Elaine Scarry's magisterial The Body in Pain (1985) set the agenda for decades to come in relation to thinking about the experience of pain. As Rachel Ablow points out, although Scarry is by training a Victorian critic, her work, focused as it is on the contemporary infliction of torture, did not address Victorian culture. Its central premises were nonetheless drawn, she suggests, from nineteenth-century philosophy, in particular the development of earlier notions of sympathy, and of attempts to use “emotional response as an engine of social change” (135). In Victorian Pain, Ablow follows Lucy Bending and the more recent work of historian Joanna Bourke in focusing on specific nineteenth-century formations of the experience of pain. Where Ablow differs from these studies is in the philosophical rigor she brings to the task, as she ranges across work by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Hardy. Like George Eliot, she shifts her gaze from the whole human horizon to that of an object glass, moving effortlessly between philosophical principle and penetrating analysis of textual detail.In the introductory section of the book, Ablow engages with recent theories of pain, post-Scarry, as well as exploring the medical, scientific, and religious frameworks for thinking about pain in the Victorian period. Scarry, as Ablow notes, has come in for considerable criticism from a variety of quarters, largely focusing on her argument that physical pain is inexpressible and prior to language. For Ablow, Scarry's “epistemological” approach is bound up with “a particular account of liberal subjectivity as self-conscious, prior to the social, and private” (4). Her own preferred framework, like that of Bourke, would appear to be that of Ludwig Wittgenstein's language game theory of pain, as more recently reworked by Stanley Cavell and Veena Das in arguments that emphasize “how pain is always already part of a social world” (4). Although the phrase “always already” is indelibly associated with Louis Althusser and his theory of the interpellation of the human subject, Ablow also seeks to avoid what she defines as the overdeterminism of social constructivism. These are complex waters, not least because Scarry's political analysis of the operations of power through the language of torture seems far removed from customary accounts of liberal subjectivity. Ablow's overall argument, however, concerning the social imbrication of pain, and the potential for reconfiguring the boundaries between persons, as well as persons and things, is well made.Victorian Pain does not restrict itself to physical pain. Indeed the first chapter, on Mill's account of his breakdown, is almost exclusively focused on mental pain. His Autobiography, Ablow suggests in one of her sparkling opening lines, “tells the story of a machine that turns into a tree” (24). The analysis does an excellent job of re-evaluating the utilitarian philosophy of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, which has had such a bad press of late, highlighting the fact that, far from suppressing feeling, they “effectively place the emotions at the center of their understanding of human psychology” (28), including the “other-regarding-pleasures of ‘benevolence’” (30). Ablow tracks in detail Mill's responses to his father's philosophy, while reading his Autobiography as a narrativization of “his own passage from a utilitarian model that casts pain as prior to the social, to a model that regards both pain and the subject as inescapably social” (25). Focusing as she does on the structure of Mill's account, Ablow has no truck with analyses that seek out the “real” causes of his breakdown. Yet such a form of reading runs the danger of ironing out some of the difficulties and complexities of the text, which can seem to fit too neatly into the philosophical pathways outlined in the introduction, from Scarry to Cavell, as it were.Ablow also considers another inheritor of utilitarian philosophy, Harriet Martineau. Of all the case studies, this is the one that focuses most directly on physical pain, with Martineau's Life in the Sickroom. The discussion opens, however, with Household Education, which, together with Martineau's subsequent Autobiography, offers a startling account of the sufferings and terrors of childhood. Like Mill, Martineau was concerned with the relations between subjectivity, suffering, and the social, Ablow argues, but unlike her fellow sufferer, she saw a way to reconcile individual interests and the wider social good through the education of the sensations (50). Yet to read Household Education is to experience a real discordance between the graphic descriptions of terror and the subsequent assertions of the need to educate the senses, which seem to have little purchase on the highly charged descriptions of childhood suffering that have preceded them. The same point could be made with reference to Life in the Sickroom. Ablow draws attention to Martineau's assertion in the Autobiography that “Pain and