Presence of Persons

William Myers

• Contents: Introduction; Nothing new; Part One: The Presence of Persons: Where are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson and Daniel C. Dennett?; Evolution and progress: Herbert Spencer, Thomas Hardy and Amartya Sen; Why John Stuart Mill chose to go to the Devil; Walter Pater and the higher decadence; Arnold and Newman: the phenomenological option; Autobiography and the illative sense; Part Two: Manifold and Complex Corruption: Celibate men and angelic women in Oliver Twist; The radicalism of Little Dorrit; Part Three: Luminously Self-Evident Beings: The Feral children of Haworth: Charlotte and Emily Brontë; Fragments of consciousness: the poems of Emily Brontë; The rights of celibacy; Part Four: The Management of our Hearts: The two eternities: race and soul in Daniel Deronda; Justice and freedom: The Portrait of a Lady; Notes; Index.

’This is an unexpected kind of book. It is both interesting and unfashionable, strong-willed and unpolemical, confident and professional, and at the same time open to broad questions. While it is a collection of short essays on a wide variety of subjects, it has a coherence that, I am sure, William Myers was hoping his readers would find. However diverse the subject and different the judgments, these essays speak with a single voice...Students and scholars will be grateful to have it....’ Victorian Studies 'For Victorian scholars there is something wonderfully refreshing in watching a writer unapologetically engage the Victorians vitally on the issues that engage us at the moment, and yet, more unusually, find them able to out-argue and out-think the intellectual heroes of the twentieth century.' English at Leicester '...a set of brilliantly argued provacations to thought and rethinking.' Victorian Studies