Prominent citizens in nineteenth-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong currents of chaos and uncertainty. Richard J. Walker plumbs the depths of those undercurrents in order to present an alternative history of nineteenth-century society. Mining literary and philosophical works of the period, Walker explores the crisis of identity that beset nineteenth-century thinkers and how that crisis revealed itself in portrayals of addiction, split personalities, and religious mania. Victorian England will never look the same.