untimely death are, no doubt, tokens of our ignorance, and of our sins against the laws of nature. I conceive our business to be to accept these consequences of our ignorance and weakness, with as little personal shame on the one hand as vanity or pride on the other” (Autobiography 53). This she sees as the kernel of Martineau's theory that illness and pain are products of error, but if placed back in the context of the Autobiography it immediately precedes her casting blame for her illnesses not on her own “sins” but on those of her family. Her deafness, she suggests, was the result of an accident in childhood caused by “the ignorance in a person whom I need not point out,” while her adult illness was caused by the stresses of overwork and anxiety of looking after three dependent relatives, including an irritable blind mother (Autobiography 433). She was not, she complains, even allowed to have a maid at her own expense, and the result, as Ablow notes, was she developed a tumour “of a kind which usually originates in mental suffering” (59). Even given Victorian medical readiness to trace the interpenetration of body and mind, the assertion is fairly extraordinary and provides a crucial context for understanding Martineau's contention in Life in the Sickroom that she could attain her greatest happiness as an invalid when left alone (64). The experience of pain can produce a form of impersonality of reflection that enables her, in Ablow's summary, “to help her think beyond, and even experience beyond, the unit of the individual” (71). It is worth noting, however, that the freedom of impersonality Martineau claims to experience is very much the freedom from her family and all their claims, rather than a more generalized form. While Mill struggled during his breakdown with his relations with his father, Martineau similarly attempts to distance herself from her mother. In the famous passage in which Martineau talks of the pleasures of being alone with her memories, of being, as Ablow suggests, “most social, when left alone” (64), it is significant that she is not actually alone. Martineau's definition of being alone is seeing only “the face of my maid,” a distinctly hierarchical and class-based conception of solitariness and the social.Moving away from the inheritors of utilitarianism, Ablow turns to consider that most unsettling of texts, Brontë's Villette, which, as she astutely notes, breaks from the models of pain associated with community and collectivity in Mill and Martineau and offers instead one in which “pain is ‘social’ only in the sense that it testifies to the existence of other people, not in the sense that it holds out hope for any substantive relation to them” (73). Sympathy emerges less as a solace than a threat. “Solitude,” Ablow argues, “is described as excruciatingly painful, yet it is also posited as infinitely more desirable than its alternative: the self-betrayal that involves becoming one of the many” (74). The analysis captures the painful policing of the borders of self and other that we see in Lucy's narrative in Villette, focusing particularly on her self-identification as a hypochondriac. The discussion here links back to a section in the introduction on changing understandings of hypochondriasis, helping to make sense of why this particular term was singled out amid the array of psychological and medical conditions associated with forms of pain. Given the range of uses for the term by the mid-nineteenth century, it would be helpful to pin down Brontë's own understanding of the term, and here it was surprising that the chapter does not draw on Brontë's own descriptions of her sufferings from hypochondria (in a letter to Margaret Wooler in 1846), or the account of hypochondriasis in the family's medical work, Thomas John Graham's Domestic Medicine (an author whose name is of particular significance to Villette), which explicitly defines the condition as one of “Low Spirits.” Brontë's letter speaks of the “tyranny of hypochondria” and of the suffering being worse than that of being “buried in a subterranean tunnel,” language that is picked up in the novel's subsequent motif of being “buried alive” and strengthens Ablow's argument regarding the “pseudo-allegories” of the text and the extreme language of physical suffering that is deployed to depict mental pain.Chapter 4 sees a complete change of register as Ablow turns not to literary representations of pain but to “Charles Darwin's Affect Theory,” a deliberately anachronistic title that puts Darwin's work in dialogue with contemporary debates around affect. Ablow draws upon Darwin, particularly The Expression of Emotions, to challenge both the overly biologistic interpretations of emotion and the wildly optimistic political projections to be found in the disparate areas of theory loosely assembled under the label of affect theory. The shift in subject matter is not as surprising as it might seem at first glance in that it permits Ablow to consider work on emotion that challenges