The intellectual attraction of the new, brain-based theories of mind for a poet coming of age around 1798 could only have been heightened by their distinctly avant-garde tinge. The brain science being disseminated throughout the 1790s in the writings, lectures, and laboratories of iconoclasts like Darwin, Beddoes, Thelwall, and the youthful Davy came charged with a Jacobin frisson, redolent of religious dissent and political radicalism, and inspiring accusations of dangerous skepticism at best, godless materialism at worst. Despite a growing climate of reaction, the “radical science” of the mind continues well into the early nineteenth century, reaching a crisis point with the Lawrence controversy in the late 1810s, when it moves “underground” to find oblique expression in the works of a new generation of avant-garde intellectuals typified by the Shelleys. But at the same time, in a subtler but equally significant fashion, key tenets of the new psychology were seeping into the mainstream, helping to transform notions of subjectivity, of culture, and of character. Charles Bell gave the imprimatur of the scientific establishment and the aura of the Established Church to physiological conceptions of mind, esthetics, and human development that overlapped significantly with the ideas of radicals like Darwin and revolutionaries like Cabanis. The relentless critical attention devoted to Gall and Spurzheim in the major reviews guaranteed that at least the basic elements of the new brain-based psychologies were widely known; “no speculations have engaged more attention, or have more frequently afforded a topic for conversation,” acidly remarks a reviewer in 1817, “since the time of Joanna Southcote.”