The Romantic Ethic

Campbell, Colin

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-79066-4_9

The Romantic Ethic

Colin Campbell⁶

Chapter
First Online: 06 June 2018

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Part of the book series: Cultural Sociology ((CULTSOC))

Abstract

Campbell outlines how the cult of sensibility evolved into Romanticism, as sensibility led to the indulgence in emotion for the pleasure it provided, whilst the need to defend a philosophy of feeling against its detractors caused ‘the self’ to be set against ‘society’. Campbell notes that creativity is the dominant characteristic of a Romantic theodicy, while the Romantics’ dreaming of a perfect realm caused them to seek to perfect this world, something they believed could be achieved through poetry. This was possible because the poem embodied the poet’s visionary experience, which – conveyed by pleasure – could then be re-imagined by the reader. This was an ideal of character that placed a high moral value on imaginatively mediated pleasure. After discussing Bohemianism Campbell concludes that it had to be this Romantic philosophy that provided the ethical support for modern consumerism, with its characteristically endlessly generated wants and associated preference for novelty.

The land of chimeras is alone worthy of habitation.

Rousseau

The grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which [man] knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.

Wordsworth

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Notes

1.
Vickers, Introduction to Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. viii.
2.
Winfield H. Rogers, ‘The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality in the English Novel 1796–1830’, PLMA, 49 (March 1934), 98–122.
3.
James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill, revised by L. F. Powell, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), vol. 3, p. 149.
4.
Ibid.
5.
Lecky comments on the growing realization that ‘The exaggerated sentimentality which sheds passionate tears over the fictitious sorrows of a novel or a play is no certain sign of a benevolent and unselfish nature, and is quite compatible with much indifference to real sorrows and much indisposition to make efforts for their alleviation’ (quoted by Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 278). In fact, Mackenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling, warned against this very danger, saying, ‘In morals as in religion, there are not wanting instances of refined sentimentalists, who are content with talking of virtues which they never practice, who pay in words what they owe in actions; or perhaps what is as fully dangerous, who open their minds to impressions which never have any effect upon their conduct, but are considered as something foreign and distinct from it’ (Louis I. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1962), p. 85, italics in original).
6.
J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 111.
7.
Ian Watt’s carefully expressed judgement that, whilst ‘people have always … read for pleasure and relaxation … there seems to have arisen in the eighteenth century a tendency to pursue these ends more exclusively than before’, must be judged over cautious in face of the evidence. But then he is not clear about what reading for pleasure might involve (Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 48).
8.
Peter Haining, Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe and the United States (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 10.
9.
Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), p. 12. See also Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957).
10.
Summers cites a contemporary satirist on how one could turn a domestic novel into a Gothic one. Essentially it amounts to no more than a process of substituting ingredients, a castle for a house, for example, and a giant for a father (Summers, The Gothic Quest, p. 35).
11.
Foster notes that the main object of the Gothic novel or ‘sentimental tale of adventure’ was to create an emotional effect in the reader, especially tears and shudderings, whilst there was a ‘pathological craving for fearful experiences’ on the part of the readers (see James R. Foster, ‘The Abbé Prevost and the English Novel’ PMLA, 42 (June 1927), 443–64, see esp. p. 443 and p. 461).
12.
Haining, Gothic Tales of Terror, p. 124.
13.
John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760–1830 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943), pp. 8–10.
14.
Rogers, ‘The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality’, p. 110.
15.
Foster, ‘The Abbé Prevost and the English Novel’, p. 453.
16.
See Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel, pp. 62–75 passim, and Rogers, ‘The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality’, pp. 110–11.
17.
For a good example see ‘Polly Honeycombe’ in Richard W. Bevis (ed.), Eighteenth Century Drama: Afterpieces (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 137–61.
