Historians and literary critics often align Victorian aesthetic philosophy – situated between Romantic-era metaphysics that emphasized sublimity and transcendence and early twentieth-century formalist literary criticism that disavowed affective reactions to art – with the more distanced approaches that preceded and followed it. However, in this ambitious and wide-ranging new book, Benjamin Morgan uncovers a parallel strand of aesthetic thought in nineteenth-century Britain – one that emphasized ‘materialist’ or ‘embodied’ relations to art (pp. 5–6). While Victorian thinkers like John Ruskin ‘balk[ed] at reducing the theory of art to a theory of its mechanistic effects on the senses’, others attempted to ‘scientize’ aesthetics, privileging somatic, corporeal responses over disinterested Kantian notions of sublimity (pp. 4, 47).

The Outward Mind is most remarkable for its staggering scope. Morgan draws together the history of Kantian aesthetics, Linnaean concepts of artistic response, early natural theology, Victorian narrative history and art criticism, and twentieth-century literary formalism into a tightly woven narrative that tells the story of how humans understand their relations to art. Morgan clearly and cogently illuminates a dizzying web of networks between writers, artists, natural theologians and physiologists – a feat that will arouse the interest of both literary scholars and historians of science. Most exciting is the book's unexpected but nonetheless convincing pairings of figures like Walter Pater, William Morris, Thomas Hardy and Vernon Lee with scientists like Grant Allen, James Sully, Alexander Bain and Edmund Gurney.

Morgan's opening chapter concerns early nineteenth-century theories of formal beauty by George Field and David Ramsay Hay, who studied the physiological effects of different colours and shapes. Morgan also examines studies of form and physiology by figures such as John Addington Symonds Sr and Thomas Laycock, whose 1860 work Mind and Brain analysed the degrees of sensory pleasure given by different kinds of poetry.

Morgan's subsequent chapters take on a more literary bent. Besides a brilliant reading of the nerves in Thomas Hardy – a section that could perhaps have been expanded – Morgan's analyses centre on Victorian writers whose connections to physiology are perhaps less obvious than those of, for instance, George Eliot. Chapters 2 and 3 uncover the physiological underpinnings of the writings of Walter Pater – a figure often associated with sublimity and abstraction. Morgan argues that Pater's writing, particularly his 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean, represents a kind of sensation fiction in the most literal terms in that it concerns human ‘sensuousness’ (p. 155). In drawing out this alternative narrative about Pater, Morgan offers a rethinking of aestheticism's investments in ‘irony, disinterest, and detachment’ (p. 137).

Chapter 4 complicates Morgan's argument in its focus on William Morris, a figure who possessed an uneasy relationship with physiological aesthetics. While Morris was deeply committed to the role of the social and political in human responses to art, he was also interested in the physiology of perception, as evidenced by his careful manipulation of space, print and illustration in his artistic books, calculated to appeal to the human eye. While literary critics might be left wanting a more in-depth discussion of Morris's fictional works, particularly News from Nowhere, Morgan succeeds in putting a wide range of Morris's work – literary, artistic and commercial – into a larger intellectual framework.

Chapter 5 focuses on the still-understudied late Victorian author Vernon Lee, who, as Morgan points out, was as much a scientist and a physiologist as she was a writer of fiction. Along with her lover Kit Anstruther-Thomson – to whom Morgan refreshingly gives much attention in her own right – Lee conducted significant social-science research in the vein of what we would now call qualitative analysis. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson interviewed over a hundred people about their reactions to music for Music and Its Lovers (1933) and systematically recorded their own responses to art as they wandered the museums of continental Europe. In doing so, Morgan suggests, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson had to learn to transcribe this ‘data’ in literary form – to develop new narrative techniques to capture their ‘semiconscious bodily responses’ (p. 242). In contrast to early twentieth-century literary critics such as William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, who famously loathed the use of ‘tears, prickles, or other physiological symptoms’ in literary interpretation, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson found a way to reconcile physiology and formal narrative (p. 258).

The Outward Mind offers a comprehensive account of an underexplored thread of Victorian aesthetics that will prove fruitful to scholars in a variety of fields. Morgan not only reconstructs an alternative history of nineteenth-century thought but also, perhaps even more importantly, stakes important claims for the intersection between the sciences and the humanities. By tracing the intersections between physiology and literature, art and philosophy, he offers an account of interdisciplinarity-in-action long before the term became an academic buzzword. According to Morgan, scientific and humanistic thought effected a kind of ‘mutual defamiliarization’ (p. 261) in the nineteenth century, in which the two disciplines urged each other to extend their boundaries, reframe their methodologies, develop new tools and ask broader questions about the relationship between art and human experience.