Abstract
An unexpected bridge linking philosophy, politics and romantic literature is the body of eighteenth-century works known to literary historians as ‘sentimental’. Indeed, it is hard to underestimate the importance of sentimentality in its eighteenth-century literary guise for the rise of romanticism, although the links relating to natural rights have not often been drawn. It is equally important to acknowledge that at least one strand of sentimentality had a strong connection with a general political stance, what G. J. Barker-Benfield calls ‘A Culture of Reform’, associated particularly with the articulation of women’s consciousness.2 Because the 1790s did not occur in an historical vacuum, this chapter looks backwards to the eighteenth century and forwards to the younger romantics, tracing the changes which increasing consciousness of reform under the pressure of a demand for natural rights, made to the genre.
The conscious heart of Charity would warm, And her wide wish Benevolence dilate; The social Tear would rise, the social sigh; And into clear perfection, gradual bliss Refining still the social passions work.
Thomson’s Seasons, ‘Winter’, lines 354–81
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Notes
Quoted from James Thomson: Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1908). This passage appeared for the first time in the third version, 1730.
G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture o f Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 5.
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (London: Dent, 4 vols, 1932), 4, 559–60 (my italics).
Erik Erametsa, ‘A study of the word “sentimental” and of other linguistic characteristics of eighteenth century sentimentalism in England’ (PhD thesis, Helsinki, 1951).
Quoted in Leonara Ledwon, Law and Literature: Text and Theory (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996), 133.
Olive D. Rudkin, Thomas Spence and his Connections (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), 17.
Barbara M. Benedict in her Introduction to Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction (New York: AMS Press, 1994), mentions the influence of Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, although the emphasis of her book is on the evocation of ‘feeling’ through language rather than the moral or political significances of the genre.
Francis Hutcheson, On Human Nature: Reflections on our Common Systems of Morality on the Social Nature o f Man, ed. Thomas Mautner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 113.
Ibid., 114. Mautner points out that both Gottlieb Gerhard Titius (1661–1714) and Jean Barbeyrace (1674–1744) of fered precedents for this view which was otherwise controversial since most commentators agreed that the worst ‘sort of polity’ is anarchy.
Mautner, ibid., 122.
Ibid.
Ibid., 74.
R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel o f Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974).
Ibid., 46.
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Metheun, 1986), 23.
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 93.
T. D. Campbell, Adam Smith’s Science of Morals (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), 16.
Tom Campbell, Seven Theories of Human Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 101.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds, D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 10.
Ibid., 9.
David Marshall, The Surprising E f fects o f Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3.
Text quoted is The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, facsimile ed. R. H. Bowers (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1962) (t 1 v) and (t 1 r).
See especially Bernard Harrison, Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (London: Chatto and Windus for Sussex University Press, 1975); Thomas R. Cleary, Henry Fielding: Political Writer (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1984).
Quoted from Thomas Gray, selected and ed. Robert L. Mack (London: Everyman Poetry Library, 1996).
Quotations from Arthur Friedman (ed.), Collected Works o f Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 4 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966).
It was once thought that Goldsmith was in an autobiographical vein writing of his own youth in Lissoy, Ireland, but the consensus now is that he is speaking more generally of the process occurring in England where he lived from 1761. See The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), 670, giving the argument for Lissoy.
W. G. Hoskins, English Landscapes (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973), 78. The book is a condensation of The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955).
‘Goldmsmith’s “Pensive Plain”: Re-viewing The Deserted Village’;, in Thomas Woodman (ed.), Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 93–116.
Raymond Wiliams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), 97.
John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 77.
For an excellent account of.the general condition of the rural poor during enclosure, as represented in poetry, see John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
See James H. Lehmann, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield: Goldsmith’s Sublime, Oriental Job’, English Literary History, 46 (1979), 97–135.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 3.
It has been argued that Hume’s argument is equivocal when examined in detail, though its overall drift is clear: see Philip Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between Sympathy and Morality with Special Reference to Hume’s ‘Treatise’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 40–3.
Quotations from Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Kenneth C. Slagle (New York: The Norton Library, 1958).
John Mullan, ‘The Language of Sentiment: Hume, Smith, and Henry Mackenzie’, in The History of Scottish Literature: Volume 2 1660–1800, ed. Andrew Hook, general ed. Craig Cairns (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 286.
For a brief survey of a field that has increasingly generated much scholarship, see Jane Spenser, ‘Women writers and the eighteenth-century novel’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 212–35.
Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the form o f the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3.
Ibid., 4. See also James Warner, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Reactions to La Nouvelle Héloise’, PMLA (1937), 803–19.
Sarah Scott, The History of Cornelia (1750; facsimile edn, New York: State University Press of New York, 1974), 148.
Margaret Anne Doody, ‘George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, Nineteenth-CenturyFiction, 35 (1980), 278.
Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
For a more complex view, see Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics o f Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, ed. Jerome McGann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xx.
McGann’s anthology and its apparatus seem modest in comparison with British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) which is extraordinarily thorough and well researched.
All quotations are from Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe after the edition of A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (21 vols, London: Dent, 1930), I, 1.
Ibid., I, 18.
Ibid., I, 14.
Ibid., I, 49.
See R. S. White (ed.), Hazlitt’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1996), Introduction and passim.
Unfortunately, the well-known book by Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), is a wasted opportunity, since Ricks focuses on the more superficial aspects of the sentimental link. So, I believe, does Marjorie Levinson (without referring to sentimental literature) in Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
All quotations are taken from John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (second edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
Unsigned review, London Magazine (Baldwin’s), Sept. 1820, in Keats. The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 222.
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White, R.S. (2005). The Social Passions: Benevolence and Sentimentality. In: Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506145_2
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