Abstract
This introduction reflects on the recent critical privileging of the visual in nineteenth-century studies, and considers the emergence of alternative readings of nineteenth-century culture that have focused on the wider human sensorium, and, in particular, touch. It suggests that the tactile imagination was a dynamic element of nineteenth-century cultural life, through which Victorian writers, thinkers, and artists explored the relationship between self, body, and the world around them.
Highlights
The Victorian Tactile Imagination Heather TilleyIn July 2013, over one hundred researchers gathered in Birkbeck, University of London, for a conference on ‘The Victorian Tactile Imagination’.1The social and cultural historian Constance Classen, a keynote speaker at the conference, has written that the history of touch ‘clothes the dry bones of historical fact with the flesh of physical sensation’, and certainly what united all presentations at this event was a sense of intellectual freshness, excitement, and energy.2 But what implications might approaching Victorian culture through the tactile have upon our critical practice? As Classen stresses, sensuous history is important not because it is memorable but because it opens out the cultural values of societies
Heather Tilley In July 2013, over one hundred researchers gathered in Birkbeck, University of London, for a conference on ‘The Victorian Tactile Imagination’
What implications might approaching Victorian culture through the tactile have upon our critical practice? As Classen stresses, sensuous history is important not because it is memorable but because it opens out the cultural values of societies
Summary
The Victorian Tactile Imagination Heather TilleyIn July 2013, over one hundred researchers gathered in Birkbeck, University of London, for a conference on ‘The Victorian Tactile Imagination’.1The social and cultural historian Constance Classen, a keynote speaker at the conference, has written that the history of touch ‘clothes the dry bones of historical fact with the flesh of physical sensation’, and certainly what united all presentations at this event was a sense of intellectual freshness, excitement, and energy.2 But what implications might approaching Victorian culture through the tactile have upon our critical practice? As Classen stresses, sensuous history is important not because it is memorable but because it opens out the cultural values of societies. In a discussion of the theoretical traditions that have characterized material culture studies over the past few decades, Christopher Tilley outlines the productiveness of adopting a methodological approach drawn from phenomenological theory, which focuses on ‘material forms as encountered through the multiple sensuous and socialized subjective apparatus of our bodies (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste)’.12 Phenomenology, broadly conceived, is a science of the phenomenon; and, in particular, the way in which phenomena manifest themselves, and the mental acts concerned with experiencing them.
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