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Emotions and the Making of Psychiatric Reform in Britain, c. 1770-1820

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions ((PSHE))

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Abstract

For the so-called lunacy reformers of the early nineteenth century, promptings of sympathetic feeling were urgent and deeply felt, driving a distinctive form of activism characteristic of the so-called humanitarian sensibility in the modern West. Recent research into the history of emotions has sought to historicise such sensibilities, in the process highlighting the cultural and emotional practices that created and sustained ‘fellow-feeling’ in the past. This scholarship offers new conceptual tools for recovering the historical experience of sympathy, and this chapter considers how this can inform the historical study of lunacy reform at the turn of the nineteenth century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    T.S., ‘To the Right Hon. George Rose, M.P. Chairman of the Committee for Inquiring into the Abuses in Lunatic Asylums, &c.’, Morning Post, 25 Dec. 1816.

  2. 2.

    In terms of the history of British psychiatry, early champions of lunacy reform built upon the optimistic narratives produced by nineteenth-century physicians like Daniel Hack Tuke, the son of the most prominent English reformer, Samuel Tuke (Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles, London, 1882). See, for example, Kathleen Jones, Lunacy, Law, and Conscience 1744–1845: The Social History of the Care of the Insane (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998); Hubert Norman, ‘Some Factors in the Reform in the Treatment of the Insane’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 24, no. 8 (1931), 1068–74. The most prominent critic of this Whiggism was Michel Foucault, who depicted modern psychiatry as enacting a ‘gigantic moral imprisonment’ (Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Khalfa (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 511. See also, idem, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

  3. 3.

    For a broad overview of the cultural forces that are said to precipitated the ‘Humanitarian Big Bang’ in the late eighteenth century see Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 49–56.

  4. 4.

    Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1’, The American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (1985), 339–61; idem, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2’, The American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985), 547–66.

  5. 5.

    See, for example, Elizabeth B. Clark, ‘“The Sacred Rights of the Weak”: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America’, The Journal of American History 82, No. 2 (1995), 470–5; Lynn Hunt, ‘The Experience of Revolution’, French Historical Studies 32, no. 4 (2009), 671–678.

  6. 6.

    Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007), esp. Ch. 1.

  7. 7.

    G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 56–7, 80; Drew D. Gray, Crime, Prosecution and Social Relations: The Summary Courts of the City of London in the Late Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Ch. 7; Steven Anderson, A History of Capital Punishment in the Australian Colonies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Ch. 5.

  8. 8.

    Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850 (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  9. 9.

    Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995), 304. See also Kevin Rozario, ‘“Delicious Horrors”: Mass Culture, The Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modern American Humanitarianism’, American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003), 417–55.

  10. 10.

    Bertrand Taithe, ‘“Cold Calculation in the Faces of Horrors?” Pity, Compassion and the Making of Humanitarian Protocols’, in Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950, ed. Fay Bound Alberti (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 81.

  11. 11.

    William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–6.

  12. 12.

    William Reddy, ‘The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day’, Emotion Review 12, no. 3 (2020), 170.

  13. 13.

    Catharine Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions: Asylums for the Insane in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, c. 1880–1910’, Social History of Medicine 19, no. 3 (2006), 425–42 (qtd. 437); Jade Shepherd, ‘ “I am not very well I feel nearly mad when I think of you”: Male Jealousy, Murder, and Broadmoor in Late-Victorian Britain’, Social History of Medicine 30, no. 2 (2017), 277–98.

  14. 14.

    On the treatment of lunatics in the community in early modern Britain see Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 117–28; Akihito Suzuki, ‘Lunacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England: Analysis of Quarter Sessions Records Part I’, History of Psychiatry 2 (1991), 437–456; idem, ‘Lunacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England: Analysis of Quarter Sessions Records Part II’, History of Psychiatry 3 (1992), 29–44; idem, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Peter Rushton, ‘Lunatics and idiots: Mental disability, the community, and the poor law in North-East England, 1600–1800, Medical History 32, no. 1 (1988), 34–50; Rab Houston, ‘Poor Relief and the Dangerous and Criminal Insane in Scotland, c. 1740–1840’, Journal of Social History 40, no. 2 (2006), 453–76; Audrey Eccles, ‘ “Furiously Mad”: Vagrancy Law and a Sub-Group of the Disorderly Poor’, Rural History 24, Special Issue 1 (2013), 25–40.

