Emergent Theories of Victorian Mind Shock: From War and Railway Accident to Nerves, Electricity and Emotion

Abstract

In the last few decades, trauma theory has achieved great saliency in an array of disciplines. It has been widely applied in studies of twentieth-century forms of testimony and the capacity of literature to bear witness to traumatic experience, not just individual but generational and national. From the uniquely personal repercussions of childhood abuse to the wide-scale reverberations of colonial rupture, the concept of trauma has come to cover a wide range of suffering.1 E. Ann Kaplan remarks that “it is partly because of accumulated twentieth-century traumatic events that psychologists, sociologists, and humanists are investigating trauma.”2 Although no one could claim that the twentieth century has the monopoly on horrific experience, trauma theory, it has been suggested, emerged as a response to “modernity.” This view arises in large measure from the influential work of Walter Benjamin, which identified modernity with a rupture in experience and a break in consciousness.3 But, as Benjamin himself understood, the material conditions and technologies we associate with modernity began well before the twentieth century.4 Large-scale cataclysmic accidents, experiences of near death and miraculous survival were certainly part of the Victorian industrialized world. How did Victorians understand the effect on consciousness and memory of events and experiences that “went beyond the range of the normal”—events so overwhelming and inassimilable that the ordinary processes of registration and representation were suspended or superseded?