Victorian Culture, “Other Sciences,” the Occult, and Mourning
The Victorian era is often remembered as an age of invention and progress: locomotives shrieking through the countryside, telegrams racing across continents, microscopes opening unseen worlds, Darwin unsettling creation with On the Origin of Species.
Yet beneath the triumphalism of science ran another current: what contemporaries sometimes called the “other sciences.” These were disciplines that sought authority, sometimes masquerading as respectable inquiry, sometimes hovering at the edges of the occult. They reveal not only the Victorians’ hunger for knowledge, but also their unease with uncertainty, their grief, and their prejudices.
Phrenology, the practice of “reading” skulls, was wildly popular in the nineteenth century. Its practitioners claimed that bumps and indentations revealed character, intellect, and even morality. Parlors hosted phrenological readings the way we might consult horoscopes today. Employers used it to hire workers; parents used it to guide children’s futures. Though later discredited, phrenology carried the trappings of science—charts, measurements, instruments—and offered a seductive promise: that the human mind could be made legible. Wilkie Collins drew on this fascination in novels like The Woman in White, where identity and character are questioned through both surface appearance and hidden psychology.
The rise of the alienist, an early psychiatrist, worked in parallel. Alienists believed they could diagnose, classify, and treat “madness,” situating mental illness within systems of order. Their asylums became laboratories for the mind. But here too the lines between science and speculation blurred. Treatments were often experimental, and diagnoses reflected cultural anxieties as much as medical insight—especially regarding women, whose bodies and desires were frequently pathologized as hysteria. Fiction absorbed these figures readily: in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dr. Seward’s journals present the alienist as both scientist and baffled witness, cataloguing madness but ultimately unable to explain the Count’s supernatural power.
These sciences shared a deeper impulse: to tame what was invisible. Just as microscopes revealed microbes and fossils revealed deep time, phrenology and alienism promised to chart the unseen territory of thought and feeling. But what they mapped was often less about truth and more about reinforcing social norms. Phrenology, craniometry, and anthropometry provided pseudo-scientific justifications for racial hierarchies. Skulls of colonized peoples were measured against European ones to “prove” supposed differences in intelligence and morality. This veneer of science lent authority to imperial expansion and the brutalities of slavery’s afterlife, framing oppression as natural law rather than human choice. Alienists, too, sometimes fed these narratives, diagnosing rebellion or resistance in colonized subjects as signs of mental illness. The very language of sanity and madness could be used to delegitimize the voices of women, the working poor, and people of color. What masqueraded as objective science often masked the deep prejudices of the age.
Alongside these sciences of the body and mind grew sciences of the spirit. Spiritualism promised to bridge the divide between life and death, offering a rational-seeming system for contacting the departed. Mediums staged séances with table-rapping, ectoplasm, and automatic writing, insisting these phenomena were subject to investigation, repeatable, almost scientific. Mourning culture made the appeal of spiritualism especially strong. High mortality rates, coupled with wars and epidemics, meant that grief was omnipresent. Strict codes of mourning—black crepe, jet jewelry, locks of hair woven into keepsakes—offered social expression of loss, while séances offered intimate consolation: a whispered voice, a ghostly touch, the sense that death had not won. Queen Victoria herself, famously devoted to mourning Albert, helped enshrine grief as both public spectacle and private devotion. Fiction reflected this longing too—Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla infused the vampire tale with both eroticism and grief, the undead standing in for love and loss that refused to end.
The Victorians lived in a paradox. They believed in science as the key to progress, yet they clung to other sciences that promised to answer what progress left unsettled.
These disciplines mapped skulls, charted madness, and summoned spirits, not only because they were curious, but because they were anxious—about empire, race, gender, death, and the limits of knowledge. To study these “other sciences” is to glimpse the shadow of Victorian culture. They reveal how easily scientific authority can be bent to prejudice, how mourning can give rise to ritual and belief, how progress can never fully banish mystery. The occult, the alienist, the phrenologist, the medium—all belonged to the same age, each insisting that the world could be known, ordered, and controlled, even as they revealed its uncertainties.
And perhaps that is their lasting lesson. The Victorians remind us that culture is not only made by its triumphs of reason, but also by its fears, its griefs, and its longings. The “other sciences” still echo tod