  15. 15.

    On Bethlem’s central place in the history of madness in eighteenth-century Britain see Jonathan Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited: A History of Bethlem Hospital c1634-c1770’ (PhD thesis: QMUL, 1991); Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Christine Stevenson, ‘Robert Hooke’s Bethlem’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 3 (1996), 254–75; Patricia Allderidge, ‘Bedlam: Fact or Fantasy?’, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, vol. 2: Institutions and Society (London and New York: Tavistock, 1985), 17–33.

  16. 16.

    On the history of private madhouses, and the commercialised care of the insane in Britain, see William Llewellyn Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Charlotte MacKenzie, Psychiatry for the Rich: A History of Ticehurst Private Asylum (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992); Leonard Smith, Private Madhouses in England, 1640–1815: Commercialised Care for the Insane (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); idem, ‘A Gentleman’s Mad-Doctor in Georgian England: Edward Long Fox and Brislington House’, History of Psychiatry 19, no. 2 (2008), 163–84; Elaine Murphy, ‘Mad Farming in the Metropolis. Part 1: A Significant Service Industry in East London’, History of Psychiatry 12 (2001), 245–82; idem, ‘Mad Farming in the Metropolis. Part 2: The Administration of the Old Poor Law of Insanity in the City and East London 1800–1834’, History of Psychiatry 12 (2001), 405–30; Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); idem, Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London; With the Complete Text of John Monro’s 1766 Case Book (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  17. 17.

    Leonard Smith, Cure, Comfort, and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999); idem, Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (New York and London: Routledge, 2007).

  18. 18.

    Smith, Lunatic Hospitals, 165–91; Anne Digby, ‘Changes in the Asylum: The Case of York, 1777–1815’, Economic History Review 36, no. 2 (1983), 218–39.

  19. 19.

    Porter, Madmen, 157–8.

  20. 20.

    Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); Michael Brown, ‘Rethinking Early Nineteenth-Century Asylum Reform’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006), 425–52; idem, Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c. 1760–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Jones, Lunacy, 66–8. That is not to say that all critics of lunatic asylums were disinterested observers. As the case of Thomas Bakewell makes clear—a lay madhouse proprietor who railed against potential corruption in the better-financed public asylums—reformism was undoubtedly partly motivated by self-interest. See Rebecca Wynter, ‘ “Horrible Dens of Deception”: Thomas Bakewell, Thomas Mulock and Anti-Asylum Sentiments, c. 1815–60’, in Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, eds Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge, 11–27 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015).

  21. 21.

    Brown, ‘Rethinking’, 443–4; Leonard Smith, ‘ “The Keeper Must Himself be Kept”: Visitation and the Lunatic Asylum in England, 1750–1850’, in Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting, eds Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz, 199–222 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009).

  22. 22.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 47–61. Akihito Suzuki, ‘Dualism and the Transformation of Psychiatric Language in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, History of Science 33 (1995), 419–21.

  23. 23.

    Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 153–55; Eccles, ‘Furiously Mad’, 27–8.

  24. 24.

    See, for example, Porter, Madmen, 180–7. On the reception of nerve theory in British society see Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-century sensibility and the novel: The senses in social context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); George Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

  25. 25.

    Suzuki, ‘Dualism’.

  26. 26.

    George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers, &c. (London, 1733). On the vagaries of ‘fashionable’ nervous disorders in the long eighteenth century see Porter, Madmen, 89–96; Heather R. Beatty, Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); Clark Lawlor, ‘Fashionable Melancholy’, in Allan Ingram et. al, Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century: Before Depression, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 25–53; idem, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61–70; John Mullan, ‘Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the Physicians’, The Eighteenth Century 25, no. 2 (1994), 141–74; David E. Shuttleton, ‘The Fashioning of Fashionable Diseases in the Eighteenth Century’, Literature and Medicine 35, no. 2 (2017), 270–91.

  27. 27.

    On the role of Protestant theology in reforming the treatment of the mad see Anne Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat, 1790–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Louis Charland, ‘Benevolent theory: moral treatment at the York Retreat, History of Psychiatry 18, no. 1 (2007), 61–80.