assumptions about subjectivity and the ownership of emotions. The question for Darwin, she argues, is whether an individual's feelings are “better conceived as the proper possession of those organisms, objects, or environments to which I am most proximate” (95). Ablow turns to Darwin, given his dominance in our current culture and science, and her analysis is as always intelligent and perceptive. It did feel rather cut adrift, however, from the wider scientific and cultural debates of the time: the earlier versions of evolutionary theory, or of physiological psychology that underpinned Darwin's reflections on the emotions, or the conflicts between Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley over the consequences of evolutionary theory for the domain of ethics (a debate that addresses centrally questions of suffering and personhood and would help illuminate the current divide in interpretations of “Darwinian” psychology, or indeed affect theory). Like Gillian Beer, Ablow is an excellent reader of Darwin: she tracks, for example, the excitement exhibited in his work and the “aesthetic pleasure” he derives from detecting subtle and surprising transformations of form and the “compound nature” of trees or animal life (106–7). In concluding, Ablow suggests that “[i]n place of any divine order, or any natural political progressivism, all Darwin can point to is the fact of endless transformation, one name for which might be “affect” (113). Even given the buildup of argument during the chapter, this is a surprising claim, and one I am still mulling over: does it strengthen or weaken affect theory to designate its subject simply “a condition of being” (113)?No study of Victorian pain could afford to ignore Hardy, the arch-chronicler of human suffering, and Ablow does not disappoint, ending with “Wounded Trees, Abandoned Boots,” a title that aptly summarizes The Woodlanders and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (while permitting escape from the excesses of Jude the Obscure). Ablow addresses the “personifying pathos” (118) of the wounded trees, although the suggestion that we do not normally think of trees as having wounds should be modified, since there is a long-standing usage of referring to wounds in trees in arboriculture. Hardy was clearly drawing on this usage, but intensifying its effects to break down, as Ablow suggests, the divisions between human and nonhuman. Tess's boots have attracted much critical attention, but in her reading of the scene, in which they become “vectors of pity” (128), enabling Tess to reorient her sense of herself, Ablow offers a master class in the value of close, philosophically informed reading. Such moments in the novels, and the imaginative projection they involve, lead in Hardy, Ablow suggests, to “a condition of possibility for experiencing ourselves as part of a universe that suffers” (134). What is left unsaid, however, is that such a projection then disarms both perceptions of and active responses to the evident unequal nature of suffering in a socially hierarchical world.Throughout Victorian Pain, one very clear absence is George Eliot, the most thoughtful, and philosophically sophisticated Victorian novelist when it comes to questions of mental pain. Yet, just as Ablow noted the unspoken presence of Victorian constructs in Scarry's work, so it is possible to track Eliotian perception throughout this text, which no doubt has its origins in Ablow's excellent chapter “George Eliot's Art of Pain” in her first book, The Marriage of Minds. Eliot is finally allowed direct entry, however, in the conclusion to Victorian Pain, with a wonderful reading of the scene in Middlemarch in which Dorothea overcomes her sorrow and visits Rosamund to offer her support. The scene is normally interpreted as an act of selflessness on Dorothea's part, which in turn produces a moral transformation (albeit temporary) in Rosamund. Ablow turns such readings on their head: for Rosamund this is an act of violence by Dorothea that leaves her no choice but to speak. In a surprising yet compelling coupling, this scene is then linked to the transfusion scene in The Lifted Veil: both become examples of what Ablow terms the “fantasy of the speaking body” (135), which she links both to Eliot's epistemology and to current practices of torture, thus revealing, in a reversal of Scarry, how current politics provide an undertow to her Victorian explorations. The explanations flash by too fast, but the very juxtapositions are in themselves hugely suggestive.As can be seen, Victorian Pain is a book that tempts you into dialogue, and a work that cries out for rereading and reflection. It cannot be idly consumed. Using the experience of pain as its starting point, it explores a series of boundaries—mind/body, self/other, solitariness/community—that are challenged and troubled by Victorian writings on pain. Always astute and philosophically rewarding, it makes a major contribution to the growing body of contemporary work on the senses and emotions.