Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth: ‘Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants’

Alan Richardson‟s 2001 study, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, recently drew attention to the importance of early neurological science for the study of Romanticism, but the philosophical medicine of Erasmus Darwin remains understudied by literary scholars, despite its importance within this context. This is despite the fact that Darwin‟s interest in the properties of nerves, 1 and his appreciation of the active role played by the nervous system in the process of perception, 2 show that he is a thinker whom it is not anachronistic to describe as having neuroscientific preoccupations. The popularity of Darwin‟s writings, moreover, made them a familiar reference among Romantic writers and their public. For these reasons, Darwin represents a key figure in the case for the neural account of Romanticism proposed by Richardson. In what follows, I will both endorse and qualify Richardson‟s argument for the importance of Romantic neuroscience by examining the nature of Wordsworth‟s relationship to Darwin‟s medical thought. As Neil Vickers argues in his essay, „Coleridge and the Idea of “Psychological” Criticism‟, also included in this special issue, Richardson‟s emphasis on the neurological dimension of Romanticism represents a „materialist straitjacket‟ when referred to the context of present-day scientific orthodoxy. Crucially, however, late eighteenth-century medicine was fully prepared to accept that mental states could have real, physical effects on the functioning of the body, 3 and in this context the therapeutic aims of the Wordsworthian poetic can be seen to reflect an immaterialist philosophical orientation, despite making extensive use of proto-neurological concepts from Darwin‟s Zoonomia.