  28. 28.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 92–3.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 92.

  30. 30.

    Andrews and Scull, Undertaker of the Mind, 21–4; Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited’, 60–71.

  31. 31.

    On the development of ‘moral’ treatments in British psychiatry see Paul Laffey, ‘Psychiatric therapy in Georgian Britain’, Psychological Medicine 33 (2003), 1285–97; Porter, Madmen, 208–26; Digby, Madness; Charland, ‘Benevolent theory’.

  32. 32.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 101–2; Digby, Madness, 61–78; Charland, ‘Benevolent theory’, 71–3.

  33. 33.

    See, for example, Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 169–72; Barry Edginton, ‘Moral architecture: the influence of the York Retreat on asylum design’, Health and Place 3, no. 2 (1997), 91–99; Lorraine Walsh, ‘ “The property of the whole community”. Charity and insanity in urban Scotland: the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum, 1805–1850’, in Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914, ed. Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, 180–99 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Jade Shepherd, ‘ “I am very glad and cheered when I hear the flute’: The Treatment of Criminal Lunatics in Late Victorian Broadmoor’, Medical History 60, no. 4 (2016), 473–91; Maureen Park and Robert Hamilton, ‘Moral treatment of the insane: Provisions for lifelong learning, cultural engagement, and creativity in nineteenth-century asylums’, Journal of Adult and Continuing Learning 16, no. 2 (2010), 100–13.

  34. 34.

    Parry-Jones, Trade in Lunacy, 290.

  35. 35.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 104–10; Peter McCandless, ‘Insanity and Society: A Study of the English Lunacy Reform Movement 1815–1870’ (PhD Thesis: University of Wisconsin, 1974), 57–9.

  36. 36.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 99–100.

  37. 37.

    Mark Neuendorf, ‘Moral Panic and the Policing of the Mad in Georgian Britain’, in Law, Media, Emotion and the Self: Public Justice in Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds Amy Milka and Katie Barclay (forthcoming, Routledge). On the role of fear in nineteenth-century lunacy reform see McCandless, ‘Insanity and Society’, 66–70.

  38. 38.

    Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited’, 67–8.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 66.

  40. 40.

    Andrews and Scull, Undertaker of the Mind, 21–3.

  41. 41.

    Porter, Madmen, 99–100.

  42. 42.

    Suzuki, Madness at Home, 5.

  43. 43.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 91.

  44. 44.

    For instance, in Haskell’s view, the ‘upwelling of powerful feelings of sympathy, guilt, and anger’ that constituted the humanitarian sensibility were a direct result of a ‘change in the perception of causal relations’ (‘Humanitarian Sensibility Part 1’, 343). Lynn Hunt, too, in explaining the impact of sentimental novels in the eighteenth century described them as piquing a ‘universal’ experience of ‘empathy’ (Inventing, 39).

  45. 45.

    Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1.

  46. 46.

    Referring to the instrumental uses of caritas in the early modern period, Barclay points out that whatever the individual’s motives in publicly performing ‘charitable activity’, it was ‘the community who framed how such events should be interpreted’: ‘intention only played a single part’ in this evaluation (Caritas, 11).

  47. 47.

    Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 163.

  48. 48.

    On the new history of emotions and the body see Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012), 193–220; Katie Barclay, ‘New Materialism and the New History of Emotions’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 1, no. 1 (2017), 161–83; idem, Caritas, 10–18; Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Karen Harvey, ‘Epochs of Embodiment: Men, Women and the Material Body’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 4 (2019), 455–69.

  49. 49.

    Barclay, Caritas, 13.

  50. 50.

    Boddice and Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience; Stephanie Olsen and Rob Boddice, ‘Styling Emotions History’, Journal of Social History 51, no. 3 (2018), 476–487; Rob Boddice, ‘The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future’, Revista de Estudios Sociales 62 (2017), 10–15.

  51. 51.

    Rob Boddice, ‘History Looks Forward: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Emotion Research’, Emotion Review 12, no. 3 (2020), 131.

  52. 52.

    Boddice, ‘History of Emotions’, 13–14.

  53. 53.

    Boddice and Smith, Emotion, 50.

  54. 54.

    Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 199, 193. For an earlier attempt to apply the concept of habitus to the historical study of emotions, see Fay Bound Alberti, ‘Introduction: Medical History and Emotion Theory’, in Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950, ed. Fay Bound Alberti (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), xviii.

  55. 55.

    Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 207.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 209.

  57. 57.

    Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 212.

  58. 58.

    Rob Boddice, History of Feelings (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 11.

  59. 59.

    Tania Colwell, ‘Emotives and Emotional Regimes’, in Broomhall, Early Modern Emotions, 7; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 96–110;

  60. 60.

    Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 122–126.

  61. 61.

    Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8.

  62. 62.

    Scheer, ‘Emotions’; Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 265–70.

  63. 63.

    Boddice, History of Emotions, 67–70.

  64. 64.

    Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 215; Plamper, History of Emotions, 267–8.

  65. 65.

    Leila Dawney, ‘Affective War: Wounded Bodies as Political Technologies’, Body & Society 25, no. 3 (2019), 49–72.

  66. 66.

    Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 206.

  67. 67.

    Reddy, ‘Unavoidable Intentionality’, 175.

  68. 68.

    Boddice and Smith, Emotion, 10–15 (qtd. 15).

  69. 69.

    On emotional management as a ‘domain of effort’ see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 55–57.

  70. 70.

    In this sense, I agree with historians who have argued that reformism was a source of spiritual satisfaction for nineteenth-century Evangelicals. As I suggest in this book, experiencing ‘sympathy’ for the insane was a quasi-conversion experience for lunacy reformers across religious and political divides.

  71. 71.

    See, for example, Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 7; Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, Ch. 5; John Spurr, ‘England 1649–1750: differences contained?’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–1740, ed. Steven Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27–8; Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 15–16; Maurice Goldsmith, ‘Regulating Anew the Moral and Political Sentiments of Mankind: Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49, no. 4 (1988), 587–606; 198–9; Lucinda Cole, ‘(Anti)Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More’, ELH 58, no. 1 (1991), 109.

  72. 72.

    Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14. On sentimentalism’s culture of display see John Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

  73. 73.

    Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 209.

  74. 74.

    Todd, Sensibility, 7.

  75. 75.

    Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 215–24.

  76. 76.

    Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 57–9; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies’ Campaign Against the Brothels in Westminster, 1690–1720’, Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (2004), 1017–35; Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘Sex and Societies for Moral Reform, 1688–1800’, Journal of British Studies 46, no. 2 (2007), 290–319.

  77. 77.

    Barker-Benfield, Ch. 5. See also idem, ‘The Origins of Anglo-American Sensibility’, in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence Friedman and Mark McGarvie, 71–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Norman Fiering, ‘Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism’. Journal of the History of Ideas 37, no. 2 (1976), 195–218.

  78. 78.

    See, for example, Brycchan Carey, ‘Abolishing Cruelty: The Concurrent Growth of Anti-Slavery and Animal Welfare Sentiment in British and Colonial Literature’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 2 (2020), 203–20; Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 95–101; Clark, ‘Sacred Rights of the Weak’; Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 40.

  79. 79.

    Festa, Sentimental Figures.

  80. 80.

    See, for example, Melissa Bellanta, ‘His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture’, Journal of Victorian Culture 20 no. 4 (2015), 471–90; idem, ‘Bury Me Deep Down Below: Masculine Sentimentality on the Turn-of-the-Century Australian Frontier’, Outskirts 31 (2014); George E. Boulukos, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s “Grateful Negro” and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery’, Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 1 (1999), 12–29.

  81. 81.

    Dana Gliserman Kopans has highlighted the rhetorical construction of the ‘patriarchal mad-doctor’ in the eighteenth century, a figure whose medical authority stemmed from their seemingly benevolent and paternal temperament. As Gliserman Kopans demonstrates, this sentimental medical man nevertheless assumed absolute physical and moral authority over his patients, particularly women, implementing coercive and sometimes violent treatments to force their submission, and uphold the gendered hierarchy (‘ “With the Affection of a Parent”: The Invention of the Patriarchal Mad-Doctor’, in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions, ed. Glen Colburn, 124–52 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

  82. 82.

