Victorian Literary Aesthetics and Mental Pathology

In WHAT GOOD ARE THE ARTS? (2005), a polemic aimed at shredding many longstanding conceptions of art and aesthetic judgement, the literary critic John Carey briefly discusses a bibliotherapy project established over a decade earlier in West Yorkshire by John Duffy. This was a project in which patients with depression, stress and anxiety disorders were given the opportunity to participate in reading groups, book advice surgeries and other literacy activities, having been referred to the service by mental health practitioners – an alternative to the anti-depressant medication commonly prescribed to such patients by GPs. The service users in question were ‘helped by art’, in Carey’s words, not treated by pharmacological means. The initiative demonstrated the potential therapeutic benefits of reading books, while seeming to dismantle the languid association of art with uselessness or transcendence, as distilled in W. H. Auden’s phrase, ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ For Carey, bibliotherapy programmes like this one could not help also rubbing up against established notions of literary value, in turn reviving old questions over the nature and ends of art generally.