Nature’s consolation; poetry, environment, psychoanalysis, 1740 - 1820

This thesis poses the question of how the more-than-human environment was used to alleviate mental suffering in eighteenth-century Britain. Beginning with the philosophical writings of David Hume and Adam Smith, moving through to the archive and patient writings of the York Retreat, and then opening onto the poetic works of William Cowper and Charlotte Smith, the thesis asks why the trope of nature’s consolation appears as a trans-discursive presence in eighteenth-century culture. In answer to this question, I argue that it enables eighteenth-century writers to think about, on the one hand, the commerce between aesthetic and medical theory in the construction of eighteenth-century subjectivities; and on the other, humans’ extractive relationships with the more-than-human world. The thesis therefore seeks to unite the disparate fields of medical and environmental humanities by arguing that material usages of the more-than-human world must be understood in relation to the medicalisation of human subjectivity. In support of this claim, the thesis posits the trope of ‘nature’s consolation’ as an underrecognised forebear of psychoanalysis, as the writers considered in this study formulate theories of unconscious mind which develop through the subject’s encounters with the more-thanhuman world. Ultimately, the thesis argues that in the age of climate crisis we must reformulate what it means to ‘use’ the more-than-human world, both as material resource and as the basis of our internal worlds.