18.
Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel, p. 62; Rogers, ‘The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality’, p. 106.
19.
Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel, p. 65.
20.
Ibid., p. 69.
21.
Rogers, ‘The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality’, pp. 101–2.
22.
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 103.
23.
Rogers, ‘The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality’, p. 101.
24.
G. S. R. Kitson Clark, ‘The Romantic Element 1830–1850’, in J. H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), p. 90.
25.
Peter L. Thorslev Jr., ‘Romanticism and the Literary Consciousness’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (July–September 1975), no. 3, pp. 563–72, see esp. p. 563.
26.
Kenneth B. Klaus, The Romantic Period in Music (Boston, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1970), pp. 13–14. One can also note, as Baumer does, that since the romantics loved the mysterious and celebrated paradoxes, it is not always easy to know what they are talking about (see Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas 1600–1950 (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 269).
27.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’, PMLA, 39 (June 1924), 229–53, reprinted in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: George Braziller, 1955). He does appear to modify this position in the later book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), as Baumer observes (Modern European Thought, p. 269).
28.
Wellek’s position, outlined in various publications, is summarized in this form by Thorslev, ‘Romanticism and the Literary Consciousness’, p. 563.
29.
Morse Peckham, ‘Toward a Theory of Romanticism’, PMLA, 66 (March 1951), 5–23, and Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Braziller, 1962).
30.
Lilian R. Furst, The Contours of European Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 2.
31.
H. H. Remak, ‘West-European Romanticism: Definition and Scope’, Newton P. Stallnecht and Ilorst Frenz (eds), Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Union University Press, 1961), pp. 223–59, see esp. p. 226.
32.
John B. Halsted (ed.), Romanticism (New York: Walker, 1969), p. 2.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Furst, The Contours of European Romanticism, p. 5.
35.
Lovejoy, for example, dates Romanticism in England from the 1740s (‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’, p. 241), whilst Klaus (The Romantic Period in Music) sees the terminal dates as 1820 and 1920. Shenck gives details for most of the other countries of Europe – see H. G. Shenck, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (London: Constable, 1966).
36.
Quoted in Lilian R. Furst, Romanticism (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 27.
37.
Baumer, Modern European Thought, p. 268.
38.
Ibid., p. 270.
39.
The phrase is Morse Peckham’s (see ‘Toward a Theory of Romanticism’, p. 11–12).
40.
J. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, ‘The Inner Movement of Romanticism’, in Anthony Thorlby (ed.), The Romantic Movement, (London: Longmans, 1966), pp. 188–142, see esp. p. 138.
41.
See Anthony Thorlby (ed.), The Romantic Movement (London: Longmans, 1966), Part Two, pp. 145–61, for documents illustrating these attitudes.
42.
Cited in Thorslev, ‘Romanticism and the Literary Consciousness’, p. 566.
43.
The phrase is Geoffrey Hartman’s, quoted by Thorslev (ibid.).
44.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connections with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), p. 707.
45.
The traditional association between poetic inspiration and supernatural possession is discussed by Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 189; Weber also mentions it but rather tends to assume that prophetic religion and art are necessarily opposed and irreconcilable (see Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephriam Fischoff (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 244–5).
46.
The words are Arthur Lovejoy’s, quoted by Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 198.
47.
The expression is Carlyle’s (see Baumer, Modern European Thought, pp. 275–6).
48.
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
49.
The qualitative versus quantitative notion of individualism derives from Simmel (see Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 81), whilst it is Shenck who refers to singularity or peculiarity (The Mind of the European Romantics, p. 21).
50.
Cited by Howard Mumford Jones, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 233. Jones also goes on to observe that, ‘The great, the unique contribution of romanticism to modernity is the insistence that every human being is a distinct and autonomous entity’ (p. 463).
51.
G. Poulet, ‘Romanticism’, pp. 40–2 in Thorlby (ed.), The Romantic Movement, p. 40.
52.
