In April 1903, in a book-lined study in St John's College, Cambridge, the psychologist W. H. R Rivers and the neurologist Henry Head posed for a photograph (Figure 1). Rivers, on the right, somewhat younger looking and smartly dressed, industriously held a scientific instrument. Head, on the left, bearded, older, sat with his eyes closed, his chin cupped in the palm of his right hand, his face tilted away from the camera, suggesting one lost in reverie. On the table, extended between the two men lay Head's left arm. Scattered around it were a number of laboratory devices for measuring sensation: the pressure-aesthesiometer (for measuring sensitivity to force applied to the flesh), the spring algesimeter (for measuring thresholds of pain), a pitcher of iced water, a box brimming with the softest jeweller's cotton wool and a series of fine wire 'hairs'.1 For this photograph, the two men fashioned themselves into a tableau vivant to illustrate an experiment which took place between 1903 and 1907. It began on 3 April 1903 when Head underwent an operation to sever the radial nerve of his left arm. During the four and a half years that followed, Head and his colleague Rivers tested the gradual and faltering return of sensitivity to Head's hand each week. Their aim was to understand the physiology of sensation which was considered to be 'one of the most obscure regions of neurology' at the time. 3 Head was not alone in regarding self-observation as a technique of the scientific observer, and his method, as I will go on to describe, can be positioned within a tradition of introspection used in experimental psychology in Europe and America between 1870 and 1920. But Head's 'negative attitude of attention' in the laboratory is also reminiscent of modes of aesthetic contemplation he described in the letters and scrap-books that documented his artistic pursuits -trips to art galleries and churches, reading and writing poetry, visits to the opera and, in particular, to the theatre. This article will explore the connections between Head's introspective practice and his descriptions of theatre-going, foregrounding his attempts to produce states of reverie as a technique for self-observation in both.Drawing attention to moments when Head's cultivated state of daydreaming in both theatre and laboratory failed -due to interruptions by others, self-consciousness about being observed, or the distractions of painful sensations -my discussion will explore what Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin have called the 'embodied human processes' through which scientific knowledge has been produced, and their 'vicissitudes'. 4 At the same time, by exploring the entwined practices of selfwatching and reverie in psychological and theatrical contexts, this article complements current scholarly debates that address the problems of perception, attention, absorption and theatricality in scientific and wider cultural discourses at the end of the long nineteenth century.
This article explores the relationship between Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872) and the debates surrounding audiences of sensation theatre. It takes as its starting point a flinch performed by Darwin in a self-experiment at London Zoological Gardens. Darwin's flinch combined the act of scientific observation with a self-consciously staged emotional gesture. In the 1860s and early 1870s, the passionate and demonstrative audiences of sensation plays were similarly understood to watch themselves feeling. In this economy of emotional surfaces, actors and audience were caught up in unsettling relations between outwards expression and the remote landscape of interior feeling. Entangled in this theatrical instability, Darwin's scientific observation reflected broader cultural concerns about the reliability of the emotional body. Thus the article offers Darwin's Expression as an unusual but nonetheless suggestive artefact of theatrical spectatorship in 1872, while also contributing to recent debates about the history of objectivity and its supposedly unemotional and restrained scientific observer. It argues that the technique of self-conscious emotional spectatorship, shared by Darwin and theatre audiences, constituted a distinctive model of late Victorian emotion and visuality, in which communities of spectators were also spectators of themselves.
This article argues that overtly theatrical techniques and problems have played a vital part in the design and execution of scientific experiments. Taking as its case-study Michael Faraday's famed experiment debunking the spiritualist phenomenon of table-turning in 1853, attention is focused on the crucial role played by sleight of hand, patter, misdirection and other theatrical tricks in it. Saturated in the wider culture of stage and parlour magic familiar to Victorians, Faraday's experiment into ideomotor activity highlights the many connections running back and forth between the worlds of science and theatre in the mid-nineteenth century, in which performativity and theatricality were not only part of flamboyant scientific demonstrations, but at the heart of experiments themselves.'Now I will show you a very curious experiment. Perhaps some scientific gentlemen among the audience will explain how the effect is produced, for I confess that though I have performed this trick some scores of times, I am not quite certain myself as to the reason of the phenomenon'.
This chapter investigates scientists’ attempts to understand the workings of the mind through an exploration of mimicry, the near-universal urge to imitate, which has natural affinities with the stage. It explores the relationship between the scientific interest in mimicry during 1890‒1914 and the practices and problems of theatre, showing how scientific experimentation and theatrical performance mutually informed one another. At this time, psychologists ventured forth from their laboratories into music halls, circuses, and other theatrical venues, interviewed actors, and adopted performance techniques in their own experiments, while theatre itself was assimilating and reflecting scientific ideas about the processes of mind and thought. Tracing the connections running back and forth between theatre and scientific psychology at the fin de siècle, it is argued that, despite increased codification and professionalization, the sciences of mind remained embedded in their wider cultural context.
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