@article{gibson_grener_goodenough_bailey_2022, title={The Digital Dickens Notes Project}, volume={49}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.49.2022.0210}, DOI={10.5325/victinstj.49.2022.0210}, abstractNote={The Digital Dickens Notes Project (DDNP) is a digital initiative that seeks to transcribe, interpret, and explore the significance of the working notes Charles Dickens kept for most of his novels.1 Our online platform (dickensnotes.com) presents color transcriptions that display Dickens’s use of space, ink colors, and nontextual markings to capture his intricate use of these pages over the course of the many weeks or months he planned, composed, and published his novels serially. Pairing these transcriptions with comprehensive editorial annotations and critical introductions, the DDNP aims to shed new light on the temporal dynamics of these working notes as fascinating records of serial composition, and in the process to open new avenues and methodologies for analyzing Dickens’s works.Scholars have long noticed and made critical use of these notes. The note for the first installment of David Copperfield (1849–50) is presented in John Forster’s 1872 biography of Dickens, and the working notes are a key pillar of John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson’s study Dickens at Work (1957). However, their significance has been underappreciated, we believe, due to the difficulty in capturing their complex and dynamic relationship to Dickens’s compositional practices. While the materiality of the working notes brings this relationship into view more clearly, it has been accessible only in an archival setting. Harry Stone’s 1987 scholarly edition of the working notes provided complete text transcriptions alongside black-and-white facsimiles, and these transcriptions have subsequently been reproduced as appendices in popular trade editions of the novels. But, as Nicola Bradbury acknowledges as editor of the Penguin Bleak House, such black-and-white linear transcriptions have significant limitations: “No attempt has been made here to indicate the physical appearance of the notes with precision: only a photographic reproduction could do that.”2 The DDNP’s images of the working notes aim to make some of their material facets accessible: our images are not photographs; instead, they provide legible transcriptions of Dickens’s notes while also reproducing their color, size, and placement on the page (see figure 1). More importantly, annotations interpret these notes with reference to the manuscript, corrected proofs, and final text of their respective novels to show their important role in Dickens’s compositional practice. Dickens did not use these working notes simply to plan a given serial installment; he usually returned to the pages multiple times before, during, and after the writing of a number. He used them, among other things, to conceive, consider, question, decide, document, prompt, and remember. The DDNP aims to leverage the multidimensionality of a digital environment to make these processes accessible to readers and in turn to provide new ways of exploring the temporal dynamics of serial form.These working notes provide unique insight into both the serial composition of individual novels and the ways Dickens’s navigation of serial form developed through his career. Beginning with Dombey and Son (1846–48), Dickens kept complete sets of working notes for his novels published in monthly installments, as well as for Hard Times (1854), which was published in weekly installments in Household Words.3 In most cases, he would divide in half a single seven- by nine-inch sheet of paper (the pages clearly folded and creased) for each serial installment. On the right side of the page he indicated the installment number and chapter numbers, filled in the chapter titles, and jotted down chief events and characters, occasional quotations, and memorable details, testing out names and phrases here and there. On the left side he added “generative” notes and memoranda, including long-term plans and motifs. Here he typically poses questions about character combinations or plot details, tests out new ideas, and returns (often in a different ink) to answer his questions, frequently changing his mind. In some cases he returns to offer summaries of work already completed; in others, he records his overwriting or underwriting of chapters and moves them around. From the evidence that survives from the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)—titled but blank pages for installments never completed due to Dickens’s death—we can see that, late in his career, Dickens adopted the practice of creating a blank working note for each serial installment at the very outset of the novel’s composition.While the textual content of the working notes can be easily represented, the DDNP aims to capture and communicate spatial and temporal properties of the notes that are currently legible only in an archival setting. Dickens’s working notes are bound with his manuscripts, most of which are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s National Art Library in London.4 If Dickens’s preservation of these notes is one indication of their significance for the novelist himself, scholarly efforts to understand and interpret that significance are hindered by the simple but frustrating limitations of accessing their material richness. For example, when readers encounter the