The figures who populate James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) shuffle mechanically through the city’s streets, mired in a condition that the poem famously compares to the continued functioning of a defaced timepiece:

Here and elsewhere in the poem, the parallels between Thomson’s vision of mechanical life and the theory of conscious automatism that Thomas Huxley would most fully articulate later the same year are striking, but those parallels have largely been overlooked in the criticism of “The City of Dreadful Night.”² Instead, knowing Thomson’s religious skepticism, and considering the periodical in which the poem was first serialized – the secularist National Reformer – critics have tended to read the purposeless wandering of the figures in “The City of Dreadful Night” as simply one means among many by which Thomson articulates his dreary atheistic vision. When critics have acknowledged Thomson’s interventions in scientific debate at all, they have tended to focus narrowly on his thinking about evolution, but Thomson was a far more serious reader of and commenter upon the scientific controversies of the 1860s and 1870s than such arguments suggest. This chapter aims to return “The City of Dreadful Night” to the midst of the science of those decades, focusing especially on the debates then raging about the extent and the implications of psychological automatism. In context, as the following pages will show, “The City of Dreadful Night” emerges as a poem that engages thoroughly and intelligently with ideas like Huxley’s conscious automatism and the theories of matter and energy that undergirded Huxley’s psychological thinking.

But the depiction of automatic life that Thomson offers in “The City of Dreadful Night” goes further than Huxley himself was willing to do. While Huxley argued that his theory retained space for purposive actions, merely shifting such purpose from consciousness to the body, Thomson puts forth a bleaker vision: more than merely devoid of purpose, Thomson’s figures are without the capacity to execute a purpose. Yet although Thomson is insistent on these figures’ lack of will, he does not deprive them of consciousness. Instead, Thomson puts forth a dualist theory of mind, but the minds to which the poem grants us access reveal these figures to be tormented by consciousness; while Huxley allowed for the feeling of volition, positioning that feeling as an effect rather than the cause of physical changes, Thomson’s figures are denied such illusions, forced to watch impotently while the real work of life goes on outside their control. Like Huxley, Thomson explains this impotence in the poem by invoking the “universal laws” (XIV.61) of physics, those laws that, as John Tyndall would put it that summer in his “Belfast Address,” “[bind] nature fast in fate.”³ Thomson, in short, insists upon the pessimistic conclusion to which religious readers feared Huxley’s theory of conscious automatism must inevitably lead: an impotent self inhabiting a godless world.

Yet material theories like Huxley’s were not the last word on psychological automatism in the 1870s. Restoring the poem to the midst of that decade’s debates about automatism – and especially setting it alongside the work of the man who sought most vociferously to counter theories like Huxley’s, William Carpenter – casts the poem in a surprising light, revealing hints of a much more complicated picture of the body’s (and mind’s) capacity to go on automatically. In this chapter’s final pages, I unearth echoes of Carpenter’s work in Thomson’s poem; while these parallels are surely not indicative of any wavering on Thomson’s part, they nevertheless destabilize his pessimistic take on automatism in telling ways. At a minimum, such moments allow this chapter to call attention to the variety of constructions of automatism in Victorian psychological writing. In this way, this chapter will offer a necessary supplement to the physiological turn in much recent criticism of Victorian poetry, uncovering the traces of immaterial constructions of the mind in even that poetry seemingly most committed to establishing the material basis of mental life.

James Thomson, Automatism, and Scientific Naturalism

Although he had discussed automatism in earlier work – work that predated “The City of Dreadful Night” – Huxley’s fullest (and most notorious) articulation of his theory of conscious automatism came at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Belfast in August 1874, in a lecture that he subsequently published in three periodicals as “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History” (1874).⁴ Building on the increasing amount of our bodily and mental activity that psychophysiologists had ceded to the reflex function, Huxley insists in that essay upon the material basis of consciousness, writing that “[i]t is experimentally demonstrable … that a mode of motion of the nervous system is the immediate antecedent of a state of consciousness.”⁵ That is to say that, for Huxley, our bodies are the source of thought and action; consciousness comes after the molecular “mode of motion” in our bodies. Consciousness, then, as Huxley puts it in perhaps the essay’s most controversial image, is as powerless to control the working of the body “as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery.”⁶

To justify such a thoroughgoing denial of the efficacy of volition, Huxley turns to the latest theorizing in the physical sciences:

