This introduction argues that, together, conceptions of automata and automatism provided an expansive framework for expressing diverse, sometimes contradictory, ideas and values in Victorian culture. Introducing the contributions to the volume, this chapter considers the specific sites, uses, and meanings of automata and automatism in the nineteenth century. It examines human automatism in psychology, law, aesthetics, occultism, and science, and considers mechanical automata as entertainment, as commodity, and as racist objects. The introduction also looks at connections to factory and labor automata, and the beginnings of artificial intelligence and robotics. It additionally discusses the depiction of automata in and the influences of discourses of automatism on nineteenth-century literary works.

The application of the word ‘development’ to a fully formulated principle of temporal Order becomes ubiquitous in Rousseau’s Emile. The biologist Buffon, the psychologist Condillac and particularly Bonnet all influenced this seminal treatise. But where they had written of development only occasionally and in an abstract sense, with Rousseau it becomes normative and the main descriptor of the structured lifespan of the individual. Rousseau retains the older sense of development as the ‘unfolding’ of an already existing, preformed structure; nevertheless, he also reveals in outline the modern human sciences’ presupposition that the child is an incomplete being. Thanks to Bayle and Diderot, Rousseau derived his concept of a political General Will, irrespective of the individual will, from that of God’s general will to save humankind that does not take individual behaviours into account; this has its psychological equivalent in Rousseau’s creation of ‘the abstract man’, against whose developmental norms the individual must be measured.