147-490-9 • Hardback • August 2010 • $101.00 • (£78.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / General, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Philosophy / Criticism, Philosophy / Epistemology

Victorian Empiricism

Hardback

Summary

Empiricism, one of Raymond William's keywords, circulates in much contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr Johnson, it should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort to restore historical depth to the term, this book examines epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Ruskin, Alexander Bain, G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot, developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century scientific culture occurred at a time when empiricism itself was critically dismantling any such naive representationalism.

Dr. Garratt argues that by the 1860s empiricism was both a dominant cultural language and a reflexive epistemic theory, producing a model of contingent self hood conceived simultaneously as the route towards knowledge and its obstacle. For this reason, Victorian empiricism predicated its search for knowledge on a profound instability, one embodied within the textual language through which it sought its articulation. By examining familiar works, such as Ruskin's Modern Painters and George Eliot's fiction, alongside the voluminous psychological and philosophical prose of Bain, Lewes, and Spencer, he illustrates, using detailed examples, how the imperatives of empiricist thought shaped the aesthetic of realism, as well as nineteenth-century views towards perception, human embodiment, and relativism. In all cases, their works give shape to empiricism's skeptical impulse. In Ruskin, for example, the narrative journey into knowledge is one of haphazard progress and fraught autobiographical engagement; in Bain's psychology it forms a story of precarious accumulation; in Lewes and Spencer, sprawling form expresses the proliferating potential of knowledge itself.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 244 •

978-1-61147-490-9 • Hardback • August 2010 • $101.00 • (£78.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / General, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Philosophy / Criticism, Philosophy / Epistemology

Author

Peter Garratt is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. He holds degrees from Durham University and the University of Edinburgh, and has published several articles on Victorian literature and culture exploring interactions between literary form and intellectual history.

Victorian Empiricism is his first book.

Reviews

This is...an outstanding and thoroughgoing work of intellectual recuperation, and one which corrects many prevailing assumptions. In sum, Victorian Empiricism is a study which will be of interest to all concerned with the complex map of Victorian thought.
— Metascience

In Victorian Empiricism, Peter Garratt surveys mid-Victorian literature for moments when writers engage with psychologists in order to ask 'what it means to know, and to strive for knowledge from an always-limited consciousness, and to be situated yet aspire to see more reality than one perspective allows, and to experience the not knowing' (21). ... Garratt weaves readings of exemplary moments in Middlemarch into his discussion of Victorian psychologists in a way that disperses questions of influence within an attractive contextual tissue that is nonetheless strangely impervious to questions about specific ways and means. . . . Garratt is attentive to the Spinoza-esque elements of Eliot's fiction as well as similar moments in the psychological writers that form the core of his study.
— The Victorian Web

Victorian Empiricism

Peter Garratt

Victorian Empiricism

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