This dissertation offers an account of the missing critical link between Romanticism's transcendent sublime and the "art-for-art's-sake" of the Aestheticist movement. We begin with the question, quite simply, of what aesthetic experience meant in the intervening Mid-Victorian period (1830-1880). Working across genre, I offer a theory of the Mid-Victorian aesthetic through a reading of the works of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. These authors defined aesthetic experience as a materialization of the self-reflexive mind and embedded the moral purposes of their works in this transformative ideal. The phenomenon of a mind actively exerting agency over its own movements, or actively observant of itself is represented in the novels and poetry of this period as a direct product of what happens to a subject absorbed in sensuous form.

The marked duality of feeling and judgment in these textual moments (experienced on the level of what the Victorians themselves called "non-conscious cerebration") explains the Victorian period as a bridge between the 18th century aesthetics of attitude (promoted by Hume, Kant, Schiller and Shaftesbury) and the 20th-century aesthetics of experience (culminating in expressionist art and the Modernist moment of Joyce and Woolf). Two things make this self-reflexive aesthetic unique. The first is the very ordinary, intimate contexts in which aesthetic experience begins to takes place - whether in Jane Eyre's every-day act of dressing her body, or in the forms of frost Hopkins' noted on the urinal walls of his seminary. The second novel aspect is the potential for such unforeseen apprehensions of sensuous form (unforeseen, to some extent, because they occur in such ordinary contexts) to disrupt and re-form a subject's definition of selfhood.

Aesthetics in Mid-Victorian literature is therefore not a flight from the world; it is a means to embody characters, speakers, and readers alike in live systems of relation and meaning, whether these be Eliot's "larger social faith," Tennyson's ideal of communal purpose, or Hopkins's Catholicism.