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It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The book argues that this paradox emerges as a result (and a cause) of changes to how instinct operates as a mechanism for governmentality as it helps gloss over contradictions in British liberalism that had been made palpable as writers around the turn of the twentieth century grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. As a result of these changes, instinct takes on new appeal to elite European men who identify instinct as both an agent of civilizational “progress” and a force that offers (in contradistinction to the lack associated with desire) a plenitude that can hold the alienation of self-consciousness at bay. Without wholly or consistently unseating the idea that instinct marked the proper province of women, workers and/or savages, this shift in instinct’s appeal to civilized European men nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book makes this argument by examining materials such as legal and parliamentary papers about the regulation of obscenity, pornographic fiction, ethnological monographs about Aboriginal Australians, treatises on political economy, and suffragette memoirs alongside scientific texts in evolutionary theory, psychology, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.

During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice drawing persistent attention to what they called “fictitious capital.” In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, being replaced by notions of fickle investor psychology and mental equilibrium encapsulated in the fascinating metaphor of “psychic economy.“ In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, this book illuminates the ways that Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction associated with the growth of periodical publication in the nineteenth century but also the school subject we now know as “English.” Examining a set of Dickens's most popular novels from The Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend, the book shows how his serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning and reading founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens's serial novels consistently lead readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience, thus channeling their personal memories of Dickens's “unforgettable” scenes and characters into a public reception reaching across social classes. Dickens's celebrity authorship represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth-century educational reforms in Britain and the United States consolidated Dickens's heterogeneous constituency of readers into the “mass” populations served by national and state school systems; however, Dickens's beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education. The book traces how the reading of serial fiction emerged as a widespread practice and a new medium of modern mass culture.