This chapter situates James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” in the midst of Victorian debates about psychological automatism, finding in the poem’s vision of mechanical life the materialistic and atheistic consequences to which conservative readers feared that theories like Thomas Huxley’s conscious automatism must lead. Thomson depicts not just the impotence of consciousness; he uses automatism to challenge the very possibility of free will. But while Thomson found in psychological automatism a confirmation of his own pessimism, this chapter notes that others in the 1870s articulated theories of the phenomenon that retained space for an immaterial and efficacious will (and the soul for which it seemed to stand). By considering how Thomson’s poem resonates with one key example of such conservative models, the work of William Carpenter, this chapter ultimately reveals the surprising endurance of an orthodox psychological dualism in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines the conscious automata theory as advanced by Thomas Huxley in his controversial essay “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (1874), which posits that human consciousness is a mere byproduct of neural processes, not, as is widely thought, the initiator or controller of voluntary behavior. This chapter asks why a theory that denied the efficacy of consciousness strongly captured the Victorian cultural imagination, and considers the implications of the view for aesthetic production. It explores late nineteenth-century responses to conscious automatism in philosophy, psychology, literature, and popular culture, before looking more closely at the treatment of the ideas in Samuel Butler’s “Book of the Machines” and George Eliot’s “Shadows of the Coming Race,” alongside George Henry Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind. The chapter argues that rather than diminishing consciousness, Huxley’s theory removes consciousness from science and hands it over to aesthetics and, especially, literary texts.

The rich diversity of industrial achievements at the Great Exhibition of 1851 stimulated debate about the factors making such developments abundant in the modern age. Campaigners for science education pointed to the superiority of international competitors, to the roots of relative decline, means of mitigation through their favourite measures, and the importance of new institutions – such as those promoting knowledge of applied science, foregrounding the term. The wish to emulate France led to new bodies, such as the government’s Department of Science and Art, which paid teachers across the land and ran examinations, and Birmingham’s private Mason College; to the substantial development of Manchester’s Owens College; and to widespread public debate. In Parliament, Bernhard Samuelson further popularised the term ‘applied science’, promoting and obtaining an enquiry into its teaching. Though Thomas Huxley famously condemned the term at the 1880 opening of Mason College, the donor’s spokesman warned that we should credit it for Mason’s philanthropy.