Self-Help and the Helpless Subject

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Industrial Age

Cara E. Murray, “Self-Help and the Helpless Subject: Samuel Smiles and Biography’s Objects” (pp. 481–508) This essay examines how the changing relationship between human subjects and industrial objects in the industrial age redraws the conventions of the most influential strand of nineteenth-century biography, self-help. It argues that Samuel Smiles’s greatest contribution to biography, self-help, arises from his initial recognition of how, in an industrial age, objects shape subjects, and then from his subsequent demonstration of how subjects surmount that very phenomenon. By tracing the strides that Smiles makes in his biographical project from his earliest speeches in the mid-1840s, and then to his technical and biographical writings of the following decade, to his synthesis of these two forms in Self-Help (1859), this essay demonstrates how Smiles develops the genre of self-help out of writing about men’s changing relation to objects. It argues that Self-Help teaches the paradoxical lesson that at the height of industrialization men no longer need to depend upon machines. With this message, Self-Help invigorates biography by providing it with the ideological purpose of teaching Victorians that in the age of machines man can help himself.

Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Josephine Hoegaerts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
National Language ◽  
Systematic Observation ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.

Genealogy of the Cerebral Subject

Being Brains ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Vidal ◽  
Francisco Ortega
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Brain Structure And Function ◽  
Cerebral Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Function ◽  
Cerebral Self ◽  
The Brain

The first chapter proposes to trace the distant roots of the cerebral subject to the late seventeenth century, and particularly to debates about the seat of the soul, the corpuscularian theory of matter, and John Locke’s philosophy of personal identity. In the wake of Locke, eighteenth century authors began to assert that the brain is the only part of the body we need to be ourselves. In the nineteenth century, this form of deterministic essentialism contributed to motivate research into brain structure and function, and in turn confirmed the brain-personhood nexus. Since then, from phrenology to functional neuroimaging, neuroscientific knowledge and representations have constituted a powerful support for prescriptive outlooks on the individual and society. “Neuroascesis,” as we call the business that sells programs of cerebral self-discipline, is a case in point, which this chapter also examines. It appeals to the brain and neuroscience as bases for its self-help recipes to enhance memory and reasoning, fight depression, anxiety and compulsions, improve sexual performance, achieve happiness, and even establish a direct contact with God. Yet underneath the neuro surface lie beliefs and even concrete instructions that can be traced to nineteenth-century hygiene manuals.

INTEMPERATE NARRATIVES: TORY TIPPLERS, LIBERAL ABSTAINERS, AND VICTORIAN BRITISH SOCIALIST FICTION

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 471-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Mutch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Contributory Factor ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Public House ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
Working Practices ◽  
Socialist Movement

Attitudes toward the consumption of alcohol by the British working class had begun to shift during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, as the environment and working conditions were gradually recognised as being a major contributory factor in drunkenness. Friedrich Engels had raised the environmental issue in 1845 in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, arguing that cramped, uncomfortable living conditions and harsh working practices drove the worker to drink. Engels states of the worker, “His enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, loudly demands some external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public house, he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. How can he be expected to resist the temptation?” (133). But the power of the temperance movement's focus on individual responsibility and self-help during the mid-nineteenth century meant Engels's focus was not widely accepted until the resurgence of socialism at the end of the century. By then resentment was rising within both the working class generally and the socialist movement against the imposition of abstinence, especially when the consumption of other classes remained steady. As Brian Harrison states, “it was now suspected that [the workers] were being hypocritically inculcated by self-interested capitalists,” (402) and British socialists were keen to promote this perspective.

Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mystery Plays ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Imagination ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Theatrical Representation ◽  
Mind's Eye

In the early nineteenth century, the biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the novel, the oratorio, and poetry, but spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban on religious theatrical representation was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about impersonation, performance, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation. But by mid-century, the turn towards medievalism in visual culture, antiquarianism in literary history, and the ‘popular’ in constitutional reform placed England’s pre-Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national theatrical literature. In this changing climate, how was England’s rich heritage of vernacular sacred drama to be understood? This book probes the tensions inherent in the idea of ‘incarnational art’—whether, after the Reformation, ‘presence’ was only to be conjured up in the mind’s eye by the act of reading, or whether drama could rightfully reclaim all the implications of ‘incarnation’ understood in the Christian tradition as ‘the word made flesh’. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the recovery of the medieval mystery plays and their subsequent impact on the national imagination. The second half of the book looks at the gradual relaxation of the ban on the performance of sacred drama and asks whether Christian theatre can ever be truly tragic, whether art perpetually reanimates or appropriates sacred ideas, and whether there is any place for sacramental thought in a post-Darwinian, industrial age.

The Time Revolutionaries of 1859

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Clive Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Water Supply ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Freezing Time ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Unlimited Time ◽  
Conflicting Interests

The three principals, their partners, families, and networks are introduced. The chapter uses Darwin’s explanation of natural selection in 1857: ‘We have almost unlimited time; no-one but a practical geologist can fully appreciate this.’ Evans, Lubbock, and Prestwich were all practical geologists but with conflicting interests in managing London’s water supply for health and business. The chapter explores their geological passion and how they came to investigate the question of great human antiquity—the crux of the time revolution. The idea of using stone tools as a proxy for remote human ancestors is examined and the challenges which faced them set out. The characters of the principals are mapped onto the ideals in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, where zeal and perseverance sum up the qualities of success in all walks of life. George Eliot’s observations in Adam Bede on the men of New Leisure provides another fit for the three time revolutionaries. The preoccupation of the mid-nineteenth century with time is also examined using three inventions, the railways and railway time, shrinking distance—and hence time—by telegraphy, and freezing time with photographs. Examples range across literature and engineering.

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