working notes as text transcriptions in a paperback’s appendix, the constraints of the small printed page obscure and distort the notes’ use of space, size, angles, colors, emphasis, and nontextual markings. Stone’s scholarly edition captures considerably more by placing transcriptions alongside black-and-white facsimile images, but can indicate differences in color only through elaborate descriptions in an introduction to each set of transcriptions. Coupled with the volume’s unwieldy size (and the fact that it is out of print), these contrivances highlight the limitations of the print format in which Stone’s edition was produced thirty-five years ago. And while the V&A’s planned digitization of Dickens’s manuscripts means that color images of the working notes will soon be more readily accessible, his handwriting is notoriously difficult to read (as the V&A’s own Deciphering Dickens project seeks to address). The DDNP’s transcriptions of the working notes therefore aim to overcome these different limitations by replicating both the placement of text as well as nontextual markings (lines, blots, erasures, underlinings, check marks). Our online platform provides easy and open access to these transcriptions, thus facilitating renewed scholarly engagement with these vital records of serial composition.5Perhaps because of Dickens’s methodological use of these pages, the notes have primarily been viewed as planning documents, described as “number plans,”6 “blueprint[s],”7 “worksheet[s],”8 and “reminders.”9 Although Stone and others acknowledge the complex temporality of the notes—the insight they provide into “Dickens in the act of creation”10—they are often framed as “clue[s] . . . to authorial intention,”11 evidence of “systematic planning,”12 or “ingredients for a particular number.”13 This inclination to interpret the notes as products of preparation, design, and planning also arises from—and subsequently reinforces—the predominant view of the trajectory of Dickens’s career, whereby the “open and improvisational”14 nature of Dickens’s earliest works develops into a commitment to coherence and a formal unity that transcends the monthly installment.15 This is the story Dickens himself told about his craft, which he first articulated in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit (written at the conclusion of the novel’s serial run): “I have endeavoured in the progress of this Tale, to resist the temptation of the current Monthly Number, and to keep a steadier eye upon the general purpose and design.”16 Given that Dickens begins to keep complete sets of working notes with his next novel, Dombey and Son, their very existence can be taken as evidence of Dickens’s growing concern for and commitment to the larger design of his novels.This predominant view of the working notes as plans or blueprints for coherent design has been reinforced by how their content has been physically seen to this point. When viewed simply as a text transcription or black-and-white facsimile, the content of the notes can understandably appear to be “ingredients” for a given number that Dickens first conceived and then incorporated into the installment. But the materiality of the notes themselves reveals far more complex temporal dynamics: a static “plan” is shown to in fact comprise multiple, temporally distinct moments in Dickens’s use of the notes before, during, and after composition. This is most evident on notes where some memoranda appear in blue ink and others in black or brown ink (a shift that can often be linked to a change in the ink used in the manuscript itself), or on notes where Dickens poses questions to himself and the replies clearly appear in a different hand or nib, indicating a return to the note at some later point. These explicit and obvious examples help us to see how almost every page of notes—even where the physical appearance might seem rather uniform—is the product of Dickens returning multiple times in the process of conceiving, composing, and editing a given number. Analysis of the manuscripts and proofs in their archival settings offers further evidence of the complex temporality of these notes, and confirms that Dickens frequently returns to notes after the completion of an installment. For example, the majority of the chapter titles of Bleak House were conceived and added at proof stage, as Dickens adds a title (sometimes with deletions or changes) in ink to the typeset installment, and then returns to the manuscript and working notes to retroactively document this decision. There are also instances where we can see an extended decision-making process in the manuscript—Dickens writing, reworking, and revising a particular name or phrase—that then results in that name or phrase being recorded, later, in the notes.Since these pages were intended and kept “for no one’s eyes but Dickens’,” the insight they provide into his creative process is at times constrained by their (il)legibility.17 While most everything in the notes can be confidently transcribed, there are certain deletions, erasures, and nontextual markings that obscure words and characters.Our transcriptions agree in almost all points with Stone’s, but there are times where we do not validate his more speculative interpretations. In such cases, our transcriptions render the deletions as they appear on the manuscript page, as nontextual markings. Our color transcriptions register obvious changes in ink (e.g., from