    William Reddy (Navigation of Feeling) and Marisa Linton (Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)) have explored the ways that the eighteenth-century culture of feeling that fuelled the French Revolution. Gordon Wood (The Radicalism of the American Revolution, (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 215–8), Sarah Knott (Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)), and Nicole Eustace (Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)) have all examined the sentimentalist underpinnings of the American revolution. Thomas C. Buchanan provides some interesting insights into the importance of sentimentality to the development of a working-class consciousness in the United States in the nineteenth-century (‘Class Sentiments: Putting the Emotion back in Working-Class History’, Journal of Social History 48, no. 1 (2014), 72–87).

  83. 83.

    Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974); Roy Porter, ‘The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry?’, Medical History 27 (1983), 35–50; idem, Madmen; Digby, Madness; Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited’; Dana Y. Rabin, Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

  84. 84.

    Andrews et al., History of Bethlem, 194. Andrews and Scull explain the expansion of the mad trade as a product of the civilising process, as an increasingly polite society sought novel ways of removing unseemly social problems (Undertaker of the Mind, xx).

  85. 85.

    For a powerful critique of Norbert Elias’s concept of a ‘civilizing process’ see Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006); idem, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002), 821–45.

  86. 86.

    Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, Ch. 5–7.

  87. 87.

    Todd, Sensibility, 129–46.

  88. 88.

    Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), spec. Ch. 8.

  89. 89.

    See, for example, Mary Lenard, Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Benjamin Lamb-Books, Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery: Moral Emotions in Social Movements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 98.

  90. 90.

    Jamison Kantor, ‘The Life of Honor: Individuality and the Communal Impulse in Romanticism’ (PhD thesis: University of Maryland, 2013).

  91. 91.

    On the cultural history of sensation see Tiffany Watt-Smith, ‘Darwin’s Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872’, Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 1 (2010), 101–118; Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick (N.J.), Rutgers University Press, 1992); John Jervis, Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

  92. 92.

    Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, 176–204 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

  93. 93.

    Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  94. 94.

    Boddice, History of Feelings, 14.

  95. 95.

    Plamper, History of Emotions, 269. On the use of sources in the elaboration of emotional practices see also Barclay, ‘Performance’, 15.

  96. 96.

    Boddice ‘History of Emotions’, 14; idem, History of Feelings, 11.

  97. 97.

    Here I loosely draw upon William Reddy’s description of a ‘ “Romantic” management regime’, which arose in place of sentimentalism in France in the post-revolutionary years. See Navigation of Feeling, Ch. 7–8.

  98. 98.

    We see this prominently in nineteenth-century reformers’ adoption of indignation as a social norm, discussed in Chap. 6. While moral philosophy had tacitly endorsed righteous anger from the middle of the eighteenth century, it was only at century’s end, when new emotional norms sanctioned the public display of aggression, that social reformers felt compelled to violently articulate their grievances.

  99. 99.

    Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 24–49.

  100. 100.

    As Barclay notes, popular ideas about sympathy, charity, and sensibility ‘resonated across social groups’, with sentimental rhetoric deployed by ‘many ordinary people’ (Caritas, 17–18).

  101. 101.

    On the identification and treatment of mental disorder in early modern Europe see Porter, Madmen, 43–116; Jonathan Andrews, ‘Begging the question of idiocy: the definition and socio-cultural meanings of idiocy in early modern Britain: Part 1’, History of Psychiatry 9 (1998), 65–95; Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam; David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  102. 102.

    On the diagnosis of melancholy in the early modern period see Lawlor, Melancholia, 41–99; Allan Ingram et al., Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century: Before Depression, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Allan Ingram, ‘Death in Life and Life in Death: Melancholy and the Enlightenment’, Gesnerus 63, no. 1/2 (2006), 90–102.

  103. 103.

    On the history of ‘nervous’ or mood disorders see, for example, Katherine E. Williams, ‘Hysteria in Seventeenth-Century Case Records and Unpublished Manuscripts’. History of Psychiatry 1 (1990), 383–401; Mark Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden Story of Male Nervous Disease (Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2008); Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The Disturbing History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Beatty, Nervous Disease; Yasmin Haskell, ‘The Anatomy of Hypochondria: Malachias Geiger’s Microcosmus Hypochondriacus (Munich, 1652)’, in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell, 275–99 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).

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Neuendorf, M. (2021). Introduction. In: Emotions and the Making of Psychiatric Reform in Britain, c. 1770-1820. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_1

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