While Huxley asserts here that, in a sense, we remain free to “do as we like,” that claim is undercut by his implicit invocation of the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy, in his description of the chain of cause and effect. Since the universe constitutes a closed energy system, in which energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it would be impossible for an entity like that immaterial will on which more conservative theorists insisted to interfere in the “unbroken continuity” of material events. Writing in the next issue of the Fortnightly Review, W. K. Clifford makes this point explicit, citing “the law of the conservation of energy” to argue that no energy is added between the moment a stimulus affects our senses and our subsequent response.⁸

Huxley himself anticipated the criticism his theory would elicit: the religious, he notes, will insist that the consequences of his theory “are fatalism, materialism, and atheism.”⁹ These were charges that Huxley denied, but to Christian ears Huxley’s assault on volition must have dire consequences, seeming to eliminate the possibility of moral action. As more than one historian of science has noted, the will had also become by the 1870s a last bulwark for conservative theorists; it seemed to stand in their work as nearly synonymous with the immaterial and immortal soul.¹⁰ Strictly speaking, Huxley’s theory preserved the dualism on which conservative theorists insisted, as I discuss later in this chapter, but it did so in ways that directly challenged such a conflation of consciousness and soul, rendering the mind largely superfluous and making it wholly a product of molecular action in the nerves and brain.

Thomson was keenly interested in automatic action and its implications for free will, an interest that was surely fueled by his own experience of automatic states – the half-light of his bouts of insomnia, or the habitual drunkenness that plagued his later years. Certainly Thomson reaches for the language of automatism to describe his own suffering in these and related states. In his prose phantasy “A Lady of Sorrow” (1867), for example – which, as Thomson’s friend and editor Bertram Dobell notes, charts Thomson’s own grief at the death of the teenage girl Thomson tended to treat as the angelic love of his life, Matilda Weller¹¹ – Thomson figures the condition into which the “mighty enchantress” Sorrow threw him after that loss in mechanical terms: “As I passed daily through the streets, my eyes must have pictured the buildings and the people, my ears must have vibrated to the roar of the vehicles; but my inward vision was fixed the while on her, my inward ear was attentive to her voice alone.”¹² Elsewhere he even more explicitly draws upon the language of automatism to describe this state, insisting both on a rigid division between body and mind and on the body’s ability to function on its own: he writes how, when first visited by the lady of the title, “my spirit was stunned and lay as dead in the body mechanically alive.”¹³

Yet to limit Thomson’s interest in automatic states to concern with his own maladies is to risk missing the breadth of his engagement with the phenomena. One of Thomson’s more remarkable considerations of the range of such states is the long article he published in 1876 – nearly twenty years after the book’s publication – on Garth Wilkinson’s Improvisations from the Spirit (1857), a collection of automatic poetry.¹⁴ Thomson rejects Wilkinson’s mystical explanation of the origins of his poetry:

Thomson, that is, positions such states as ecstasy and trance on a continuum with the more mundane conditions of our existence, generalizing automatism in ways similar to Huxley’s theory; even the most typical forms of consciousness, he thereby implies, are to be understood as fundamentally automatic. His insistence on a naturalist explanation for the phenomenon to which Wilkinson credits his poems is typical of his approach to such matters; what is surprising here is Thomson’s dismissal of science’s efforts to explain these states, a dismissal that threatens to obscure how widely read he was in the work of scientific naturalists like Huxley.

Certainly Thomson wrote frequently in the pages of The National Reformer about Huxley, John Tyndall, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, expressing full-throated support for their efforts to disprove such supernaturalism as Wilkinson’s. Thomson’s interest in evolution is well known, but most significant for my own argument are Thomson’s frequent discussions in his journalism of Tyndall’s notorious “Belfast Address,” which was given at the same BAAS conference as Huxley’s automatism lecture.¹⁶ Thomson dedicates his August 30, 1874, “Jottings” column in The National Reformer to a detailed discussion of Tyndall’s argument, and the aspects on which he chooses to focus are revealing. He quotes Tyndall’s description of the conservation of energy as “one of the great generalisation[s] reached in our day,” repeating Tyndall’s tracing of the origins of that theory to the “constancy and indestructibility of matter,” a connection that is key to “The City of Dreadful Night,” as I explain later in this chapter.¹⁷ Equally important in the passage that Thomson quotes is Tyndall’s discussion of the implications of the conservation of energy, that it

Although he does not describe Huxley’s application of these ideas to the immaterial will, Thomson does turn to mental science, writing that “[w]ith the mass of materials furnished by the physicist and physiologist in his hands, Mr. Spencer twenty years ago sought to graft upon this basis a system of psychology.”¹⁹

