Abstract
Ethology, phrenology, sociology, Owenism, immanentism, transcendentalism: all became important topics around the same time and all tried to explain the nature and formation of personal character more or less scientifically. Character thus became a vital object of multidisciplinary knowledge in postwar Britain. It was anatomised, taxonomised, naturalised in new ways. Its temporal dimension, of course, could never be realised in these new discourses as it was in certain kinds of narrative fiction. Realistic novels examined networks of individual characters that seemed to live, move and change over time. The new disciplines, at best, could infer how passing time influenced character