Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture

Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, Robert Phiddian, Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, Robert Phiddian

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137455413
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores ways in which passions came to be conceived, performed and authenticated in the eighteenth-century marketplace of print. It considers satire and sympathy in various environments, ranging from popular novels and journalism, through philosophical studies of the Scottish Enlightenment, to last words, aesthetics, and plastic surgery.

Part I

The Challenge of the Passions to Eighteenth-Century Studies

1

Emotional Light on Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian

1 The public sphere, ‘authenticity’, and emotional change

An established narrative in eighteenth-century studies of Britain details the early dominance of satire, the increase in sympathetic cultural modes, and the implications for different kinds of sociability generated by the long revolution in print culture.¹ In this book, we do not wish to overturn this scholarship because we agree that it addresses fundamental aspects of change and stability in the society and culture of a nation that was rising to global prominence. Certainly the self-congratulatory Whig reading of history that has everything rising on a tide of progress towards some sort of liberal apotheosis has been very validly exposed to revision. Without the iron teleology, however, the chapters in this volume are unified by a conviction that important changes did occur in culture and society during the 1700s, and that they were linked dialogically with shifts in the ways emotions were experienced and valued.

Eighteenth-century English had a rich and varied language of the passions and the sentiments, and this is the century when the word ‘emotion’ was first used in a recognisably modern sense.² David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) is a central text in the debate about the passions, particularly in its provocative claim that reason serves rather than rules the passions. He is also one of the most sophisticated operators in the period’s rich rhetoric of emotion, recently reconsidered by Daniel Gross.³ Consider the many moving parts in this sentence from the Treatise, 2.3.3: ‘Now ’tis certain, there are certain calm desires and tendencies, which, tho’ they be real passions, produce little emotion in the mind, and are more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation’.⁴ Even without the adjectives and qualifying phrases, we are left with seven intricately distinct nouns for what we might lump together as emotion – desires, tendencies, passions, emotion, effects, feeling, sensation. This is a level of intellectual sophistication that demands to be addressed on its own terms and not mechanically reduced to the categories of modern neuroscience.⁵ Movements in the rich lexicon of passions and emotions provide us with our primary resource because we, obviously, do not have direct access to eighteenth-century consciousnesses in the ways open to modern psychology.

Modes of expression and sociability also matter crucially, hence our focus on print cultures, and particularly on the growth of literary sociability often framed as the eighteenth-century public sphere. In its pure form, Habermas’ notion of the development of a public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain may be more of a just-so story on which to build a political philosophy than an empirical historical account.⁶ It is certainly hard to find the ideally civil and reasonable coffee-house deliberation of the Habermas model in the pamphlet wars that rolled back and forth across late Stuart and early Hanoverian British public life. By contrast, passion and intolerance were very common, especially at moments of high tension like the Exclusion, Sacheverell, and American Revolutionary crises. It is nevertheless worth recognising that the civil wars of eighteenth-century Britain were overwhelmingly pamphlet wars, in marked contrast to the seventeenth-century experience. The fundamental cultural and historical change that we seek to explore is that ‘something happened’ to channel the exercise of both sympathetic and violent passions into various modes of print during a literally unprecedented (if never entirely secure) period of civil peace. Even if the causes of this relative civil peace can be shown to be a string of accidents, the consequences for public sensibilities remain real enough to warrant exploration.

This collection unites literary scholars, historians, psychologists, and philosophers in an exploration of modes of community or expressions of self and feeling that surfaced in print culture during the decades between the 1690s and the mid-1700s. We take many of our bearings from developments in the psychological research into human emotions and seek to put them into a constructive dialogue with cultural analysis properly respectful of historical specificity and difference. Indeed, recognising the insight that emotions can be social, rather than narrowly individual, in origin and expression, the collection deals with the circulation of emotions in ‘emotional economies’, or ‘emotional communities’.⁷ Moreover, while some cognitive psychologists write confidently about basic emotions as if they are established trans-historical facts of human experience, we attend also to the older language of the passions.⁸ The aim here is to uncover how expressions of feeling in eighteenth-century print came to be accepted as ‘authentic’ and thus became instrumental in the formation of a variety of eighteenth-century selves and communities. These affinities extended beyond immediate kin and traditional relationships of authority to wider networks of nation, class, or interest. The many new clubs and voluntary organisations of the eighteenth century were institutional expressions of this extension of affinity parallel to and often connected with those permitted by print. The passions shared and expressed in the Kit-Kat Club had their virtual extension through the community of feeling engendered by the Tatler and the Spectator; the novels of Eliza Hayward extended the experience of metropolitan life to the provinces; the strikingly collegial philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment developed an ethics and epistemology of sympathy.

