Visiting Dickens at his home in Doughty Street in 1839, George Henry Lewes was dismayed to find no major philosophical, literary or scientific texts in the author's library.To Lewes, Dickens appeared mystifyingly indifferent to the latest scientific discoveries and their multiple implications for the writing of fiction, and he was also consistently unhelpful in assisting Lewes's research into the psychology of literary production. Despite a new 'seriousness which […] became more and more prominent in his conversation and his writings', the author nevertheless 'remained completely outside philosophy, science, and the higher literature'. 1 Lewes's damning verdict quickly became part of the critical consensus and Dickens was long considered ignorant of, unresponsive to, or even antagonistic towards the scientific endeavours, findings and insights of his era. This issue of 19 participates in the lively revision of Lewes's account, with contributors exploring Dickens's myriad engagements with scientific thought of many varieties. As this issue seeks to show, at the heart of Dickens's response to scientific ideas was his cherished ideal that culture should show 'the romantic side of familiar things', illuminating the wonder, even magic, of everyday phenomena for people of all classes, and affectively uniting them by quenching a shared thirst for imaginative succour. 2 The essays here also collectively demonstrate the value of holding open our definition of Victorian science, so that it can encompass, as it did so capaciously in the nineteenth century, diverse fields including medicine, psychology and other mental sciences, social science, forensics, evolutionary thought, palaeontology, ecology, and contested practices and bodies of knowledge, such as mesmerism. Science by the Book? Forms of EngagementIn 1955, Gordon S. Haight expressed the representative view that Dickens was 'indifferent or hostile to the scientific developments of his age' and that his novels sadly failed to engage with the 'new theories that revolutionized man's view of himself and his universe in the nineteenth century'. 3 However, the many scientific texts found on Dickens's bookshelves at Gad's Hill -including Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon's

No abstract

No abstract

In this stimulating article, Kay Young explores the identity, self-awareness and psychic life of Esther Summerson in Dickens's Bleak House (1853) via Attachment Theory. For Young, Esther's guilt, shame and crises of identity flow from the wound of having had no mother. Esther suffers a traumatising upbringing at the hands of her unloving godmother who provides her with only scanty, censoring descriptions of her origins. Young argues that Esther's character articulates and endures the painful "psychic experience of feeling unattached" (237), of having forgone the primary, ideally loving attachment that secures the growth of an assured selfhood. With no introjected mother to answer the primary question, 'Who am I?' Esther confronts a double mystery: the identity of her lost mother and the less resolvable enigma of her unknown and unknowable self. With its underpinnings in nineteenth-century neurophysiology, Freudian psychoanalysis foregrounds the biological and orientates psychological life around the physical drives. However, Freud also explored the psyche in terms of objects, incorporation and introjection, thus facilitating the development of overlapping theories of object relations, attachment and relationality. According to these approaches, which have largely supplanted Freud's drive model, our earliest attachments form the basis of mental life via a complex, ongoing intra-psychic mediation between the external and internal. Consequently, Attachment Theory's primary exponents-John Bowlby, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott-shifted attention from father-son rivalry to (equally fraught) mother-infant attachment, while emphasising intersubjectivity, affect and lived experience. Young opens with Freud's foundational 1917 paper "Mourning and Melancholia". Here, Freud argues that loss can instigate "a fundamental cleavage" (237) within the self with the ego, which is identified with the lost loved one, becoming a "forsaken object." Young argues that Esther has undergone such a bifurcation and is "mourning for her self" (238). Bereaved infants, such as Esther, are haunted by an "absent memory" (239) and Young describes how Esther experiences a different, unthinking way of knowing her lost mother. If Esther famously, selfdeprecatingly and, perhaps, disingenuously opens her narrative with "I know I am not clever," Young posits that "what Esther knows is beyond clever-remarkably, she knows what she has not known" (246). Thus, although urged to forget, Esther intuitively recognises Lady Dedlock as her mother. Young analyses Esther's relationship with her godmother, deploying the psychotherapeutic notion of 'malattunement', by which the primary caregiver is unable, or unwilling, to provide the infant with a securing love. With her evangelicalism, which only envisages Esther's origins as shameful, Esther's godmother holds her "in a state of detachment, not just to herself as the 'mother' figure, but to Esther's self as a person" (241). Young cites the analyst Robert Stolorow, who argues that, without the "affect-integrati...

No abstract