While conservative readers balked at what they saw as the inevitable consequences of theories of conscious automatism like Huxley’s, Thomson, himself by the 1870s a confirmed pessimist and atheist, embraced those consequences. Thomson – a posthumous collection of whose essays was aptly titled Satires and Profanities (1884) – seemed never to tire of baiting the religious; Isobel Armstrong justly describes him as “deliberately blasphemous” in his writing.²⁰ And so, when he returned to Tyndall’s “Belfast Address” in his November 15, 1874, “Jottings” column, Thomson complained that Tyndall was not willing to confront the religious aggressively enough, lamenting what he described as Tyndall’s “repudiation” of atheism after Belfast.²¹ But disappointed as he was by Tyndall’s refusal to embrace what seemed like the necessary implications of his thinking, Thomson claims in that column to sympathize with what he figures as Tyndall’s clinging to the old faith, writing, “Who does not know intelligent and conscientious men whose creed has little by little yielded up all its life of brain and heart, and who yet cling to the mummy with desperate self-delusion rather than be left alone in the world?”²² In “The City of Dreadful Night,” however, Thomson avoided Tyndall’s – and Huxley’s – error, refusing to cling to the similarly desiccated corpse of volition in his vision of mechanical life.

Mechanical Life in “The City of Dreadful Night”

Considering Thomson’s insistence on going further than even Tyndall was publicly willing to do, it is hardly a surprise that “The City of Dreadful Night” offers the most troubling possible version of something very much like Huxley’s conscious automatism. While Huxley himself sought to fend off charges of materialism, fatalism, and atheism, that is, Thomson embraces such charges, painting the figures who trudge through the poem as mere clockwork, utterly devoid of will. Thomson establishes this trance-like impotence in the poem’s first section:

The rhyme of “wander” and “ponder” in lines 54 and 55 cements the connection between action and thought – both are aimless and abstracted, with the slack final syllables of the feminine rhyme perhaps underscoring their lack of purposeful vigor – just as that rhyme seems to situate the mental and the physical on a single plane. Like the figure of the defaced watch with which I began – a figure offered by a character who himself mechanically and endlessly retraces his steps, ever revisiting the sites at which Faith, Love, and Hope died – these “spectral wanderers” (XIV.27) trudge on without aim or purpose, as numerous critics have noted.²³ Volition is such an oddity in this city that the speaker follows the source of the defaced timepiece image merely “[b]ecause he seemed to walk with an intent” (II.1). If the denizens of the city occasionally interrupt the abstracted murmurs that constitute the majority of their speech by giving in “[t]o frenzy which must rave” (I.68), the force of that line’s “must,” it seems to me, is to position even such outbursts as unwilled, moments in which language itself overflows its bounds. Those who rave, in other words, appear like the vessels through which language energetically expresses itself, like mere bodies through which larger forces flow, a point to which I will return later in this chapter. It is fitting, then, that the reviewer in the Athenæum accuses Thomson of a similarly automatic and undisciplined ejaculation, drawing upon the language of energy to make the point: “The poet feels within himself an energy which demands expression, but the very energy which, properly directed, results in excellent work will often produce an impatient restlessness which prevents him from sitting down calmly to reflect upon anything whatever. He seizes – if not at haphazard, at least without duly considering it – upon the first striking subject that presents itself.”²⁴

But if Thomson’s figures – like Thomson himself – move, even speak, without will, the poem makes clear that some part of them remains more lucid than their dazed actions might suggest, a detail expressed through the distinction Thomson consistently draws between surface and depth, as in Section XI:

What is essential in this stanza’s insistence on the simultaneous insanity and rationality of the city’s wanderers, at least so far as the poem’s engagement with theories of automatism is concerned, is the way it erects a seemingly insuperable barrier between rational mind and uncontrollable – “insane” – body. The wanderers are in possession of their faculties, but that perfect reason remains barricaded in the brain, incapable of exerting its will.²⁵ This is a conundrum toward which Thomson also gestures in his notebook, where he seems to multiply such divisions:

