Harrington describes the origin of his disorder in the first chap-ter, using the language of physiological psychology.^[6] In the tale’s opening scene, he is six years old, an age of delicacy and impressionability because of the small size of nervous fibers in the child’s body. It is 1761, the end of his first day in London, and he observes that his “senses had been excited, and almost exhausted, by the vast variety of objects that were new to me” (TN, 9:1); his body has overaccumulated stimulating impressions. In such a state, it requires a strong new stimulus to arrest his attention, and this is provided by the inexplicable appearance of “star after star of light” approaching. When he finally perceives the nearing lamplighter, he reacts as a child-scientist, experiencing “as much delight as philosopher ever enjoyed in discovering the cause of a new and general phenomenon” (TN, 9:1). His attention is then arrested by an even stronger novelty when the lamplighter’s torch “flared on the face and figure of an old man with a long white beard and a dark visage, who, holding a great bag slung over one shoulder, walked slowly on, repeating in a low, abrupt, mysterious tone, the cry of ‘Old clothes! Old clothes! Old clothes!’ ” (TN, 9:1–2). When the peddler, Simon the Jew, looks back at Harrington, the narrator receives the impression that becomes the focal point of his hysteria.

That face, initially perceived by Harrington as “good-natured,” is redefined by the maid Fowler as a threat in order to compel the child’s obedience.^[7] “If you don’t come quietly this minute…I’ll call Simon the Jew there…and he shall come up and carry you away in his great bag” (TN, 9:2). This redefinition produces instant obedience, but the terror it causes in the enervated and vulnerable child’s body has long-term consequences. Beginning that night, he suffers the pains of excessive sensibility as the face of “Simon the Jew and his bag, who had come to carry me away in the height of my joys” (TN, 9:2), appears and reappears to him. In the following weeks, Fowler repeats the threat, having discovered its efficacy. However, in the standard pattern of excess sensibility, the stimulus needs to be continually escalated in order to have the same effect. When “by frequent repetition this threat had lost somewhat of its power” (TN, 9:2), she adds increasingly gruesome details to the story of Simon and his bag, until it is fully revealed as a variant of the ancient anti-Semitic blood libel.^[8]

Above all others, there was one story—horrible! most horrible!—which she used to tell at midnight, about a Jew who lived in Paris in a dark alley, and who professed to sell pork pies; but it was found out at last that the pies were not pork—they were made of the flesh of little children. His wife used to stand at the door of her den to watch for little children, and, as they were passing, would tempt them in with cakes and sweetmeats. There was a trap-door in the cellar, and the children were dragged down; and—Oh! how my blood ran cold when we came to the terrible trap-door. Were there, I asked, such things in London now?

Oh, yes! In dark narrow lanes there were Jews now living, and watching always for such little children as me.

This escalation writes a mechanical response into Harrington’s young body that causes him to suffer an “evening attack of nerves” (TN, 9:10) each time he hears the peddler’s nightly cry.

Harrington’s symptoms respond to the content of this blood-libel narrative. Every night for the next year and a half, he explains, “I lay in an indescribable agony of terror; my head under the bed-clothes, my knees drawn up, in a cold perspiration. I saw faces around me grinning, glaring, receding, advancing, all turning at last into the same face of the Jew with the long beard and the terrible eyes: and that bag, in which I fancied were mangled limbs of children—it opened to receive me, or fell upon my bed, and lay heavy on my breast, so that I could neither stir nor scream” (TN, 9:3–4). The dark maw of the trapdoor, in Fowler’s narrative, and Simon’s bag, in Harrington’s imagination, become synonymous, both functioning as great orifices in which the body of the child is contained and transformed. He imagines this bag as a weight pressing on his breast, a symptom that reproduces the “globus” associated with hysteria, and the effect of this weight is a bodily paralysis and an inability to speak. What Harrington experiences, in his hysterical moments, then, is his own containment within the bag, a sensation that manifests itself in his adult fits as a sense of suffocation, speechlessness, and immobility. His body responds as if it were literally confined, and thus his symptoms are consistent with the content of his fear.