black to blue), while other discernible changes in ink are noted in annotations. While some differences in ink weight might lead us to identify distinct temporal layers—Dickens’s engagement with the notes at different times—some may be due to changes in nib or quill; redipping the ink; variation in pressure, speed, or angle of writing; or subsequent oxidation of the pages.18 Such ambiguities may limit our identification of precise temporal relationships between notes and manuscript, but they also generate intriguing textual complications that illuminate the processual nature of both the notes and Dickens’s serial novel form.Even if it were possible to pin down precisely the relationship between the working notes and Dickens’s published installments, our project is motivated by the belief that the value of the notes is not in their ability to provide a definitive interpretation of the text. Rather, the DDNP’s annotations and editorial apparatus highlight the temporal dynamics of seriality. Our color transcriptions are at the project’s center, but the user experience encourages a rich, exploratory engagement with these texts. Critical introductions to the notes, Dickens’s serial form, and the project draw attention to serial form in process. Each set of working notes—beginning with David Copperfield and Bleak House—is presented alongside a critical introduction, which explains the significant features of that novel’s notes in the context of its many other documents of serial publication (manuscript, letters, edited proofs, published installments) and alongside working notes for other novels. The transcriptions are served as zoomable IIIF images in Mirador,19 an intuitive platform that allows users to explore parts of each page in varying degrees of detail. Clicking on selected elements of each working notes page (words, phrases, markings, etc.) pulls up editorial annotations in a sidebar: these annotations highlight connections between notes and novel; draw out temporal layers made evident by side-by-side comparison of notes, manuscript, and edited proofs; offer insight into Dickens’s writing process drawn from scholarly and biographical sources; and provide editorial commentary about authorial practice and other interpretive insights (see figure 2). Users can search within and across the working notes and the editorial annotations for key terms. This digital project facilitates an interactive exploration of the notes that mirrors their creation and use by Dickens himself. Just as Dickens engaged with these pages in a nonlinear, creative process over time, scholars and students can use the DDNP to dip in and out of, across and between, the notes, annotations, and novel text. Moving beyond the constraints of a printed page allows the DDNP to facilitate a multidimensional and dynamic exploration of these rich texts.The attention to serial temporality afforded by the DDNP’s transcriptions and annotations of Dickens’s notes can open new frameworks for interpreting Dickens’s approach to novel form. As already noted, much scholarship on Dickens’s serial composition emphasizes what Butt and Tillotson describe as his careful management of his novels. Thus, the notes are frequently read for their insights into what Robert Patten and Daniel Siegel both call the “architecture” of Dickens’s serial installments, their spatial or cartographic form.20 We believe that our attempts to render the complexity of Dickens’s use of his working notes offers a different perspective on the dynamics of composition. It is not simply that the “improvisational” nature of Dickens’s early novels is gradually replaced and superseded by a commitment to coherence as his career progressed. Rather, the tumultuous dynamics of the working notes themselves—for example, Dickens’s occasionally fraught questioning and decision making within the planning and production of a single installment—should prompt renewed analysis of the ongoing tensions between the pressures of an impending installment and the larger design of a given novel that emerges, month by month, chapter by chapter, manuscript page by manuscript page.The working notes for David Copperfield’s seventh number (chapters 19–21) gives an example of Dickens’s extemporaneous decision-making process within the production of a single serial installment. On the left-hand side he jotted down potential subjects in blue ink before returning later to respond to those ideas in black. Close inspection of the shades of ink used, and comparison with the writing on the manuscript, provides strong evidence to date the first layer to a point prior to Dickens’s beginning to draft chapter 19, and the second layer to a point during the composition of chapters 19 and 20, but prior to the drafting of chapter 21. The initial layer gives “Steerforth,” “Little Em’ly,” and “the two partners” as possible elements for inclusion, among others, but although these potential subjects are all listed as queries, Dickens only responded “yes” to Steerforth at this time. It was only in making a second pass over the notes partway through composing the number that he resolved the other possibilities, confirming Emily’s role and rejecting the as-yet-unnamed Spenlow and Jorkins. If Dickens was initially sure of Steerforth’s reintroduction but unsure about the inclusion of Emily and the proctors, he embarked upon the installment undecided whether its main action would be the meeting of Emily and