Our investigations combine current understandings of the emotions developed in cognitive psychology and other social sciences with a genuinely historical sensitivity to eighteenth-century accounts and explorations of the passions. Heeding Gross’s caution, we do not treat ‘the passions’ as an outmoded account of human motivation to be translated into the new science of emotions research, as that would be scientifically reductive. Similarly, we steer clear of the parallel problem of the cultural constructionism William Reddy has identified in some studies of emotional ethnography.⁹ For our purposes, such ethnographies are limited because, for them, ‘personal feelings’ are only ever ‘socially, locally, culturally constructed’ and are thus subject to arbitrary changes that permit little meaningful comparability across time and culture. In these circumstances, there is no capacity for understanding historical change.¹⁰ Similarly, our collection does not settle on one side or another of the recent trend to distinguish between emotion and affect.¹¹ In the turn to affect evident in ‘emotional geography’ and other studies of space and society, emotion is understood to align with the ‘narrative and semiotic’, the ‘personal and subjective’, while affect is aligned with the ‘non-narrative and asignifying’, the ‘impersonal and objective’.¹² Nor does our collection revisit a view of ‘affect’ as presignifying and abstract that is no longer current in psychology but has a continuing afterlife in literary and cultural studies.¹³ Instead, we take eighteenth-century preoccupations with the formation and origins of authentic passions in minds, bodies, and (often via the metaphor of contagion) groups as our principal subject matter.

‘Authentic’ inevitably proves to be a slippery and sometimes ironic term of analysis for the legitimate expression of public emotions in the following chapters, but it is crucial nevertheless. If chastity comes to be associated more with a state of mind than mere biological intactness (as in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, for example) or if proper British outrage at the severing of Robert Jenkins’ ear provokes war with Spain in 1739, then authenticity of emotional motivation matters. According to Hume, in a particularly provocative statement also in the Treatise section iii, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’.¹⁴ This puts it higher than most others in the period once labelled ‘the Age of Reason’, and there is a context of paradoxical irony in Hume’s prose too complex to be pursued fully here. One aspect of it involves a consciousness in Hume of the chaos wrought in the body politic when inauthentic passions enslaved reason, as often happened in the newly extensive realm of print, where feelings could be simulated and identities hoaxed, from Isaac Bickerstaff (Jonathan Swift, 1708) to Ossian (James Macpherson, 1760) and beyond. Especially in novels, though also in plays, pamphlets, and sometimes newspapers, fiction became a pathway rather than an impediment to authentic passions. Printed simulations of feeling, whether harshly in satires or sympathetically in novels, came to be supplements and even alternatives to ‘the real thing’. The word ‘authentic’ is never used blithely in the chapters that follow, for it can never be self-evident, but it presents a set of issues that cannot be avoided in a history of emotions.