Once written into his body, however, this hysterical condition persists long after its rational basis is removed. Fowler, who soon tires of tending to the hysteric she has invented, tries to undo the damage by confessing her fabrication to Harrington, explaining that the bag contained only clothes. But “to undo her work was beyond her power” (TN, 9:4). As an empirical proof, she brings Simon into the house to open his bag, but Harrington’s “imagination was by this time proof against ocular demonstration” (TN, 9:5). Instead of curing his disorder, the meeting produces a new instance of it. This gulf between rational understanding and hysterical response grows during the narrative, as he retains traces of this response even as he acquires an adult sympathy for Jewish characters. He develops a friendship with Jacob, the son of Simon the peddler, and is introduced by him to a group of highly educated Jews, including a scholar he studies with at Cambridge, the art collector Montenero, and his daughter, Berenice, with whom Harrington falls in love. Yet whenever he encounters an image reminiscent of Simon the Jew, he grows faint.

Edgeworth is positing a particular theory of hysteria, one that is characterized by a slippage between signifier and signified of the sign “Jew.” Initially, the content associated with this sign is threatening, and it produces a response in the body that is linked to this content. As Harrington matures, the content of the sign “Jew” changes from foe to friend, but his body continues to respond to the signifier as if it possessed the earlier meaning. Harrington’s body is thus a hostage to the letter, as the signifier persists in its mechanical effects long after the signified that initially accounted for those effects has disappeared. The conflict is between Harrington’s autonomy, as a rational subject, and his body’s unwilled and uncontainable response to the sign “Jew.”

Because the tale treats anti-Semitism as a social phenomenon, Harrington’s disorder is one example of a generalized problem, a collective disorder that is represented as endemic to British social life. In the tale’s thematization of group behaviors, which she calls “party spirit,” Edgeworth articulates the mechanism by which disorders such as Harrington’s are communicated and even come to dominate entire societies.^[9] Edgeworth wrote about “party spirit” before the modern concept of a mass psychology had been formulated. Contemporary ideas about crowd behavior developed in the later nineteenth century and were most fully articulated by the French natural historian Gustave LeBon, who developed a theory in which political leaders could control populations through a form of mass hypnotism.^[10] Edgeworth’s ideas about crowds belong to an earlier paradigm of crowd behavior, one that has roots in Renaissance ideas about sympathetic imagination and its communication between individuals. Harrington names those sources in the opening of the tale following his description of the origin of his Jewish “antipathy,” when he connects his own “history of the mental and corporeal ills of my childhood” (TN, 9:8) with the natural histories of Francis Bacon and the lesser-known Kenelm Digby, a seventeenth-century natural philosopher and gentleman scientist who wrote on the powers of sympathy and antipathy. Harrington defines his “experiments” as a continuation of studies begun by Bacon (who was “successfully followed” by Digby), studies that are “equally necessary to the science of morals and of medicine” (TN, 9:8). He adopts the anachronistic language of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History when he defines his narrative as “my experiments, solitary and in concert, touching fear and of and concerning sympathies and antipathies” (TN, 9:9).^[11] “Solitary and in concert” is an adaptation of Bacon’s two most frequent phrases in Sylva Sylvarum, “experiment solitary” and “experiments in consort,” used to differentiate singular from multiple observations on a stated topic.^[12] And he returns to the language of Bacon to state the fundamental topic of his narration as “ ‘the history of the power and influence of the imagination, not only upon the mind and body of the imaginant, but upon those of other people’ ” (TN, 9:8–9).^[13] His narrative, then, is not only about his individual experience but also about the communication of “imaginary” objects between minds and the consequences that follow.

Kenelm Digby calls this process of communication the “unpleasing contagion of the imagination,” and he explains it through the mechanism of sympathetic imitation.^[14] Discussed in the works of both Bacon and Digby, the concept was still in circulation in the late eighteenth century. In 1779 it appeared, for example, in the first sustained entry on sympathy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Sympathy, too, is often an imitative faculty, sometimes involuntary, frequently without consciousness: thus we yawn when we see others yawn, and are made to laugh by the laughing of another.