Steerforth or David’s entry into professional life. The deferral of the latter makes sense in relation to the rhythms of the serial narrative: its omission allows for a focused advancement of the Yarmouth subplot so carefully prepared for in numbers II–III, an advancement becoming more and more necessary as the novel approached its climactic midpoint. Dickens also made the most of the opportunity provided by the reillustration of Steerforth’s characteristic carelessness: the picture of Steerforth’s fraught domestic relations in chapter 20 plays effectively against his entry into Emily’s own domestic sphere in chapter 21, and forebodingly against his disapproval of the “chuckle-headed” Ham as a match for the “engaging little Beauty.”21 While Forster refers to the Copperfield working notes to highlight “the lightness and confidence of [Dickens’s] handling” of the novel’s material, the DDNP’s approach to the working notes draws attention to Dickens’s inconsistent compositional practices and his tendency to begin drafting a number while still deliberating between several possible subjects.22The uncertain rhythms of Dickens’s creative process are even more obvious when comparing an example like the one above to the significantly more rigorous and proactive approach evident in the working notes for Copperfield’s later installments. Dickens was more preoccupied with pacing as he drew to the end of the novel’s serial run, clearly demonstrated by a number of notes he apparently wrote at the same time, in the same ink, across the left-hand pages of the working notes for numbers XVI–XX.23 These memoranda appear to have been written in late May 1850, shortly after the composition of number XV and around the time Dickens prepared the next section of the manuscript. In this layer of memoranda across several notes, Dickens anticipated and sketched out the major events still to come that he had to work into the final four installments, including Emily’s discovery, the storm at Yarmouth, the immigration scene, and David’s union with Agnes. As he progressed through writing the final section of the novel he added to, responded to, and amended these memoranda, resulting in several distinctly layered note pages. He also systematically reviewed the notes at the beginning of each new number, jotting down things “from [the] last No.” that had yet to be resolved. As these examples demonstrate, the DDNP’s attentiveness to the temporal complexities of Dickens’s working notes offers insight not only into the painstaking architecture of Dickens’s serial form in process, but also into its ongoing openness and dynamism. Given the inconsistency of Dickens’s practice with the working notes across a single novel, their function was clearly not purely as blueprints, plans, or even summaries. The notes provide a sense of the novel in process, acting as a crucial container for the imaginative and creative work Dickens performed in each serial installment.The DDNP’s capacity to allow users to explore compositional practice in this way can contribute to scholarly conversations about seriality, building on insights about serial temporality offered by Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Jonathan Grossman, and Clare Pettitt. Dickens’s working notes ask us to attend not just to the mechanics of rhythm, pattern, progression, and forward-moving trajectory, but also to the openness and irresolution of serial form. Our hope for this project is to make available to readers a platform that can facilitate scholarly and pedagogical attention to Dickens’s writing process and encourage a reading of serial novel form that privileges the temporal and processual features of composition. Beginning in its first version with the notes to David Copperfield and Bleak House, the project will expand to include the remaining six surviving sets of working notes. Additional planned features include more comprehensive hyperlinking and search functions made possible by emerging developments in IIIF annotation. As the project progresses, the site will offer users the ability to make their own annotations for a set of working notes, a tool that will facilitate classroom projects centered around these texts. Even before such an interactive tool is available, however, the DDNP makes possible new ways of teaching students about Victorian serial form, whether as classroom illustrations of Dickens’s writing process or as springboards for student projects. For example, individual students or groups can take on one installment of a novel, reading it alongside that monthly number to examine the formal features of a single serial part, and then collaborating to read across and between installments. Both now and through future developments, the DDNP aims to provide a technological platform that can generate and support scholarly engagement with Dickens’s creative process and the temporalities of serial form.}, journal={Victorians Institute Journal}, publisher={The Pennsylvania State University Press}, author={Gibson, Anna and Grener, Adam and Goodenough, Frankie and Bailey, Scott}, year={2022}, month={Nov}, pages={210–223} }
 @misc{gibson_2022, title={The Digital Dickens Notes Project}, url={https://www.dickensnotes.com/}, journal={Digital Dickens Notes Project}, author={Gibson, Anna}, editor={Gibson, AnnaEditor}, year={2022}, month={Dec} }
