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Conscience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2023
Abstract
The word “conscience” appears frequently in Victorian writings across realms of discourse, in which it assumed an edge of ambivalence and energy difficult for us to perceive in the twenty-first century. While conscience today may seem a residual concept, recent critical strains in Victorian studies have suggested the possibilities bound up in examining anew this complex and multivalent word. Turning particularly to the writings of Charles Darwin and George Eliot reveals a self-conscious awareness not only of how the fluctuating meanings of conscience capture broader social shifts, but the ways these shifts are registered and enacted in language.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
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1. The “moral sense” was closely affiliated (and sometimes used interchangeably) with conscience. Philip Davis's 2002 chapter on “Mind” in The Victorians volume of The Oxford English Literary History also suggests the ways conscience was adapted into emergent sciences of mind, which often continued to have a theological or spiritual dimension. Davis, Philip, The Victorians: The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Miller, Andrew, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Jesse, Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2. Maurice, F. D., The Conscience: Lectures on Casuistry, Delivered in the University of Cambridge (1868; London: Macmillan, 1872), 27Google Scholar.
3. Maurice, The Conscience, 15–16.
4. Maurice, The Conscience, 16.
5. Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1879; London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 122Google Scholar.
6. Darwin, Descent of Man, 122.
7. Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda (1876; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 431CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8. Raines, Melissa, “Language,” in George Eliot in Context, edited by Harris, Margaret (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 177Google Scholar.
9. Eliot, George, Middlemarch (1871; London: Penguin Classics, 1994), 569Google Scholar.