Conscience

Abstract

The word “conscience” appears frequently in Victorian writings across realms of discourse, in which it assumed an edge of ambivalence and energy difficult for us to perceive in the twenty-first century. While conscience today may seem a residual concept, recent critical strains in Victorian studies have suggested the possibilities bound up in examining anew this complex and multivalent word. Turning particularly to the writings of Charles Darwin and George Eliot reveals a self-conscious awareness not only of how the fluctuating meanings of conscience capture broader social shifts, but the ways these shifts are registered and enacted in language.