 @misc{gibson_2020, title={Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science by David Sweeney Coombs: Reflection by Anna Gibson}, url={http://v21collective.org/reflection-anna-gibson/}, journal={victorian studies for the 21st century Collations Forum}, author={Gibson, Anna}, year={2020}, month={Dec} }
 @article{gibson_2020, title={The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature}, volume={53}, ISSN={["1945-8509"]}, DOI={10.1215/00295132-8309641}, abstractNote={When Victorian critics like Margaret Oliphant and Henry Mansel reacted negatively to the popular “sensation novel” in the 1860s, chief among their concerns was that these novels “preach[ed] to the nerves” instead of engaging readers’ cultivated reflective judgment (Mansel 483). Scholarship on sensation novels has sought to identify the unique features that allowed these texts to directly engage readers’ bodies and do certain kinds of cultural or ideological work. In a brief but significant moment in chapter 3 of his ambitious book The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan asks us to rethink both the nature of Mansel's critique and the singularity of sensation novels. A lifelong idealist invested in metaphysics, Mansel bewailed specific features of these “morbid” fictions: their melodramatic subject matter, their emphasis on plot over character, their responsiveness to market demand. But Morgan reads Mansel's review as a reaction against a much broader set of developments in the nineteenth century through which the Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience as disinterested reflective judgment was replaced with a materialist theory of aesthetic response as a corporeal reaction of matter (bodies and nerves) to matter (aesthetic objects). In the compelling story Morgan tells, sensation novels come to look less like unique sites of physiological stimulation and more like popular literary instances of a new aesthetic theory that was reimagining the relationship between humans and objects in their environment. Rather than focusing on the specificity of particular aesthetic objects (artworks, music, literary texts), Morgan turns our attention to how multiple discursive fields in the nineteenth century intersected as they rethought the nature of looking, hearing, reading, or otherwise engaging with objects in the world.With thoughtful, nuanced explication of scientific, philosophical, and literary texts, Morgan advances two interconnected claims, both supplemented by encyclopedic notes and references (which comprise a quarter of the book). His first argument is that the aesthetic experience we tend to value as the “highest” human capacity—because it appears to be a spiritual or transcendental property of autonomous, deliberative, inward-turning selves—was instead imagined within a range of nineteenth-century discourses (physiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, art history, literature, even interior design and color theory) as a function of bodies and the matter that comprised them. The book's second contention is that this “materialist strain” in Victorian aesthetics displaced the agency of aesthetic response from individual human persons to nonhuman matter, resulting not only in the expansion of aesthetic experience to nonhuman animals (think of Darwin's discerning birds) but also in conferring consciousness to inanimate physical objects. Whereas scholarship by Amanda Anderson (The Powers of Distance) and David Wayne Thomas (Cultivating Victorians) associates aesthetic experience with the cultivation of critical detachment and self-reflective individuality, Morgan reads such liberal ideals as reactionary responses to an increasingly materialist account of the self. His argument thus resonates with and broadens the scope of Nicholas Dames's approach in The Physiology of the Novel. Taking a cue from other scholars who have charted a nineteenth-century erosion of mind-body dualism (Allan Richardson, Rick Rylance, Sally Shuttleworth), Morgan shows how this erosion took on radical forms, not just by affording material properties to minds but also by identifying the “enminded” properties of matter. The “outward turn” of Morgan's title refers to the “active and animating” properties of mind that extend to other material substances: matter itself can have properties of consciousness (19).Morgan divides his book into two sections, the first of which traces a mid-nineteenth-century empirical science of beauty that runs counter (but also parallel) to the kind of anti-industrialist and socially attuned aesthetic theories we associate with John Ruskin, who serves as the implicit antihero of Morgan's story. Chapter 1 charts a shift from natural theology to scientific materialism in accounts of beauty and harmony by examining a network of intellectuals associated with the Edinburgh Aesthetic Club in the 1850s, including interior decorator David Ramsay Hay, physician John Addington Symonds, physiologists Thomas Laycock and William Carpenter, and critic E. S. Dallas. At the center of this chapter is a pair of linked paradoxes in the science of aesthetics. Aesthetic form was conceived of as both geometric (ordered, harmonious, and identifiable) and ambient (experienced by non-conscious corporeal processes). And so, while beauty and taste could supposedly be explained with mathematical precision, those thinkers who were invested in such explanations increasingly found that aestheticism's physiological mechanisms evaded rational modes of thought brought to bear upon them. Morgan's