This imitative act is based on the idea of an exchange, but one that operates without any rational activity, occurring instead as a purely mechanistic imitation. According to Digby’s early description of contagious laughter, in Two Treatises (1644), the laughing of one man will set another laughing, “though he know not the cause why the first man laugheth.”^[15] Digby draws a clear distinction between the first man, who knows the joke, and the second, whose laughter is a mechanical imitation of the first, distinct in that it is devoid of any ideational content. The second man’s laughter is more reflexive than reflective. Digby illustrates this same mechanical imitation in reporting the case of a hapless roofer, which is today cited as the first known description of “echopraxia,” the disease of compulsive imitation:^[16] “I have heard of a man…that when he saw any man make a certain motion with his hand, could not choose but he must make the same: so that, being a tyler by his trade, and having one hand imployed with holding his tooles, whiles he held himself with the other upon the eaves of a house he was mending, a man standing below on the ground, made that signe or motion to him; whereupon he quited his holdfast to imitate that motion, and fell downe, in danger of breaking his necke” (Two Treatises, 335).

Digby’s report expands the concept of sympathetic imitation from the commonplace to the pathological. In this example, it overwhelms any willful attempt at self-restraint, despite the immediate danger involved. This action takes place independently of the reason or will of the subject. An example of the power of sympathy, from Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, illustrates the complete disjunction between this category of bodily response and the subject, as it records evidence of sympathetic reaction in a corpse: “It is an usual observation, that if the body of one murthered be brought before the murtherer, the wounds will bleed afresh. Some do affirm, that the dead body, upon the presence of the murtherer, hath opened the eyes.”^[17]

Digby explains the psychophysiology in living bodies of this extrarational mechanism as follows: “All these effects, do proceed out of the action of the seen object upon the fantasy of the looker on: which making the picture or likenesse of its owne action in the others fantasy, maketh his spirits runne to the same parts; and consequently, move the same members, that is, do the same actions (And hence it is that…whatsoever a good oratour delivereth well, (that is, with a semblance of passion agreeable to his wordes) rayseth of its own natur like affection in the hearers” (Two Treatises, 335). In both cases, the key element is the effect the “fantasy” has on the body of “the looker on” or “the hearers.” What appears in the imagination, whether seen or orally represented, has a mimetic consequence in the body.

These consequences can be permanent, as is graphically illustrated in the 1797 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia appeals to sympathetic imitation as the explanatory principle for the presence of human bodily deformity in the world.^[18] In its description of the process by which “monsters”—defined as people with bizarre or deformed limbs—come into being, the Encyclopaedia uses an incident from Paris, originally described in Malebranche, to illustrate how sympathetic imitation in the body of a pregnant woman can produce monstrosity in the child (3d ed., s.v. “monster”). Observing that “the view of a wound…wounds the person who views it,” Britannica differentiates between the effects of viewing a public execution on “vigorous men” with firm fibers and on the more “weak and delicate” fibers of women. Britannica extends the scale of vulnerability to “children still in their mother’s womb,” whose fibers are “incomparably finer than those in women.” Thus, the child’s body becomes the most sensitive register of effects that are present in varying degrees in all bodies. In the specific example cited, a pregnant French woman views a criminal’s limbs being individually broken, and “every stroke given to the poor man, struck forcibly the imagination of the woman…. [T]he violent course of the animal spirits was directed forcibly from the brain to all those parts of the body corresponding to the suffering parts of the criminal.” Through the same echopraxic mechanism described by Digby, the woman’s body mimics the scene before it. Whereas “the bones of the mother were strong enough” to sustain the impression, the child’s body is more vulnerable. The “spirits” follow the identical course in the fetal body, whose fragile bones and nervous system are both destroyed. Its limbs are snapped by the contractions, and its brain is “quite ruined” by the “shock of those spirits…enough to deprive him of reason all his lifetime.” The child is born “a fool, and with all its legs and arms broke in the same manner as those of criminals.” And thus, concludes the Encyclopaedia, can “the phenomena of monsters be easily accounted for.”

