Genera Mixta

Abstract

This chapter discusses how fiction, and the genre of romance in particular, supplies the scorbutic imagination with models suitable for “peculiarity.” Having suggested in Chapter 4 that there may be something like an aesthetics of the dazzled eye, it explores the possibility of a connection between that and the genres of scorbutic literature. The histories of scurvy and fiction arrive at a curious junction in the work of Trotter and Beddoes. In their later work on the nervous temperament, they cite novels not so much as an epistemological or aesthetic blemish on modern culture but as a significant challenge to public health. Earlier in the century, George Cheyne estimated nervous diseases as comprising a third of all maladies; but by the beginning of the nineteenth century, they had grown and diversified so rapidly that, according to Trotter, they represented two-thirds of the whole catalogue.