method in The Outward Mind is to take up a series of such paradoxes, oppositions between seemingly contradictory modes of thought: humanistic inquiry and scientific positivism, abstraction and materiality, phenomenology and epistemology, aesthetics and politics. He insightfully reads these as dialectics animating new Victorian ways of thinking about aesthetic experience at a time when various humanist and scientific inquiries were only just beginning to distinguish themselves as separate disciplines.Having established how medical writers and literary critics developed a neurophysiological account of aesthetic experience, Morgan turns in chapter 2 to texts by five writers—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—all of whom, despite their different idioms, “rescaled and physicalized the primary units of analysis of aesthetic thought” (88). This rescaling happens in two seemingly contradictory directions: by narrowing in on the immediate moment of response as something that disaggregates both art objects and experiencing selves into their component parts (nerve fibers, organs, colors, shapes, words) and by expanding the register of aesthetic response to encompass the deep time of evolution. In both directions this rescaling “tends to suspend or sideline the human as a unit of analysis” (124). Responses to aesthetic objects are not located within discrete human selves but in the local actions of nerves or the evolutionary development of the species. Hardy's novels feature here as literary manifestations of scientific theories. Where Pater and Allen describe scales of aesthetic response, Hardy “adapts” these theories for use in fiction: he expands moments of physiological intensity with almost lyric detail (Henry Knight clinging to the cliff in Desperate Remedies); disintegrates characters into neurological responses (brains and nerves); and locates aesthetic experience in an expanded time of evolutionary adaptation.While section 1 considers how aesthetic response spreads out across the material properties of the body and the scale of the species, section 2 (“The Outward Turn”) considers how nineteenth-century intellectuals expanded consciousness even further, beyond human observers to the objects in their environment. Environments themselves became sentient. In chapter 3 Morgan examines a cluster of writers who coalesce around Walter Pater and developed Lucretian theories of atomic agency. In a somewhat surprising association of Pater's fiction with sensation novels, Morgan argues that both produce somatic responses in readers. In his imaginary portraits and in Marius the Epicurean Pater applies the materialist theories of psychologist James Sully and Allen by imagining reading itself as a physical experience. Reading Pater's literary texts as enactments of materialist aesthetic theories, Morgan argues that Pater's writing makes language tactile and sensuous; his sentences “imprison” readers (164); his “densely accretive style returns language to bodies” (157).Scholars of the novel might wish here, and elsewhere, that Morgan would expand his literary analysis: Just how, for instance, does the accretive quality or the “semantic density” of Pater's literary language operate (157)? Morgan reads literary texts as applications of material aesthetic theories that he locates first in scientific texts. Building upon Gillian Beer and George Levine's “shared discourse” and one-culture approaches, he reads science and literature “not as domains or fields but as rhetorics that might be flexibly and widely called on” (17). His method is therefore to explicate both scientific and literary texts. While his expositions and claims are compelling and clearly articulated, I found myself wanting more extensive close readings of just how novels by Hardy, Pater, William Morris, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde anticipate and direct readers’ physiological responses. The lack of space afforded to close readings in The Outward Mind perhaps makes sense given that Morgan focuses his energy on drawing together an astonishingly diverse array of intellectual fields from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He offers novel scholars provocative new ways of thinking about both the physiological responses referenced within nineteenth-century novels and how novels might themselves act as agents of affect and somatic response. The latter point might lead us to wonder whether the relationship between science and literature is as simple as Morgan's framework of parallel “rhetorics” would suggest. When he turns to E. S. Dallas, William Morris, and Vernon Lee, he shows that these writers made literary language inherently somatic. He thus paints a picture in which literature does much more than apply or extend scientific aesthetic theories; it enacts material aesthetics. What sort of critical method is appropriate to such enactment? Morgan points out that literary texts are complicated aesthetic objects, because “[o]ne cannot see a poetic image in the same unmediated way that one sees a color or hears a sound; novels and poems are therefore less immediately or obviously available to empirical analysis” (253–54). He admits that the way literary texts prompt effects in readers’ bodies—for instance the “somatic forces” conveyed by Pater's prose—are “difficult to talk about” (157). In the case of Pater this is because his prose combines philosophical concepts with a