Within this example, when the mother’s body mimics the body of the criminal, it responds to the image of pain as if it were its own. The material effects of this sympathetic mimesis are dramatized in the body of the child, who is born a copy of the broken body of the criminal. The larger danger represented by the ontological novelty of the monster’s body, however, is not that it reproduces the body of the criminal but rather that it embodies—it literally gives a body to—the mother’s imagined experience. The monster is the realization, in material fact, of the “fantasy of the looker on,” not of the viewed execution. Any occasion that were to present this image forcefully enough to her mind would produce the same consequence. The “looker on” does not have to be witnessing an external event. Similar effects can follow from a later recollection of the execution, reading an account of an execution, or even fantasizing such an execution, as long as the idea of the execution is vividly present. Within such a scheme, any distinction between realities and representations is lost, as representations have the ability to cross over into the status of realities.^[19]

In Alexander Crichton’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798), the central assumption of the physician’s study of the physiology of delirium is that the body does not distinguish between impressions from actual objects and impressions from imaginary ones.^[20] He claims that the “sensorial impressions” of fictional representations “pervade our frame in the same manner as the impressions of the objects themselves, had they been real, would have done; the only difference being in degree” (Inquiry, 2:149). He illustrates this claim by asserting that “Homer’s description of the girdle of Venus, and of the Elysian fields; Milton’s description of Eve; Spenser’s description of the residence of Acrasy…gratify the senses” as if the reader experienced the fictional objects as fact (2:149). Such ideas tend to produce the same physiological actions in the body as the things they represent. Thus, “if an absent person imagines himself engaged in controversy, his lips move as if in conversation; if his subject of thought be an object of any passions, as anger, jealousy, envy, hatred, or love, his countenance and gestures betray the emotions natural to these passions” (2:6). Crichton explains this phenomenon in a manner similar to Digby, asserting that mental impressions are “conveyed to the extremities of those nerves of external sense by which the object, had it been a real one, would have been naturally received” (2:37–38). In this way internal impressions reproduce, in their physiology, the effects of external impressions. This physiology provides an explanatory underpinning for the belief that the physical effect of an idea is identical in kind to the physical effect of the thing for which it substitutes. This long-standing belief contributes to the climate of fear about the effects of fictional representations, such as those in novels, on younger, impressionable readers.^[21]

Whereas ideas have “corporeal effects…that are exactly similar in kind to what the real object would have,” these effects are normally “weaker in degree” (2:112). However, under certain circumstances this difference in degree disappears, and ideas can have a corporeal effect even greater than that of objects. Chief among these circumstances is repetition. “Representations of the mind,” Crichton claims, “when frequently renewed by acts of the imagination, at last acquire a degree of vividness which surpasses those derived from external objects” (2:65). Brooding over an idea—as Harrington does late in the tale, when he fears he will lose Berenice and secludes himself “[t]o feed upon my thoughts in solitude” (TN, 9:178)—threatens the subject’s health, because mental impressions grow in strength through repetition. Lingering repeatedly over the memorized images of a novel or romance poses a real danger, because the visitor to an immaterial adventure may return with a very material disorder. As Crichton observes, in pleading for a more compassionate attitude toward suicides, “Once an idea, by its being often presented to the mind, has gained such a degree of force and vividness as to command belief, it is of no consequence as to its effects, whether it originated in a real or an imaginary cause” (TN, 2:197).^[22]