Thomson here reverses his usual figure, aligning consciousness with the outer self that lives and works – once again placing thought and action on the same mechanical level – and shifting the adjective “cold” to the part of himself from which his consciousness is cut off. But this passage’s insistence on a “disabling separation” between the inner and outer selves nevertheless resonates with the division Thomson describes in “The City of Dreadful Night,” the sense of consciousness trapped in the flesh, trailed along by the body yet powerless to impose its will. It is worth recalling here Suzy Anger’s point that Huxley’s theory of conscious automatism “is a dualist conception of mind, but one that limits consciousness to registering the private, the ‘what it feels like to me’”;²⁷ for Thomson, however, this state of impotent awareness shades into nightmare. Hence in “The City of Dreadful Night” Thomson traces the “insanity” of the city’s wretches to [t]he “dreadful strain / Of thought and consciousness which never ceases” (I.74–5), what the poem elsewhere describes as “[a]n everlasting conscious inanition” (XIII.40). Indeed, the pain of an impotent consciousness is such that the greatest blessing the poem can offer, its “[o]ne anodyne for torture and despair” (I.80), is “[t]he certitude of Death” (I.81), “[t]hat draught whose slumber nothing can bereave” (I.84).

If Thomson’s recourse to the language of insanity risks pathologizing automatism, limiting it to the sort of abnormal conditions – insomnia, alcoholism – that plagued Thomson himself, any hope that impotence might be a discrete condition, a local ailment from which only the nighttime population of this city suffers, is quickly dashed. For in spelling out the logic of the impotence at the poem’s heart, Thomson – like Huxley – turns to the theories of energy and matter that, later that year, Tyndall would hail as the great generalizations of the day.²⁸ The mechanical action on which I have been focusing in the poem, after all, is not uniquely human but is replicated in the action of the unconscious and non-sentient world, even comes to stand as merely a single form of that universal action, as in the linguistic outbursts I described earlier in this chapter. As one of the two speakers overheard on the river-walk in Section VIII insists, “The world rolls round for ever like a mill; / It grinds out death and life and good and ill; / It has no purpose, heart or mind or will” (VIII.36–8); the cyclicality of this image, as numerous critics have noted, parallels the circular paths traced by the city’s residents.²⁹ My point is that the human wandering this poem depicts finally comes into focus as but one part of the same flow of matter and energy, alike subject to what the preacher in Section XIV calls “the universal laws, / Which never had for man a special clause / Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate” (XIV.61–3). The lines from Section VIII that I quoted earlier in this paragraph refuse to trace the universe’s grinding cyclicality to heart or mind or will, but that absence ultimately makes no difference to the course of material events. Walled off from the unbroken chain of material cause and effect, as Huxley would put it, the minds that we possess are unable to alter what the preacher of Section XIV later labels “Necessity Supreme” (XIV.75), a title that seems to amount to much the same thing as Tyndall’s claim in the “Belfast Address” that the first law of thermodynamics “binds nature fast in fate.”³⁰ In the poem, the preacher’s subsequent assertion that even our births are bound by the physical laws of the universe works to similar effect, describing how the play of “forces” – a telling choice of words – shapes our lives: “If one is born a certain day on earth, / All times and forces tended to that birth, / Not all the world could change or hinder it” (XIV.70–2).³¹

As Thomson would note in his discussion of the “Belfast Address” later in 1874, as I described earlier in this chapter, Tyndall traced the origins of the theory of the conservation of energy to the recognition of the indestructability of matter; it was this indestructibility, in Tyndall’s telling, that suggested to scientists the equal impossibility of destroying or creating energy.³² Thomson anticipates this connection between atoms and energy in “The City of Dreadful Night,” seeming to position the circulation of atomic matter – its unending movement from one form to another – as the ultimate engine driving the wandering of the poem’s figures.³³ Indeed, the poem grants these atoms an agency it denies its human wanderers, as in the preacher’s evolutionary claim that “[a]ll substance lives and struggles evermore / Through countless shapes continually at war, / By countless interactions interknit” (XIV.67–9). Earlier in Section XIV Thomson is more precise about the status of the substance he names here, as in the way the preacher guarantees the peaceful oblivion of death by explaining the ultimate fate of our bodies: “Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, / Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh / In earth, air, water, plants, and other men” (XIV.52–4). The consequence of such claims, I am suggesting, is ultimately to reduce all motion to this atomic level, for the poem insists in these passages on even human life as but another manifestation of matter’s movement. Conscious or not, we are fundamentally indistinguishable from earth, air, water, plants.³⁴ This point is only reinforced by Thomson’s oft-noted tendency to describe the city as a necropolis, again rendering the wandering this poem describes as merely a different view of the circulation of dead matter.

