Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition

Abstract

^D rwescribing the powerful force of domestic habit, Elizabeth Gaskell claimed that [t]he daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise. It is the novelist's task to chronicle [t]he traditions of [. . .] bygone times, even to the smallest social particular in order to enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances which contributed to the formation of (2). Whether delineating the constricting habits of social prejudice or the quaint details of domestic routines, Gaskell outlines a theory of habit as a guiding psychological mechanism of social structure that was shared widely by her contemporaries and debated extensively in nineteenth-century psychology. This philosophical dialogue on the function and implications of habitual behavior dated back to associationist philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume, David Hartley, and Dugald Stewart, and continued in later-nineteenth-century psychological writings by, among others, George Henry Lewes, John Stuart Mill,James Sully, G. F. Stout, William Carpenter, Henry Maudsley, Alexander Bain, and William James. Theories of habit made further appearances in nineteenth-century advice literature, and were discussed extensively in popular works such as Sarah Stickney Ellis's The Women of England (1838) and Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859), as well as in magazine articles, religious tracts, sanitary reports, treatises on character formation, and eccentric biographies of