Edgeworth represents this transition from imaginary to real in the character of Mrs. Harrington. In her youth, we learn, she affected a belief in “presentiments and presages, omens and dreams” as a fashionable snare “to interest her admirers” (TN, 9:37). Repeating the ruse for years, she eventually became in earnest the nervous victim in earnest of the excess sensibility she had imitated, “so that what in the beginning might have been affectation, was in the end reality” (TN, 9:37). Harrington’s own disorder makes the identical transition. As his childhood fits in response to Simon the Jew become more pronounced, he becomes an object of popular curiosity, and there is public debate over whether or not his fits prove the existence in the Christian body of a natural racial “antipathy” to Jews.^[23] As he explains in retrospect, this popular interest exacerbates his condition: “Between the effects of real fear, and the exaggerated expression of it to which I had been encouraged, I was now seriously ill. It is well known that persons have brought on fits by pretending to have them; and by yielding to feelings, at first slight and perfectly within the command of the will, have at last acquired habits beyond the power of their reason, or of their most strenuous voluntary exertion to control. Such was my pitiable case” (TN, 9:8). In both Harrington and his mother, the illness has finally been inscribed on the body and now exists outside the reach of “reason” and “voluntary exertion”—that is, beyond any possibility of self-mastery.

Sympathetic imitation was further used to explain why individuals exhibited behaviors in large groups that they would never exhibit singly. The leading lecturer on crowd phenomena was the Scottish empirical philosopher Dugald Stewart, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Edgeworth was in an excellent position to become familiar with his ideas. Stewart was a family friend of the Edgeworths and the tutor of two of Maria’s brothers.^[24] Even before meeting him, she sketched Stewart as Dr. Campbell, the tutor for the protagonist, in Forester, a novella-length story Edgeworth published as part of her Moral Tales (1801). She stayed with the Stewarts during her visit to Edinburgh in 1803. Afterward, she wrote of him, “I never conversed with any one with whom I was more at ease,” and she expressed an interest in his ideas when she complained about not being allowed to hear his lectures because of her sex.^[25] She corresponded for many years with Mrs. Stewart and last visited the family in 1823, when Dugald Stewart was quite elderly.

Stewart uses the “contagion of sympathetic imitation” to explain the unique behavior of crowds (Works, 3:147).^[26] He specifies, in introducing the concept, that he is not interested in “any instinctive or mysterious process”(Works, 3:108), nor in the kind of willful imitation that occurs when one author forms his taste in writing by imitating another. “The Imitation of which I am here to treat, and which I have distinguished by the title of Sympathetic, is that chiefly which depends on the mimical powers connected with our bodily frame; and which, in certain combinations of circumstances, seems to result, with little intervention of our will, from a sympathy between the bodily organizations of different individuals” (Works, 3:108–9). He argues that emotions are spread from one person to another through the same “irresistible tendency to imitation” as yawns or laughter (Works, 3:136). As an example, he hypothesizes someone who imitates exactly the external stance, gestures, and expression of someone else in an extreme emotional state. The mimic, he claims, will internally reproduce the same feelings exhibited by the original. Because of the natural tendency to imitation, everyone is like this mimic to varying degrees, and so “something of the same kind happens to every man, more or less, when he sees any passion strongly marked in the countenance of another” (Works, 3:136). When a group of like-minded people come together for a common purpose—he gives the example of attendees at either a carnival or funeral—their sense of shared purpose creates a special social environment in which individuals express their emotions more freely than when alone. These strongly marked external displays combine with the bodily tendency to sympathetic imitation, resulting in a rapid escalation of emotionality: “[T]he effect is likely to be incalculably great; the mind at once acting on the body, and the body re-acting on the mind, while the influence of each is manifested by the inexplicable contagion of sympathetic imitation” (Works, 3:147). An individual’s feeling of grief is increased by a reflexive imitation of the signs of grief in another, and this produces stronger grief in others of the crowd, so that the group produces a unique and “greatly augmented” emotionality (Works, 3:147), which is felt by each member as his or her own but which cannot exist apart from the membership in the crowd. Stewart thus provides an explanation for a specifically crowd psychology—that is, for a new kind of psychological state that is qualitatively different than the sum of its individual parts. The group emotion is felt by all, “even among characters whom the event in question would, in their solitary hours, have scarcely affected with any emotion whatsoever” (Works, 3:147). Thus, individual subjectivity becomes subordinated to the new crowd subjectivity, which pushes it aside and occupies the space of the subject in each member.