For evidence that the Freudian concept of the unconscious has its origins in romantic thought see W. Riese, ‘The Pre-Freudian Origins of Psychoanalysis’, Science and Psychoanalysis, 1 (1958), 24–32, and Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (London: Tavistock, 1959), esp. chapter 4.
53.
The fact that under Romanticism the divine commonly takes the form of a unique personal genius means that self-deification can occur in a form not regarded by Weber as possible within the Western religious tradition. For this is different from both ‘possession’ and spiritual suffusion, as it is also from the mere manifestation of divine characteristics. It is, in fact, a process of emanation, or genius-realization, in which the individual actualizes that particular divine being which he has it in himself to become (cf. Weber’s discussion in The Sociology of Religion, pp. 158–9).
54.
Frederick C. Gill, The Romantic Movement and Methodism: A Study of English Romanticism and the Evangelical Revival (London: The Epworth Press, 1937), p. 17.
55.
Ibid., p. 29.
56.
Ibid., pp. 37–8.
57.
Ibid., p. 147.
58.
Ibid., p. 17.
59.
Lecky actually refers to the emotional poetry of the eighteenth century as ‘the poetic counterpart of Methodism’. The reference is from John Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (London: Frank Cass, 1967).
60.
Ernest Bernbaum, ‘The Romantic Movement’, in Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe (eds), Romanticism: Points of View (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 88–96, see esp. p. 91.
61.
Lascelles Abercrombie, Romanticism (London: Martin Seeker, 1963) p. 89.
62.
Ibid. The distinction brings Weber’s ascetic-mystic contrast to mind, and it is the case that Romanticism has much in common with that form of religious response that Weber dubbed, ‘inner-worldly asceticism’. This is because the individual is under an obligation to his ‘god’, to do his bidding; that is to ‘realize’ his ‘true self’, a process similar to the ‘perpetual externalization of the divine’ that Weber associates with asceticism (see Weber, The Sociology of Religion, p. 171).
63.
The quotation is, of course, from Keats. See Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 315.
64.
Halsted (ed.), Romanticism, p. 21.
65.
Ibid., p. 13.
66.
As Hayter observes, ‘All the Romantic writers thought that there was a strong link between dreams and the processes of literary creation. Dream theory, dreams as sources, dreams as techniques, were important to them, and they valued and used their own dreams’ (see Althea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 67).
67.
Such epistemological subjectivism did not mean that truth was considered to be relativistic in character, for the world of ideal truth, beauty and goodness which imagination revealed was assumed to be essentially one and the same.
68.
T. E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, in Gleckner and Enscoe (eds), Romanticism, pp. 34–44, see esp. pp. 35–6.
69.
The phrase is Raymond Williams’s and he continues by observing that apart from ‘the poets from Blake and Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats there have been few generations of creative writers more deeply interested and more involved in study and criticism of the society of their day’. He then lists the various political activities engaged in by the Romantic poets (see Raymond Williams Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 48).
70.
It was Fairchild who suggested that the English romanticist was ‘a parish priest with a cure for souls’ (quoted by Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 328), but, for reasons given above (see p. 185), a comparison with the prophets would have been more appropriate.
71.
It seems to have been the influence of this faith in ‘the word’ that caused them to emphasize the power of poetry rather than that of art in general. This latter claim emerged somewhat later.
72.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 330.
73.
Ibid., p. 329. Just in case there might be those who doubt the efficacy of this mechanism, Wordsworth refers them to the ‘true tale’ of Goody Blake and Harry Gill. This recounts how a man, hard-hearted enough to try and prevent a poor woman from using his hedge for firewood, and experiencing her ‘curse’, is, in consequence, thereafter never able to feel warm (see Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (eds), Romantic Poetry and Prose (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 609).
74.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 103.
75.
The utilitarians had attacked poetry for being ‘misrepresentation’, and dangerous misrepresentation at that, their single-minded obsession with utility even leading them to such observations as, ‘ledgers do not keep well in rhyme’ (see Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 302).
76.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Bloom and Trilling (eds), Romantic Poetry and Prose, pp. 746–62, see esp. p. 756.
77.
Ibid., p. 757.
78.
Ibid., p. 750.
79.
Selections from the Writings of John Ruskin, Second Series 1860–1888 (Orpington: George Allen, 1899), p. 231.
80.
