This essay examines the relationship between cultural anxieties about the effects of novels on the moral, mental, and physical well-being of readers and medical writing of the 1870s and 80s by focusing on the prominent physician, essayist, and sometime novelist, John Milner Fothergill (1841-1888). In his seminal study The Reading Lesson, Patrick Brantlinger argues that, though "militant opposition to novels and novel-reading waned during the nineteenth century," such opposition continued to flare up in response to the emergence of specific writers, genres, and new kinds of readers.1 In Britain in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s, anxieties about novel reading were catalyzed by several specific developments in society, literary fashion, and medical practice: an advent of mass literacy that resulted in an unprecedented audience and market for novels amongst the working class; a medical emphasis on the vulnerability of the nervous system (and especially the female nervous system) to the vicissitudes of emotion; and, last but not least, the transformation brought about by the "sensation novel" to the characteristic thematic concerns and affective sensibility of literary fiction.
展开▼
