‘A Sight for Pity to Peruse’: The Spectacle of Madness in the Culture of Sensibility

Neuendorf, Mark

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_2

Mark Neuendorf⁵

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

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Abstract

Historians have long pointed to the sentimental art of the long eighteenth century as fostering a culture of intense emotional display, and encouraging sympathy for marginalised groups. A desire to narrate the suffering other’s perspective became a hallmark of this so-called culture of sensibility: an emotional practice which enabled the production of pleasing fellow-feeling. Yet, for marginalised subjects like the insane, who offered no legible tableau to observers, this was a fraught prospect, which as often produced aversion as affection. By contemplating representations of the mad in novels, poetry and the theatre, the sentimental public came to discern between those lunatics that could excite affective communion and those that provoked disgust or dread.

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Notes

1.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, vol. 2 (London, 1768), 171–73. Though Sterne’s commentaries on the glories of ‘sensibility’ were partly parodic, they could—and indeed regularly were—‘read as the sincere kind of prayerful invocation of nature, of God, or of authors, which were incorporated into works of unambiguous sensibility’ (G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 262.
2.
Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 182. See also W.B. Gerard, ‘Laurence Sterne’s “Poor Maria” as Model of Empathic Response’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, eds Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 490.
3.
Gerard, ‘Laurence Sterne’s “Poor Maria”’, 490.
4.
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 7.
5.
John Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 4; Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; Carolyn Williams, “The Luxury of Doing Good’: Benevolence, Sensibility, and the Royal Humane Society’, in Pleasure in the Eighteenth-Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1996), 77–107.
6.
Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni to David Garrick, quoted in Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 32.
7.
Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments, 2. On the theatricality of sympathy see also Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 173–4.
8.
Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, Ch. 5. See also Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977), 237–9.
9.
Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), spec. Ch. 2; Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974); Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993).
10.
Jonathan Andrews et al., History of Bethlem (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 189.
11.
Jonathan Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited: A History of Bethlem Hospital c1634–c1770’ (PhD thesis: QMUL, 1991), 68.
12.
Andrews et al., History of Bethlem, 189, 194; Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited’, 68.
13.
‘The History of Kitty Wells. A True Story’, Hibernian Magazine, or Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge (April, 1782), 227.
14.
Paul Laffey, ‘Insanity in Enlightenment England’ (PhD thesis: University of Western Australia, 2001), 1–97.
15.
V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 267.
16.
Ibid., 280.
17.
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), 209, 211–12.
18.
Festa, Sentimental Figures, 15. On the role of artists in cultivating sentimental ideals see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 163–5; John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997), 87.
19.
Todd, Sensibility, 4. See also Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments, 49–51.
20.
Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments, 50.
21.
Thomas Keymer, ‘Sentimental Fiction: Ethics, Social Critique and Philanthropy’, in The Cambridge History of English literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 587–9.
22.
Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 315–6.
23.
Ibid., 305. On the sentimentalist’s ambivalence towards ‘practical action’ see R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1974), 77–8, 82–3.
24.
Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 15–16.
25.
Erastus, ‘Reflections on Sympathy with Sorrow’, The Monthly Miscellany 2 (1774), 240.
26.
Robert Charles Dallas, Miscellaneous Writings: Consisting of Poems; Lucretia, A Tragedy; and Moral Essays; with a Vocabulary of the Passions (London, 1797), 288.
27.
Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996), 24.
28.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 2 (London, 1739), 73.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Todd, Sensibility, 27.