Quoted in Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 115.
81.
Shelley, in ‘Defence of Poetry’, p. 750.
82.
It is noticeable that whilst the typical man or woman of feeling was simply ‘acted on’ by external forces, the Romantic is expected to respond creatively to events in the world.
83.
Very little seems to be known about the precise mechanisms involved in the reading of fiction. For a brief discussion of some of the issues, see D. W. Harding, ‘Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2 (1962), 133–47.
84.
Bloom and Trilling (eds), Romantic Poetry and Prose, p. 601.
85.
Ibid., p. 602.
86.
Ibid.
87.
Ibid., p. 607.
88.
Ibid., p. 608.
89.
Ibid.
90.
Ibid., p. 602.
91.
Ibid., pp. 607, 603.
92.
Ibid., p. 603.
93.
Ibid.
94.
Ibid, Michael, line 77.
95.
Lionel Trilling, ‘The Fate of Pleasure: Wordsworth to Dostoevsky’, Partisan Review, 30 (Summer 1963), 73–106, and reprinted in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 50–76 (page references are to the latter).
96.
Trilling, Beyond Culture, p. 52.
97.
It is interesting to note that Trilling continues by commenting on the connection between pleasure and luxury, defining the latter as ‘the means of pleasure made overt and conspicuous’ (Ibid., p. 55). Wordsworth’s emphasis on pleasure as constituting the ‘dignity’ of man he thus sees as a version of the growing belief that all men were entitled to a life which transcended subsistence and embraced some degree of ‘affluence’.
98.
Ibid., p. 53.
99.
Wordsworth’s views on the role of pleasure and of the psychology of moral behaviour owed a good deal to Hartleyan associationism, a current of thought derived from Locke which was both materialistic and deterministic (see Baumer, Modern European Thought, pp. 175–6). It was also highly optimistic, and tended to assume that ideas imprinted on the mind through pleasurable association would inevitably lead from the ‘lower’ to the ‘higher’. Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining Wordsworth’s failure to perceive that pleasure might also be an agent of moral degradation.
100.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
101.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 103. This has naturally been a principal focus for the many critics of Romanticism, who have regarded such ‘unhealthy’ tendencies as eventually leading to ‘sensationalism, satanism [and] sadism’ (see F. R. Lucas, ‘Faeries and Fungi; Or the Future of Romanticism’, in Thorlby (ed.), The Romantic Movement, pp. 62–4, see esp. p. 61). The intriguing question raised here is how far the desire to enjoy such ‘abnormal’ pleasures in life is dependent upon their prior enjoyment in imagination; if this is the case then the essence of this critique must be accepted as valid. On the other hand, it seems wrong to associate de Sade’s name with this tendency, as he was not really a romantic but a follower of the Enlightenment faith in rational self-determination. He despised sensibility and set no value on emotional or imaginatively mediated pleasure; in this respect he epitomizes traditional rather than modern hedonism. See The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and other Writings, compiled and trans, by Richard Seaves and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1966), esp. pp. 177–367.
102.
Trilling Beyond Culture, p. 53.
103.
Considerable ethical significance is still attached to the display of emotions, as it was in the cult of sensibility, but now they are less significant in themselves than as an index of hedonistic capacity.
104.
Howard E. Hugo, ‘Components of Romanticism’, in John B. Halsted (ed.), Romanticism: Problems of Definition, Explanation and Evaluation (Boston, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1965), pp. 30–6, see esp. p. 31.
105.
Ibid., p. 36.
106.
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. ix.
107.
Ibid.
108.
Grana suggests that the origin of Bohemianism represents something of ‘a sociological riddle’ because it coincides with the rise to power and influence of the bourgeoisie. ‘How did it happen’, he asks, ‘that while one section of the bourgeoisie was efficiently gathering profits with unbending matter-of-factness, another was giving itself over to philosophical despair, the cult of sensitivity, and the enthronement of the nonutilitarian virtues?’ (see Cesar Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 17). As we have seen, this is not really a ‘riddle’ because the culture of the middle classes had long been divided into Pietistic sentimentalist and rationalistic utilitarian strands, and hence the perceived triumph of the latter sparked a reaction from the former. At the same time, the middle classes had to attain economic dominance before they were in a position to ‘afford’ the ‘luxury’ of Bohemia.
109.
This point is made by Grana, Ibid., pp. 26–7.
110.
