This chapter studies Richard Marsh’s unexplored fiction on criminal mesmerism (The House of Mystery, “A Psychological Experiment,” “How He Passed,” “The Woman with One Hand”) alongside The Beetle, to analyze how mesmerized subjects are portrayed as automatons, seemingly devoid of agency/power. Drawing on the complex material history of automaton-objects and nineteenth-century psychological theories of automatized human behavior, the figures of mesmerized automatons in the texts complicate the usual association of automatons with technophobic anxiety. They also complicate the fraught issue of criminal responsibility, projecting difficult questions of volition/power that inhabit the crimes/injustices committed, or enabled, through an automaton. The automaton-like humans fracture the established nineteenth-century connection between mesmerism and painlessness, underscoring the inner (moral) agony of the automata – who in these texts are usually class/gender outsiders. As such, Marsh’s texts on criminal mesmerism stage an ethical intervention by showcasing the automatized subjects’ pain as their protest against socioeconomic injustices.

Chapter 4 considers the significance of embodied encounters between musicians, listeners and musical instruments. It takes as its focus the experience of touch in musical encounters, charting the sensory intensities and eroticism inherent in fin-de-siècle literary depictions of touching musical instruments and scores and in feeling the transmission of the material touch of music in performance. The chapter examines encounters between bodies and musical instruments in Richard Marsh’s ‘The Violin’, Forster’s ‘Dr Woolacott’ and the anonymous pornographic novel Teleny. Tactile proximity between musician and instrument sees the musical instrument transformed in these texts into a technology for the transmission of touch. The experience of piano playing in Forster’s A Room with a View with Woolf’s The Voyage Out similarly suggests that tactile interaction between the body and the musical instrument allows for marginalized subjects to more fully inhabit a sense of their desiring bodies. Finally, in Vernon Lee’s writing about the archival remains of eighteenth-century music, her sensuous affective connection with the historical past is articulated through a wish for restored tactile contact.