Introduction: The Victorian Tactile Imagination

Abstract

This introduction reflects on the recent critical privileging of the visual in nineteenth-century studies, and considers the emergence of alternative readings of nineteenth-century culture that have focused on the wider human sensorium, and, in particular, touch. It suggests that the tactile imagination was a dynamic element of nineteenth-century cultural life, through which Victorian writers, thinkers, and artists explored the relationship between self, body, and the world around them.

Keywords

• phenomenology
• Alexander Bain
• the senses
• Touch