“A Skilful Rider”: Dualism, Will, and Automatic Action

But while Thomson seems intent in “The City of Dreadful Night” on following automatism to what he implies are its inevitable consequences – the materialism, fatalism, and atheism with which Huxley knew he would be charged – it remained clear to other Victorian observers that none of these were necessary consequences of automatism itself. Indeed, the work of another key theorist of psychological automatism, William Carpenter, also resonates in compelling ways with Thomson’s poem, as different as the beliefs of the two men were.³⁵ In his Principles of Mental Physiology (1874) – as well as a series of essays he published in the 1870s – Carpenter emerged as perhaps the strongest voice for an orthodox dualist psychology against Huxley’s theory of conscious automatism. Carpenter himself – along with Thomas Laycock – had been central in extending the reflex function to the cerebrum, theorizing what he labeled “unconscious cerebration.” But while Carpenter was willing to acknowledge the mind’s ability to function automatically, he continued to argue for the possibility of conscious volition, insisting upon an immaterial will’s ability to control the automatic mechanisms of the body.³⁶

In his “On the Doctrine of Human Automatism” (1876), for example, Carpenter notes that many of the automatic actions to which Huxley points in his essay as evidence for human automatism are acquired actions, at least initially dependent for their development on the exercise of the will: in human beings, he suggests, “the higher forms of activity can only be excited in the first instance through the consciousness, though they too may become automatic by frequent repetition”³⁷ The surest proof of the freedom of our wills, for Carpenter, is the evidence of our own consciousness: “[I]f I assert, on the basis of every-day experience, that my conscious Ego can direct my automaton to execute this movement, it is surely no answer to say that because my automaton was competent to do it for itself, therefore my conscious Ego really had nothing to do with it.”³⁸

To this point, it is tempting to conclude that Carpenter’s discussion of automatism has little in common with the nightmare vision presented in Thomson’s poem. After all, part of the torment of consciousness in “The City of Dreadful Night” is the evidence it provides us of the impotence of our wills, of the impossibility of our exerting any power over ourselves or the world around us. But the vehicle – “Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse” (IX.16) – that appears in Section IX of the poem seems to point directly to Carpenter:

Repeatedly in his psychological work, Carpenter turns to the similar figure of horse and rider to illustrate the will’s capacity to play upon the body’s automatic functions. In Principles of Mental Physiology, for example, he writes that “the relation between the Automatic activity of the body, and the Volitional direction by which it is utilized and directed, may be compared to the independent locomotive power of a horse under the guidance and control of a skilful rider.”³⁹

Whether or not the drudges of Section IX in “The City of Dreadful Night” are skillful is unclear; they are certainly incapacitated, either fully unconscious or three parts of the way there. Yet in this detail, too, Thomson echoes Carpenter, for Carpenter expands the analogy to describe our own abstracted actions: Carpenter writes, “[T]he horse will quietly find his way home, whilst his rider, wrapped in a profound reverie, entirely ceases to guide him; just as our own legs carry us along a course which habit has made familiar, while our Mind is engaged only upon its own operations, and our Will is altogether in abeyance.”⁴⁰ Indeed, Carpenter adds later in Principles of Mental Physiology that our body’s ability to find its way without the guidance of the will is evidence of the patient energy previously exerted by the will in forming habits:

But what is perhaps most significant in Carpenter’s frequent returns to this figure is the way he finally uses it in “On the Doctrine of Human Automatism” to counter the scientific naturalists’ insistence that the conservation of energy rendered impossible a self-directing will. After all, the rider does not create the energy of the horse, but merely directs it: “[J]ust as a rider utilizes and directs the motor energy of his horse, so, I maintain, does the mind of man utilize and direct (within certain limits) the physical energy of his body, turning this to account not only in muscular movement, but also in those cerebral changes which serve as the bases of further mental operations.”⁴²

Such connections become all the more significant in light of the image with which “The City of Dreadful Night” closes, Thomson’s description of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia, a figure, it is worth noting, whom Thomson describes as being “[s]ustained by her indomitable will” (XXI.52). Even the weak gain something from looking upon her:

The ambiguity of this image, the way it threatens to run counter to all in the poem that has come before, is underscored by the many readers who, despite the poem’s conclusion with the word “despair,” have found something hopeful or comforting in it.⁴³ After all, however inert the exercise of her will (although we are told that “she works on still” [XXI.50]), the figure of Melencolia seems to hint at possibilities that Thomson has elsewhere been at pains to deny. Thomson is quick to try to close down any hope Melencolia might arouse, insisting that she shows “[t]hat all is vanity and nothingness” (XXI.70); but in light of the poem’s echoes of Carpenter’s images of a volition that is only temporarily in abeyance, the will that Thomson grants Melencolia threatens to destabilize the poem’s insistence on our impotence.

