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Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. In ‘The Most Dreadful Visitation’, Valerie Pedlar redresses the balance. This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson’s Maud, Wilkie Collins’s Basil and Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings – and fears – of mental degeneracy.
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Keywords
- Charles Dickens
- clinical psychology
- Crime & mystery
- Dracula
- Fiction & related items
- Gekte
- Historical mysteries
- insanity
- Madness
- Male
- Mannen
- Masculinity
- medicine
- Other branches of medicine
- Renfield
- thema EDItEUR::F Fiction and Related items::FF Crime and mystery fiction::FFH Historical crime and mysteries
- thema EDItEUR::M Medicine and Nursing::MK Medical specialties, branches of medicine::MKM Clinical psychology
- Victoriaans
- victorian
Links
DOI: 10.5949/upo9781846314186Editions