style that is “resistan[t] to thought.” But the difficulty here is also that formalist textual analysis does not have a history of playing well with reader response or cognitive criticism.In his chapters on Pater, Morris, and Lee, Morgan poses the question, What happens to social life when empirical theories root aesthetics in universal physiological responses, making aesthetics the work of nerves and evolutionary adaptation rather than the products of specific social and political circumstances? He answers by assessing how writers imagined matter itself to have social properties. In chapter 4 Morgan takes up the case of William Morris, whose physicalist aesthetics at first glance seem at odds with his socialist politics. But unlike Herbert Spencer, for whom evolutionary theory leads to a competitive individualism, for Morris the same theory makes possible a shared corporeality. Reading Morris's essays, lectures, romances, and News from Nowhere, Morgan explores how Morris aligns aesthetic experience with the pleasure of production, self-expression, and use, experienced by laborers who engage in shared embodied practices. The antithesis of the fin de siècle decadent aesthete, Morris rejects the category of “art” as a privileged, refined domain and locates it in the everyday. When Morgan turns to News from Nowhere, he traces in Morris's construction of character an alternative to realism's reliance on introspection and individualistic sympathy. Morris renders characters physically, promoting an ethics of shared corporeal practices; his characters are distinguished by “their external markers and preferred modes of activity” (207).This expanded notion of sociality—one not based on a community of sympathetic individuals but on sensory reactions to corporeally rendered characters or even to books as material objects—has important implications for how we read. In his fifth chapter Morgan shows how Vernon Lee's theories of empathy describe readerly affect as a feeling with or feeling into objects. Indeed Morgan finds in Lee a precursor to Brian Massumi's affect theory. Empathy was not synonymous with interpersonal sympathy until the mid-twentieth century; instead it meant “unconscious physiological reaction to an object” (220). For Lee and her lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, literary language itself is based on this physiological, object-oriented empathy. When we speak of a mountain as “rising,” for instance, the metaphor is not just an act of imagination; we feel our eyes moving upward and our bodies rising. Empathy, Morgan notes, “is rooted in experiences that precede the social domain” (222). I find myself wondering whether Morgan hopes to hold on to a separate, individuated notion of the social domain even as he sees material aesthetics radically expanding sociality to include all types of responsiveness between material things. What are the ethical and political functions of literature—especially in relation to gender, race, or class—in a system of universal corporeality?Despite his statement to the contrary, in many ways Morgan's book is an “intellectual history”—a complex, revisionist, sometimes presentist, and often recuperative one—of an overlooked Victorian mode of thinking (and reading, and looking) (16). His book unearths intricate intersections between a surprising range of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, and literary thought. His premise is that a reassessment of the material turn in Victorian aesthetic theory might help us overcome our own entrenchment in methodological and disciplinary divisions between humanistic interpretation on the one hand and scientism, empiricism, and positivism on the other. Victorian aesthetic theory might, he says, “reveal some of the ways in which the humanities have long been ‘scientific’” (15). It is in this gesture toward the present, along with steady alignment of Victorian theories with later philosophies and approaches (affect theory, thing theory, distant reading, poststructuralism, neuroscience), that Morgan refuses to engage in a mere intellectual history. He is interested in what his epilogue calls a “nonlinear” method of engagement with the past, one that casts Victorian theories not as merely anticipatory of modern ideas but as sources of alternative, potentially invigorating, less disciplinarily entrenched modes of thinking about aesthetics, reading, and interpretation (261). This is especially apparent in his final chapter, in which he challenges a story we tell of literary critical history: that New Criticism's analytic modes of close reading made a clean break with Victorian modes of “moral-aesthetic evaluative criticism,” and that distant reading's quantitative approach was made possible by digital technologies (244). Not only is distant reading not new, he shows us; twentieth-century New Critics (following I. A. Richards) were “haunted by” the quantifiable methods of reading that preceded them, methods they sought to caricature as scientifically reductionist and naive (237). Morgan uncovers in Lee's empathetic literary criticism a distant reading avant la lettre (Lee was invested in statistical linguistic analysis as well as in the affects of aesthetic experience). More important, Morgan suggests Lee's objective aesthetic theory may inspire ways of marrying phenomenological accounts of aesthetic experience (the feeling of reading, the affects of art) with quantifiable, objective