31.
On Smith’s notion of the impartial spectator see David Marshall, ‘Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments’, Critical Inquiry 10 (1984), 592–613; Todd, Sensibility, 27.
32.
Bert Kerkhof, ‘A Fatal Attraction? Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” and Mandeville’s “Fable”’, History of Political Thought 16, no. 2 (1995), 219–33.
33.
Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 100–4.
34.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 2–3.
35.
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 164–6.
36.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 35. See also Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 23–7; Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 19.
37.
Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 46.
38.
Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 50–2.
39.
Rae Greiner, ‘Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel’, Narrative 17, no. 3 (2009), 294–8.
40.
On the temporality of sympathetic identification see Ibid., 295–8.
41.
Charles Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120.
42.
With respect to the polite spectator, aesthetic pleasure could also be viewed as an incentive towards potentially painful sympathetic expenditure. See, Ibid., 120–1; Csengei, Sympathy, 57–8.; Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 46–7; Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments, 99–101; Eugene Heath, ‘The Commerce of Sympathy: Adam Smith on the Emergence of Morals’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 33, no. 3 (1995), 454.
43.
Smith, Moral Sentiments, 22.
44.
Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 5–6, 12.
45.
Csengei, Sympathy, 52. See also Soni, Mourning Happiness, 314; Erastus, ‘Reflections on Sympathy’, 240.
46.
Csengei, Sympathy, 53.
47.
Sophie von la Roche, Sophie in London, 1786, trans. Clare Williams (London: J. Cape, 1933), 84. See also Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 73.
48.
Smith, Moral Sentiments, 99. See also, Erastus, ‘Reflections on Sympathy’, 241.
49.
Heath, ‘Commerce of Sympathy’, 456.
50.
Csengei, Sympathy, 58. See also Greiner, ‘Sympathy Time’, 294.
51.
Smith, Moral Sentiments, 55.
52.
Ibid., 7–9.
53.
James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1790), 173–4 [emphasis added].
54.
Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 140–2.
55.
Thomas Gray, An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (London, 1747), 7. On the utilisation of this couplet in contemporaneous medical writings see, for instance, William Perfect, Select Cases in the Different Species of Insanity (Rochester, 1787), 102; William Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading, 1792), 39.
56.
Smith, Moral Sentiments, 9.
57.
Ibid., 9–10.
58.
Csengei, Sympathy, 58.
59.
Perfect, Select Cases, 72.
60.
Thomas Brown, Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1798), 469.
61.
Soni, Mourning Happiness, 308.
62.
Brown, Observations, 468–9. The cleric James Scott similarly emphasised that such ‘ruins of Reason’ were a ‘humiliation’ that ‘human nature must shudder to behold’ (A sermon preached at York on the 19th of March 1780, for the benefit of the Lunatic Asylum (York, 1780), 24).
63.
Keymer, ‘Sentimental Fiction’, 588
64.
Samuel Richardson, quoted in Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 23. See also Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited’, Ch. 1.
65.
Porter, Madmen, 98–9.
66.
On ‘emotional suffering’ see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 122–124.
67.
Perfect, Select Cases, 72–3.
68.
Ibid., 73.
69.
G.N. [Thomas Green], ‘Essay on Dreams’, The European Magazine, and London Review 26 (1794), 362.
70.
See, e.g., Andrew Snape, A Sermon Preach’d before The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor of London, The Court of Alderman, and the Governors of the several Hospitals of the City; At the Parish Church of St. Bride, alias Bridget, On Wednesday in Easter Week, 1707 (London, 1707), 22; The Guardian 79 (11 June, 1713).
71.
Soni, Mourning Happiness, 321.
72.
Ibid., 321–2.
73.
Francis Hutcheson, An Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725), 141. See also Todd, Sensibility, 25.
74.
Ann Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17. As Amy Milka has shown, those sentimentalists that called for the humane treatment of animals sought to anthropomorphise their subjects, utilising prosopopoeia to similarly ‘construct a sense of the animal’s interiority’ (‘Political Animals: Dogs and the Discourse of Rights in Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 23 (2018), 250).
75.
Csengei, Sympathy, 59–61.
76.
Green, ‘Essay on Dreams’, 362.
77.
Csengei, Sympathy, 59–61.
78.
Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1788), 146.
79.
Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited’, 69–70.
80.
Reid, Essays, 145.
81.
Ibid.
82.
Green, ‘Essay on Dreams’, 362.
83.
Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy, 12.
84.
Pargeter, Observations, 39.
85.
In a study of the writings of the outspoken alleged lunatic Alexander Cruden, Lina Minou notes that he was forced to appeal to the sympathies of the public, thus he emphasised the ‘humiliation’ he suffered by his treatment in captivity (rather than the attendant physical pain), and also ‘demonstrating the appropriateness of his emotions’ to avoid the taint of madness (‘Suffering, Emotion and the Claim to Sanity in an Eighteenth-Century Confinement Narrative’, Cultural History 8, no. 1 (2019), 33–37.
86.
Henry Home (Lord Kames), Elements of Criticism I, 3rd Edition, Edinburgh, 1765, 49.
87.
On the association between sensibility and physiological sensitivity see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility.
88.
Kingsmill Davan, An Essay on the Passions. Being an Attempt to Trace them from their Source, Describe their General Influence, and Explain the Peculiar Effects of Each Upon the Mind (London, 1799), 53.
89.
See Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 84–95; Todd, Sensibility, 2–3; Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility.
90.
Van Sant, Sensibility and the Novel, 27.
91.
In outlining his didactic purpose with Sentimental Journey —to ‘teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do’—Sterne actually drew attention to his representations of the ‘gentler passions and affections’ which, he claimed, facilitated such affective communion (Laurence Sterne, The Letters of Laurence Sterne to his most Intimate Friends, II, edited by Wilbur L. Cross (New York: J. F. Taylor and Company, 1904), 191–2).
92.
Public Advertiser (9 April 1779).
93.
Amit Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 28. See also Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 63.
94.
Van Sant, Sensibility and the Novel, 16–7.
95.
Ibid., 16.
96.
Ibid., 27.
97.
Gary Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 58. For a wider discussion of the influence of ideology on middle-class conceptualisations of poverty and charity in this period see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 65–88; Keymer, ‘Sentimental Fiction’, 591.
98.
Romira Worvill, ‘From Prose peinture to Dramatic tableau: Diderot, Fénelon and the Emergence of the Pictorial Aesthetic in France’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010), 151–70. See also Peter de Voogd, ‘Sterne and Visual Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146–7.
99.
Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments, 54–5; Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’ American Historical Review 100 (1995), 307; Jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Ch. 1.
100.
Todd, Sensibility, 5. See also Caplan, Framed Narratives, 16; Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments, 55; Van Sant, Sensibility and the Novel, Ch. 2.
101.
Jervis, Sympathetic Sentiments, 56.
102.
Halttunen, ‘Pornography of Pain’, 307.
103.
William Cowper, ‘Retirement’, in John Aikin ed., Select Works of the British Poets, (London, 1820), 729.
104.
On the importance of theatrical absorption to depictions of madness in this period see Stefano Castelvecchi, ‘From Nina to Nina: Psychodrama, absorption and sentiment in the 1780s’, Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (1996), 97–100.
105.
Aikin, British Poets, 730.
106.
In Retirement, Cowper lamented that melancholy, ‘of all maladies … [c]laims most compassion, and receives the least’—words that undoubtedly reflected his lived experience of depression. On his own experience with melancholy see Maurice J. Quinlan and William Cowper, ‘Memoir of William Cowper’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97, no. 4 (1953), 359–382.
107.
William Blake Gerard, ‘“All that the heart wishes”: Changing Views toward Sentimentality Reflected in Visualisations of Sterne’s Maria, 1773–1888’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 34 (2005), 231–2.
108.
Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 172.
109.
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London, 1771), 54.
110.
Ibid., 60–1.
111.
Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 214–15.
112.
Ibid., 211.
113.
Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1811), 347–8.
114.
Ibid., 255.
115.
See, e.g., William Ayloffe, The Government of the Passions, According to the Rules of Reason and Religion (London, 1700), 119.
116.
Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (London, 1806), 114.
117.
On depictions of mad bodies in classical art and culture see Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), Ch. 3.
118.
Jennifer Jones-O’Neill, ‘George Romney’s Sketchbook in the National Gallery of Victoria: The Development of a New Expressive Vocabulary’, The Art Bulletin of Victoria 39 (1999), 50.
119.
Ibid., 47.
120.
Aikin, British Poets, 729–30.
121.
Alison, Taste, 255.
122.
See e.g. figs. 3 and 4 in Jones-O’Neill, ‘Romney’s Sketchbook’, 48.