Thus we develop a dialogue between current emotions scholarship and older accounts of the passions because that is essential if we are to pinpoint historical specificity of and change in emotional economies of meaning and social organisation. Just as Habermas’s concept of the public sphere has proved useful as a heuristic device for the discussions in this collection, so also ideas about the ‘civilising process’ that can be traced to the historical sociologist Norbert Elias are constructive, if considered critically.¹⁵ In Steven Pinker’s macro-argument about the retreat of violence in the modern world, ‘The eighteenth century marked a turning point in the use of institutionalised cruelty in the West’.¹⁶ For Pinker, Britain holds a special place in a neo-Elysian civilising process, remarkable for being the first European nation to mark a steep decline in his main data group of violent deaths. Pinker’s talk of a ‘humanitarian revolution’ in the eighteenth century very probably exaggerates the universal extent of emotional transformation; as Simon Dickie has argued recently through extensive attention to jest-books, comedy remained overwhelmingly a brutally physical phenomenon in the public mind, at least to the end of the century.¹⁷ Indeed, critical consideration of the full range of Norbert Elias’s work on emotions and historical change has revealed that his ideas about the civilising process in Europe have been over-simplified by neglecting the survival of alternative emotional regimes.¹⁸ Our collection nevertheless finds evidence to support a more modest version of Pinker’s argument and the ‘cognitive turn’ that underpins it: an evolution of public sympathy, rather than a revolution, evident in a number of vanguard writers and thinkers.

Certainly, it is possible to see cultural developments in the print culture of this period that provide channels for the elaboration of sympathetic and oppositional perspectives previously unavailable in more violent times only a few decades earlier. It is also significant of such a shift that the earliest texts studied in James Chandler’s An Archaeology of Sympathy are Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711) and Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711–12), and that he proceeds towards Dickins via Sterne and Adam Smith.¹⁹ Looking forward, Ildiko Csengei’s Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century presents sympathy as the main tributary of the sensibility that permits campaigns such as that for the abolition of slavery in the late eighteenth century.²⁰ While it is possible to be overly schematic and selective in rehearsing the trajectory of change in the eighteenth century from an age of satire to one of sentiment, the underlying fact of an emotionalisation of public discourse, making space in print for harsh and gentle passions, is hard to dispute.

2 Sympathies, communities, and improving emotions

The essays in the volume respond in a variety of ways to the initial challenge from cognitive psychology posed in the psychologist W. Gerrod Parrott’s opening survey. Parrott provides a clear outline of the origins and current scientific understanding of research on emotions, especially relating to their generation in groups, and with an eye to emotional exchange in print culture. While attending carefully to the historical distinction between passions and emotions, he considers the complex conceptualisation of emotion by modern psychologists and explains their ideas about the interpersonal transmission of emotion in terms of sympathy and empathy: a distinction not made in the eighteenth century, but useful for historical analysis all the same. His account also includes a particularly valuable discussion of the extent to which emotions vary with cultural environment. Indeed, Parrott’s idea of ur-emotions seems especially relevant to the study of emotions and social change, since it allows for the influence of environment in emotional expression, while asserting that there are underlying features common to humans in all emotional displays. The following chapters address a mixture of canonical and non-canonical texts from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Literary scholars, historians, and philosophers explore ways in which ‘authentic’ passions came to be conceived and performed in a range of environments, from popular novels, to the new journalism, through the lucubrations of major figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, to last words, aesthetics, and plastic surgery.

Following Parrott’s call for humanities scholars to study the social aspects of emotion in different historical contexts, several chapters in this volume consider instances of early eighteenth-century print culture which seem to exemplify a fresh emphasis on appeals to the emotions as a means to lead opinion and constitute moral communities among readers. Robert Phiddian’s contribution (Chapter 3) concentrates on the work of Jonathan Swift, and takes as its point of departure Swift’s ‘savage indignation’ at corruption in government as an element of satire: a genre of contemporary print culture that he argues represented anger, contempt, and disgust, rather than mere humour. Political satire of this type is interesting for at least two reasons. Firstly, it is an attempt to conjure an ‘emotional public’ on the basis of violent dissent, rather than through civil discussion, and therefore offends against the Habermasian view of the emerging public sphere as an environment characterised by politeness and reasoned discussion. Secondly, in the early eighteenth century, such ferocious expressions of opposition in print by authors like Swift and Pope were not openly suppressed by the Whig authorities, and in this official tolerance it is arguable that they conferred a measure of legitima...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: The Challenge of the Passions to Eighteenth-Century Studies
• Part II: Sympathy, Improvement, and the Formation of Virtual Communities
• Part III: Performing the Self: Communicating Feelings and Identifying Authentic Humanity
• Part IV: Afterword
• Select Bibliography of Secondary Sources
• Index