Nor is Thomson’s depiction of the unconscious riders the only way in which “The City of Dreadful Night” seems to echo Carpenter’s more conservative theory of psychological automatism. Carpenter’s position seems equally to be captured in a figure for which Thomson often reached to defend his pessimistic outlook. As critics have frequently recounted, after Thomson sent a copy of the poem to George Eliot, she responded in a May 1874 letter by expressing her hope that “an intellect informed by so much passionate energy as yours will soon give us more heroic strains with a wider embrace of human fellowship in them.”⁴⁴ Thomson replied by acknowledging the limits of his own poetic vision: “I am aware that the truth of midnight does not exclude the truth of noonday, though one’s nature may lead him to dwell in the former rather than the latter.”⁴⁵ Significantly, this was a description of perspectival truth that Thomson had used before in print. Positioning himself as merely the editor of “A Lady of Sorrow,” Thomson there asks whether the composition that follows is “true in relation to the world and general life”:

The image of the double-sided coin on which Thomson here finally settles parallels a metaphor that appears repeatedly in the psychological literature, a metaphor to which Carpenter often turned to refute reductionist psychophysiological constructions of mind like Huxley’s. Carpenter uses it in Principles of Mental Physiology, for example, to describe the controversies between materialists and “spiritualists” about the nature of mind: these controversies, Carpenter insists, are “almost as absurd as that mortal contest, which (as fable tells us) was once carried on by two knights respecting the material of a shield seen by them from opposite sides, the one maintaining it to be made of gold, the other of silver, and each proving to be in the right as regarded the half seen by himself.”⁴⁷

Thomson, of course, does not evoke the figure of the two-sided coin explicitly in “The City of Dreadful Night,” but more than one critic has noted the limitations of the poem’s perspective. Its very title situates its vision as merely one half of the story, hinting at a daytime vision that would surely look very different. As I have discussed, Thomson’s insistence on “universal laws” is aimed at forestalling such a reading, is aimed at generalizing his vision, but it should nevertheless come as no surprise that at least one contemporary reviewer of Thomson’s poetry reached for a closely related image to the double-sided shield to blunt the edges of Thomson’s pessimism. Amy Levy writes of Thomson:

Others, if they did not employ the same metaphor, made much the same point, refusing Thomson the universality he claimed for his necessitarian vision. The title of the review of Thomson’s first two volumes of poetry in The London Quarterly Review – “Optimist and Pessimist Poetry” – equally positions Thomson’s perspective as merely one possible approach, and not the right one: that reviewer insists, “Of course we start from the basis that pessimism is heresy.”⁴⁹ The review in the Athenæum, meanwhile, goes so far as to describe the poem as “a bitter satire upon atheism,” suggesting that Thomson “has simply written ‘dreadful’ poetry because just now it is the fashion to be dreadful.”⁵⁰

However bleak Thomson’s vision in “The City of Dreadful Night,” that is, praise of the poem often hinged on readers’ ability to cordon off or rationalize away its pessimism. One of my points in this chapter has concerned the part that theories of psychological automatism could play in such rationalizations. While Thomson’s insistence on undergirding his dreary vision with the latest psychological thinking about the rigid division between our bodies and our minds allowed him to deny us an efficacious will, that psychological context simultaneously provided Victorian readers with possibilities for reading against the poem’s grain. That even as unrelenting a pessimist as Thomson could be so consistently defanged by readers and reviewers surely has the potential to tell us a great deal about the way both poetry and psychological writing were understood – and misunderstood – in the period, as I have argued elsewhere.⁵¹ But while considerable critical attention has been paid in recent years to tracing the way Victorian poetry engaged with and contributed to the development of new physiological theories of mind, even if Thomson’s part in those engagements has been largely overlooked, such work has often tended to have too little to say about the important role that conservative theories like Carpenter’s continued to play in such conversations.⁵² My focus here has been on the contested status of psychological automatism, of course: if in Huxley’s notorious argument such phenomena seemed to confirm conservative fears about materialist assaults on the possibility of agency and on the existence of anything beyond the body, I have sought to show that it bears keeping in mind that Huxley’s was far from the only theory of automatism on offer. Just as more conservative readers were able to reconcile Thomson’s pessimism with their own beliefs, even as potentially troubling a phenomenon as our body’s capacity to act without – even despite – our wills could be made to fit alongside an abiding faith in that which transcended matter and forestalled despair.