The Latent and the Manifest

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines Dickens’s return to first-person narration in Great Expectations, arguing that Pip’s frequent invocations of the mental work that goes on outside his consciousness are part of Dickens’s efforts to undergird his soul-based psychology with the metaphysical latency theorized by Sir William Hamilton. But while Hamilton’s model of latency appears to conflate unconsciousness with the powers of the soul when freed of the body, other theories of unconsciousness suggested that what was latent to the mind was merely the body, the nerves and fibers that underlay consciousness. Key here are two such theories, those offered by Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer, both of whom melded their physical models of unconsciousness with the latest advances of associationist psychology, rendering especially problematic for Dickens’s anti-materialist project the ambiguities inherent in the language of association. In considering Spencer’s psychological work, this chapter situates Great Expectations in the midst of evolutionary debate, but evolution of a sort quite different from Darwin’s natural selection. Instead, Spencer’s evolutionary psychology, which posited the hereditary transmission of inherited characteristics, redefined the notion of habit—so central to Great Expectations—as the source of those innate qualities that were seen by faculty psychologists to be the gifts of God. Great Expectations’s deployment of the discourse of habit, like Martin Chuzzlewit’s treatment of Jonas Chuzzlewit, thus inadvertently threatens to deny the immortal soul that, for Dickens, separates humankind from the beasts and serves as evidence of the existence of God.