The impact of culture on science and social science was intense in the mid-nineteenth century – notably in poetry’s influence on the still emergent discipline of psychology

Impact is often represented as ‘another (modern) brick in the wall’, but nineteenth century novelists and poets had strong social agendas, often driven by personal experience. Greg Tate argues that we can gain interesting insights into the modern impact potential of the humanities and creative writing from the interaction of poetry and psychology in the 1850s, at a key stage in the discipline’s development.