Japanese Buddhist temples had traditionally relied on the high levels of social capital within the local village to enforce the giving they needed to stay solvent. When men and women began to leave the villages for the anomic cities, the temples found themselves without the necessary funds. In response, they turned from what had been an effective village retainer contract to an individual fee-for-service model of finance. Unfortunately for the temples, they market their priceable services (primarily ceremonies connected to deaths) within competitive markets. Unable to sell above marginal cost, they have been unable to cross-subsidize their other – less priceable – services.

A brief entry in Jerome’s Chronicle – the only Life of Lucretius surviving from antiquity – claims that he wrote De rerum natura ‘in the intervals of insanity’ before committing suicide. Jerome’s brief Life and its early modern accretions became a virtual blueprint for reading Lucretius’ poem in biofictional terms. De rerum natura was seen as a document of a mind divided against itself: the Life interacted with contradictions in the text to read Lucretius’ poem as a dramatized version of a modern subject facing the competing pressures of religion and its scientific other. This chapter looks at how Victorian readers engaged in biofictional receptions of De rerum natura as a means to thinking through psychological modernity. Lucretius’ popularity – as is now widely acknowledged – was crucial to the scientific culture of the period. But his Life and his poem were associated with another sort of inquiry: the psychological investigation of the human mind. Focusing on Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, the chapter examines how these writers, in exploring the make-up of the human psyche at the crisis of modernity, used biofictional reading of Lucretius’ to work through contemporary cultural anxieties. The Roman poet was co-opted as an ersatz Victorian, and, in the process, modern subjectivity itself could be discovered.