Autumn Term 2024:
17 October - 12 December (8 weeks)
Four Sessions: 17|10; 24|10; 31|10; 07|11
Half term : Thursday 14 November
Four Sessions: 21|11; 28|11; 05|12; 12|12
Members: £110 Non-members: £140
Concessions: £20 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
We will explore various themes related to insanity and altered states of consciousness by examining a number of 19th-century works of fiction. Novelists and poets often had the greatest insights into the workings of the mind, and many Victorian psychiatrists cited works of fiction in their case studies. Among the authors we will analyse are Charlotte Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Gogol, Herman Melville and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
All diagnoses were hotly contested, and among the psychological phenomena we will examine are ‘hysteria’, paranoia, alcoholism, ‘moral insanity’ (ie psychopathy), learning difficulties and post-natal depression. We will also examine the phenomenon of the Victorian asylum.
Each of the authors had a huge insight into such states, and constructed impressive and thoughtful works of art to explore these often distressing conditions and the impacts upon those close to the men and women who suffered from them.
Sarah Wise teaches 19th-century social history and literature to undergraduates and adult learners and is visiting professor at the University of California’s London Study Center. Her debut,The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. It was the inspiration for Sky’s The Frankenstein Chronicles.
Her follow-up, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum, was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, and was the basis for the BBC’s series The Victorian Slum. Her book Inconvenient People: Lunacy and Liberty in 19th-Century England, was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize; her most recent book, The Undesirables: The Law that Locked Away a Generation was published in April this year.
