E.S. Dallas

1828-1879

Victorian journalist and aesthetician, devoted his two-volume The Gay Science to an account of the imagination and the kinds of pleasures it affords which, in a conventional manner, are contrasted with the workings of ‘reason’. Dallas transforms traditional accounts of the inner and secret workings of genius into the Victorian language of the ‘unconscious’ and what he terms the ‘Hidden soul’: ‘It is in the hidden sphere of thought, even more than in the open one, that we live and move and have our being’.Eneas Sweetland Dallas was the elder son of John Dallas of Jamaica, a planter of Scottish parentage, and his wife Elizabeth (née Baillie), the daughter of the Rev. Angus McIntosh of Tain and sister of Rev. Caldor McIntosh. He was born in Jamaica in 1828 and was brought to England when he was four years of age. He was educated at Edinburgh University, where he studied philosophy under Sir William Hamilton, and acquired the habit of applying notions derived from eclectic psychology to the analysis of aesthetic effects in poetry, rhetoric, and the fine arts. His first publication in which he proved his mastery of this line of investigation was entitled Poetics, an Essay on Poetry, a work which he produced in 1852, while he resided in London. However, his abilities were destined to be absorbed chiefly in anonymous journalism. He first made his mark in London by sending an article to The Times, a critique which by its vigour and profundity secured immediate attention.