“I turn, without shrinking,” writes George Eliot in 1859, “from cloud-borne angels, [...] prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner.” For many critics, Eliot’s “turn” captures something central to Victorian culture: its commitment to the ordinary over the exceptional, the material over the spiritual—in a word, its realism. This panel aims to challenge this orthodox view, turning instead to the neglected archive of Victorian idealism. Exploring connections between literature, philosophy, science, history, and legal theory, “Victorian Idealisms” asks how the literary and intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Britain looks different by idealism’s lights.

Whereas conventional literary histories associate idealism with Romanticism, in fact idealism continued to shape British culture across the century: from the earliest reception of Kant’s transcendentalism by Coleridge and Carlyle, through idealism’s preeminence in academic philosophy after the 1860s, to the “refutations” of idealism that laid the foundations of logical positivism in the early twentieth century. What this history shows is that the idealism of the Victorians was not just a foreign import, but rather the product of interactions between Continental schools of thought (especially post-Kantian idealism) and local intellectual traditions (Empiricism, Neo-Platonism, and Common Sense philosophy).

Inspired by the pioneering studies of feminist scholars Mary Poovey, Lyn Pykett, and Sharon Marcus, this panel also follows the lead of some of the most exciting critics in the field today. Recent work in literature and ethics has begun to look beyond utilitarianism to develop a more complex picture of Victorian moral culture, incorporating both utilitarianism’s idealist critics and a number of intellectual movements informed or inspired by idealism (e.g., intuitionism, moral perfectionism). In idealist metaphysics and logic, other scholars have discovered models of form that can be instructively compared with formal developments in fiction and poetry. Beyond literary studies, the last two decades have also witnessed a renewed interest in Victorian idealism in intellectual history, political theory, and philosophy of art. W.J. Mander’s magisterial British Idealism (2011) stands at the center of a constellation of writings by David Boucher, Chinatsu Kobayashi, Sandra Den Otter, and William Sweet—concerned to do justice to idealism’s critique of classical liberalism, its foundational influence on the Anglophone social sciences, and the originality of its neo-Hegelian aesthetics.

“Victorian Idealisms” will begin with a brief introduction by Mark Taylor. Following this, S. Pearl Brilmyer’s paper will track the crystal across nineteenth-century philosophy and science as a figure for theorizing the analogical relationship between the orders of thought and things. Intellectual historians argue that, while in the first half of the century analogical arguments served to maintain a rigid boundary between the ideal and the real, after 1850 scientists and philosophers began to emphasize the fundamental likeness between the forces that govern human thought and those that govern the natural world. Complicating this narrative, Brilmyer traces the roots of Scottish analogical thought to the “crystal analogy” constructed by the German idealist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer—a thinker for whom the ideal and real were two sides of the same coin.

Next, Liz John’s paper will examine the influence of idealism on British historiography and historical fiction. John follows historian James Anthony Froude’s search for a method that would marry the rising emphasis on archival evidence with the moral energy and reflections on transcendent human nature characteristic of Thomas Carlyle’s historical writings. Finally, Jesse Rosenthal will consider the interplay of realism and idealism in Victorian legal thought, arguing that British jurisprudence, even as it tries to distinguish itself from the idealism of its German counterpart, recapitulates certain idealist themes and structures of thought. Looking closely at the writings of legal anthropologist Henry Sumner Maine, Rosenthal shows how Maine’s account of modernization as the shift from kinship to contract elevates the figure of the contract into a language for imagining the connection through time of individuals and larger social forces.

Addressing the impact of idealism throughout Victorian life, these three papers also share a concern with its legacy today. If modern literary criticism emerged in complex relation to literary modernism and analytic philosophy, what can contemporary critics learn by revisiting the idealism these movements set themselves against? How far does nineteenth-century idealism deserve its reputation for conservatism, and does idealism—as a tradition that includes both architects and radical critics of imperialism—help or hinder recent efforts to diversify and decolonize Victorian studies and the Victorian canon? In sum, this panel hopes to reflect on the sense in which (to paraphrase a more recent idealist) the Victorian idealists might be “our contemporaries.”