methods of literary formalism. In one of his most provocative moments Morgan asks what literary studies might have looked like if, instead of rejecting the phenomenology and physiology of reading, New Criticism had followed Lee's lead and “embraced corporeality rather than cognition” (253). The critical investment of The Outward Mind is that we might benefit from revisiting nineteenth-century materialist theories of aesthetics at a time when we face our own methodological questions about how to read, how disciplines can intersect, and whether “scientific” approaches to literary analysis (cognitive criticism, digital humanities) impinge upon or invigorate traditional hermeneutic methods of inquiry. As Morgan puts it, Lee's brand of scientific humanistic inquiry, in its refusal to pit the affects of reading against statistical analysis, might help us reunite the phenomenological and the quantitative, the humanistic and the scientific.}, number={2}, journal={NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION}, author={Gibson, Anna}, year={2020}, month={Aug}, pages={280–284} }
 @article{gibson_2017, title={Charlotte Brontë’s First Person}, volume={25}, ISSN={1538-974X}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nar.2017.0009}, DOI={10.1353/nar.2017.0009}, abstractNote={This essay reads Charlotte Brontë’s use of first-person narration in Villette as a contribution to a Victorian reassessment of personal identity as material, heterogeneous, and adaptive. Challenging common readings of Brontë’s first-person fictions as displays of self-definition and authority, I unpack the relationship between the narrated and narrating person in both Jane Eyre and Villette to reveal dual operations of narrative—world-making strategies and adaptive tactics—that express competing notions of personhood. By comparing Villette (1853) to Jane Eyre (1847), we can chart a shift from a strategic to a tactical emphasis in narration indicative, I argue, of a broader movement in nineteenth-century thought from Cartesian dualism toward associationist and materialist theories of consciousness as adaptive and processual. Villette’s narrative tactics demonstrate the potential in novel form to enact processes of being in the world that challenge both traditional concepts of a unified, self-contained consciousness and new Victorian scientific conceptions of a material mind only knowable from science’s “objective” perspective. Positioning Brontë’s novel form alongside psychological debates about the nature and study of mind, I show how the novel offers alternative methodologies and conclusions about the nature of personhood to those proffered by an emerging Victorian psychology. When Brontë’s first-person narrative produces (rather than assumes the prior presence of) a “person” narrating, it asks us to read that production of identity and consciousness as an experiment with what it means to experience oneself as, in the words of Jane Eyre, a “heterogeneous thing.”}, number={2}, journal={Narrative}, publisher={Project Muse}, author={Gibson, Anna}, year={2017}, pages={203–226} }
 @article{gibson_2015, title={Our Mutual Friend and Network Form}, volume={48}, ISSN={0029-5132 1945-8509}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2860341}, DOI={10.1215/00295132-2860341}, abstractNote={This essay demonstrates how Charles Dickens used the form of serial fiction to experiment with a uniquely Victorian idea of life as a dynamic network of interactions. Reading Our Mutual Friend alongside nineteenth-century physiological and evolutionary writing, I show how Dickens shaped novel form around the attractions and reactions that organized social and psychological life in his city. Victorian sciences—particularly the work of George Henry Lewes and Charles Darwin—were turning to “net-work” to describe the plastic processes underpinning biological life. Dickens's fiction used the same dynamic potential of network form to put in motion the mechanisms of social life. Taking a novel form traditionally organized around the story of a self, Dickens used serial publication to incorporate variety, change, and new combinations of radically heterogeneous characters into each new installment, turning novel form into an ongoing formation. The resulting model of character psychology is one that replaces interiority with interaction and individuated desire with physiological affect.}, number={1}, journal={NOVEL A Forum on Fiction}, publisher={Duke University Press}, author={Gibson, A.}, year={2015}, month={Jan}, pages={63–84} }
 @article{our mutual friend and network form_2015, year={2015} }
 @misc{gibson_2013, title={Passenger Networks}, volume={46}, DOI={10.1215/00295132-2345822}, abstractNote={Book Review| November 01 2013 Passenger Networks Grossman, Jonathan H., Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 256, cloth, $39.95. Anna Gibson Anna Gibson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2013) 46 (3): 478–482. https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2345822 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anna Gibson; Passenger Networks. Novel 1 November 2013; 46 (3): 478–482. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2345822 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Novel, Inc.2013Duke University Press Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.}, number={3}, journal={Novel: A Forum on Fiction}, author={Gibson, Anna}, year={2013}, pages={478–482} }