Displaced Memories in Victorian Fiction and Psychology

Abstract

in The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), Hardy recounts his hesita tions about renting a furnished house, his uncanny feeling that the “articles in the rooms are saturated with the thoughts and glances of others” (18). Hardy’s observations about the mental traces we leave upon the material world register a disparity between the fleeting nature of human consciousness and the comparative perma nence of inanimate objects. But what exactly does it mean for an object to be “saturated” with human memories? what kinds of traces might “thoughts and glances” actually leave on the material world? to what extent do we possess our own memories? And can memories be trans ferred between, or exist outside of, individual minds? in the late nine teenth century, questions such as these were frequently taken up in representations of displaced memory. From the middle of the 1870s through at least the early twentieth century, the potential for memo ries to move outside the minds that contained them became a subject of literary, psychological, and parapsychological speculation. in england and America, in the writings of figures such as George Henry Lewes, Henry Maudsley, James Crichton-Brown, and, more controver sially, in those of F. w. H. Myers and Samuel Butler, a set of narratives emerge about the potential displacement and uncertain ownership of