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Realism in Pain: Literary and Social Constructions of Victorian Pain in the Age of Anaesthesia, 1846-1870

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Realism in Pain: Literary and Social Constructions of Victorian Pain in the Age of Anaesthesia, 1846-1870 REALISM IN PAIN: LITERARY AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF VICTORIAN PAIN IN THE AGE OF ANAESTHESIA, 1846-1870 ________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board ________________________________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ________________________________________________________________________ by Dana M. Harrison May 2013 Examining Committee Members: Dr. Peter Logan, Advisory Chair, English Dr. Susan Wells, English Dr. Rachel Buurma, English, Swarthmore College Dr. Oliver Gaycken, English, University of Maryland Dr. Travis Glasson, External Member, History © by Dana M. Harrison 2013 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT In 1846 and 1847, ether and chloroform were used and celebrated for the first time in Britain and the United States as effective surgical anaesthetics capable of rendering individuals insensible to physical pain. During the same decade, British novels of realism were enjoying increasing cultural authority, dominating readers’ attention, and evoking readers’ sympathy for numerous social justice issues. This dissertation investigates a previously unanswered question in studies of literature and medicine: how did writers of social realism incorporate realistic descriptions of physical pain, a notoriously difficult sensation to describe, in an era when the very idea of pain’s inevitability was challenged by medical developments and when, concurrently, novelists, journalists, and politicians were concerned with humanitarian reforms to recognize traditionally ignored and disadvantaged individuals and groups in pain? By contextualizing the emergence of specific realist novels including works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, William Howard Russell, and Charles Dickens, within larger nonfiction discourses regarding factory reform, prison reform, and war, this dissertation identifies and clarifies how realist authors, who aim to demonstrate general truths about “real life,” employed various descriptions of physical pain during this watershed moment in medicine and pain theory, to convince readers of their validity as well as to awaken sympathetic politics among readers. This study analyzes Gaskell’s first industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), Reade’s prison-scandal novel, It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), Russell’s Crimean War correspondence (1850s) and only novel, The Adventures of Doctor Brady (1868), and iii Dickens’s second Bildungsroman, Great Expectations (1861), thereby revealing different strategies utilized by each author representing pain – ranging from subtle to graphic, collective to individualized, urgent to remembered, and destructive to productive. This study shows how audience expectations, political timing, authorial authority, and medical theory influence and are influenced by realist authors writing pain, as they contribute to a cultural consensus that the pain of others is unacceptable and requires attention. These realist authors must, in the end, provide fictionalized accounts of pain, asking readers to act as witnesses and to use their imaginations, in order to inspire sympathy. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have so many people to thank for their kindness, generosity, and support over many years of graduate study at multiple graduate programs. I am happy to have the opportunity to acknowledge, finally, the early influence and encouragement of my professors of German Literature at the University of Delaware and everyone in the English Department at Rutgers University, Camden, for believing in my abilities, opening my eyes to new ways of reading, and providing teaching assistantships. More recently, I have benefited from a University Fellowship and graduate assistantships from Temple University, which made several years of coursework and research possible. I also want to thank the English Department of Rowan University, especially Dr. Cathy Parrish, for the thoughtful teaching schedules, open doors, and positive energy during the final stages of writing this dissertation. The vicissitudes of life as a graduate student often make staying in touch difficult, so I would like to thank all of my fellow graduate students who, in one way or another, helped me to understand my work and shared their impressive insights over the years. Thanks also to the members of the occasional Nineteenth-Century British Writing Group, especially Professor Sally Mitchell, who generously offered comments on my first dissertation chapter draft and kindly gave me an old hardcover copy of Charles Reade’s novel. I have learned so much from each and every professor I have worked with during my Ph.D. experience, particularly Dr. Steve Newman, and the members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Sue Wells, Dr. Oliver Gaycken, Dr. Rachel Buurma, and Dr. Peter Logan. Thanks for the enthusiasm, insight, understanding, time, feedback, advice, and fascinating research. I am very grateful to Dr. Travis Glasson for reading the v dissertation and offering a historian’s perspective. I was particularly fortunate to have Peter Logan, my advisor, challenging and guiding me through this process. Thank you. I would not be able to accomplish anything academically without the love of friends and family, and in this I have been lucky. I want to take this opportunity to thank all of my friends who have supported me in so many ways over so many years, especially Petra Frisk, Meg Herrmann, Cauleen Noël, Evan Roskos, and Laura Roskos: thanks for the brilliance, the conversation, the laughter, and always understanding what I’m trying to say. Finally, I want to thank everyone in the Harrison, Rusnack, and Manns families for unconditional love. You believed in me from the beginning and I never had reason to doubt that I could accomplish my goals. To my father, Craig Harrison, without whom nothing I am would be possible; to my mother, Karen Harrison, who let me borrow as many books from the library as I could carry and whom I will always miss; and to my brother, Adam Harrison, who is strong in ways I am not, thanks, with love. vi In Loving Memory of Karen Manns Harrison 1952-2012 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v DEDICATION.................................................................................................................. vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: REALISM IN PAIN ................................................................1 2. REVISING WORKING-CLASS PAIN: ELIZABETH GASKELL’S MARY BARTON AND PAIN “IN THE MINOR KEY”......................................................................................................................24 3. NARRATING PRISONERS’ PAIN: SCENES OF PHYSICAL TORTURE IN CHARLES READE’S IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND ...................................................................70 4. WRITING THE PAIN OF WAR: SOLDIERS’ COLLECTIVE PAIN IN WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL’S CRIMEAN WAR CORRESPONDENCE AND NOVEL: .................................113 5. REMEMBERING PAIN: CHARLES DICKENS’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS AS DETECTIVE BILDUNGSROMAN ............................................................................................152 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................181 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: REALISM IN PAIN In a lengthy article called “Some Account of Chloroform,” published on May 10, 1851 in Charles Dickens’s Household Words, the recent discovery and implementation of that substance’s anaesthetic effects are ranked among the greatest discoveries of modern science: “The amount of human comfort has been greatly augmented; the sum of human wretchedness has been diminished by a very large figure. Among the reductions of this kind that have been accomplished in modern times, the most signal, unquestionably, is the abolition of physical pain, in so far as it has been effected by the discovery of the anaesthetical properties of chloroform […].”1 The article provides a detailed overview of the discovery of chloroform, the origins of its name, the controversies it raised, and the many ways its brings relief to surgical patients and others before closing with optimistic expectations of future scientific discoveries, as this one “has stilled the shriek of agony and pain, which is so direful a discord in ‘the still sad music of humanity.’”2 In the 1840s, several American doctors and dentists had been employing both nitrous oxide and ether in their practices without capitalizing on their products, until a dentist named William Morton convinced the more influential doctor Henry Jacob Bigelow to write a letter to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal announcing the so- 1 [Charles Dickens], “Some Account of Chloroform,” Household Words 10 May 1851: 151. 2 Ibid., 155. 1 called discovery of ether in 1846.3 In 1847, Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson successfully used chloroform to achieve a similar anaesthetic effect.4 Rendering patients insensible to surgical pain was one of the most dramatic medical achievements of the era. The meanings and management of pain had shifted for centuries, but 1846 marked the beginning of a new chapter in the medical and social history of pain. The 1840s also marked the beginning of a new era of realist fiction that
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