This summary discussion of Bohemianism draws on material from France, the United States and Britain, from the 1840s up to the early 1960s. The principal sources are: Henry Murger, The Latin Quarter (Scènes de la Vie Bohème), trans. Ellen Marriage and John Selwyn, introduction by Arthur Symons (London: Greening, 1908); Arthur Ransome, Bohemia in London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; first published by Chapman and Hall, 1907); Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America (New York: Dover Publications, 1960; first published 1933); Francis J. Rigney and L. Douglas Smith, The Real Bohemia: A Social and Psychological Study of the ‘Beats’ (New York: Basic Books, 1961); R. Mills, Young Outsiders (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
111.
See Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, pp. 14–61.
112.
Murger asserts that ‘genuine Bohemians live on their wits’ (The Latin Quarter, p. xxx).
113.
Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, p. xxiii.
114.
Murger, The Latin Quarter, p. xxi.
115.
Ibid., pp. xxiii–xxiv.
116.
It is interesting to compare the economic basis of Bohemianism with that of monasticism. Like the monk the Bohemian tends to either rely on charity or establish semi-self-sufficient communities, whilst also attempting to sell his ‘spiritual insights’. The charity, however, comes from relatives and friends rather than strangers, whilst communities are rarely sufficiently well organized to guarantee a permanent income; casual employment being a frequent resort when these means fail.
117.
Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (New York: Julian Messner, 1959), p. 286.
118.
Murger, The Latin Quarter, p. xxx.
119.
Rigney and Smith, The Real Bohemia, p. 23.
120.
Lipton has claimed that the American beat-Bohemians of the 1950s attributed special spiritual significance to the state of poverty, and although it is possible that this might have been a consequence of their interest in Buddhist thought, Rigney and Smith’s evidence does not support him (see Lipton, The Holy Barbarians p. 264, and Rigney and Smith, The Real Bohemia, p. 23).
121.
Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois, p. 65.
122.
Ibid., p. 69.
123.
Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Viking Press, 1956), p. 60.
124.
Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois, pp. 67–8.
125.
In fact, the first Romantics were pioneers in the movement for sexual equality, whilst Freud’s debt to Romanticism has already been noted. It might appear from the statement of this creed as if Bohemianism represented a clear rejection of the spirit of deferred gratification, and Cowley does mention ‘The idea of living for the moment’ as an item (Exile’s Return, p. 60). Although this is true up to a point, and a real pressure to engage in sensory) enjoyments exists, both to manifest freedom from convention and to demonstrate hedonistic potential, postponement of consummation is still necessarily built in to the Bohemian way of life and hence provides limitless opportunities for day-dreaming. The manner of existence itself guarantees frequent deprivation, whilst the repudiation of conventional routes to ‘success’ ensures the continuous dreaming of fame.
126.
The phrase is Murger’s, The Latin Quarter, p. 42.
127.
Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, p. 26.
128.
This discussion of aestheticism draws heavily on R. V. Johnson, Aestheticism (London: Methuen, 1969), together with William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945) and Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1949).
129.
Levin L. Schucking, The Sociology of Literary Taste (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1944), p. 24.
130.
Johnson, Aestheticism, p. 14.
131.
Thus although the aesthete has no prophetic message to impart, he does act as an instructor in the fine art of self-cultivation.
132.
Johnson, Aestheticism, p. 19.
133.
Ibid., p. 42.
134.
The fate of Brummell and Wilde is similar in this respect.
135.
Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois, p. 153.
136.
Johnson, Aestheticism, p. 80.
137.
As Houghton notes, ‘being as distinct from doing is the pure aesthetic attitude’ (The Last Romantics, p. 281).
138.
For details of aestheticism’s impact upon fashion, especially in association with the Pre-Raphaelites, see Johnson, Aestheticism, and Hough, The Last Romantics, as well as Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping 1800–1914: Where, and in what Manner the Well-dressed Englishwoman bought her Clothes (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), chapter 16.
139.
Indeed, their tendency to ignore morality made them especially vulnerable to charges of corruption.
140.
In fact, aestheticism tended to espouse an amorality that led into decadence. For a discussion of the relationship of decadence to aestheticism see the essays in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Decadence and the 1890s (London: Edward Arnold, 1979).

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Campbell, C. (2018). The Romantic Ethic. In: The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79066-4_9

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