123.
Mary Robinson, Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson, vol. 2 (London, 1793), 27.
124.
Thomas Penrose, Flights of Fancy (London, 1775), 17.
125.
Ibid., 18.
126.
Ibid., 18–9.
127.
The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal: From July 1775, to January 1776. 53 (London, 1776), 142.
128.
Glen McGillivray, ‘“Suiting Forms to Their Conceit”: Emotion and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Tragic Acting’, Theatre Survey 59, no. 2 (2018), 180.
129.
Jean Marsden, ‘Shakespeare and Sympathy’, in Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 30.
130.
Ibid., 32.
131.
Ibid.; Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 129; Peter Szondi and Harvey Mendelsohn, ‘Tableau and Coup de Théâtre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot’s Bourgeois Tragedy’, New Literary History 11, no. 2: Literature/History/Social Action (1980), 323–43; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 165.
132.
Szondi and Mendelsohn, ‘Tableau’, 332–4.
133.
As Allan Ingram and Michelle Faubert note, even for as highly regarded a player as David Garrick, the ‘authentic’ tragedy of Shakespeare was by necessity sanitised, so as to be ‘moral and commercially acceptable’ (Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing: Representing the Insane (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 122).
134.
Ibid., 117–20.
135.
Ibid., 125.
136.
Marsden, ‘Shakespeare and Sympathy’, 33. Ingram and Faubert, Cultural Constructions of Madness, 125–6.
137.
Todd, Sensibility, 34; Alison, Taste, 348–9.
138.
Entry for 12 May 1763. In James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal 1762–3, ed. Frederick Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1950), 256–7.
139.
Marsden, ‘Shakespeare and Sympathy’, 35. See also McGillivray, ‘Eighteenth-Century Tragic Acting’, 177.
140.
[Francis Gentleman], The Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion, vol. 1 (London, 1770), 369.
141.
Ibid., 369.
142.
Ingram and Faubert, Cultural Constructions of Madness, 122. For contemporary reviews of Garrick’s performances see Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies: Consisting of Critical Observations on Several Plays of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (Dublin, 1784), 208; Gentleman, Dramatic Censor, 370.
143.
Ingram and Faubert, Cultural Constructions of Madness, 125.
144.
[Charles Ranger], Gray’s Inn Journal 16 (12 January 1754), 91.
145.
John Hill, The Actor: or, a Treatise on the Art of Playing (London, 1755), 128–9.
146.
James Fordyce to David Garrick, 13 May 1763, in The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, vol. 1, ed. James Boaden (London, 1831), 158. Fordyce, interestingly, appears to have attended the same performance that so moved Boswell.
147.
Benjamin Victor, The History of the Theatres of London and Dublin, From the Year 1730 to the present Time, vol. 2 (London, 1761).
148.
Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage (London, 1759), 234 [emphasis added].
149.
Edward Taylor, Cursory Remarks on Tragedy, on Shakespear, and on Certain French and Italian Poets, Principally Tragedians (London, 1774), 18.
150.
Ibid., 22.
151.
Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, Esq. (Dublin, 1801), 19.
152.
Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 208.
153.
Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 207.
154.
Boaden ed., Private Correspondence, 158.
155.
Gentleman, Dramatic Censor, 369.
156.
Boaden ed., Private Correspondence, 159.
157.
On the ‘bodily practices’ associated with emotion talk see Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 212.
158.
David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica, or a Companion to the Playhouse II (London, 1782), 228.
159.
Elizabeth Harris to James Harris Jr., 26 March 1767, in Donald Burrows and Rosemary Dunhill eds., Music and Theatre in Handel’s World: The Family Papers of James Harris 1732–1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 479.
160.
Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post (10 March 1803) [emphasis added].
161.
Carol Davison, ‘The Victorian Gothic and Gender’, in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 124.
162.
David Erskine Baker, Isaac Reed, and Stephen Jones, Biographia Dramatica; or a Companion to the Playhouse, vol. 2 (London, 1812), 81.
163.
Matthew Lewis, The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. 1, ed. Margaret Baron-Wilson, London, 1839, 234–5.
164.
Monthly Mirror: Reflecting Men and Manners 15 (London, 1803), 267.
165.
Ibid., 267.
166.
Morning Chronicle (23 March, 1803).
167.
Monthly Mirror, 267.
168.
Lewis, Correspondence, 235.
169.
See, e.g. Monthly Mirror, 267.
170.
The Pic Nic 12 (26 March 1803), 167. The same critic caustically remarked that Lewis’s perverse taste made him a ‘fit candidate for admission’ to a madhouse.
171.
Morning Chronicle (23 March, 1803). For a neat counterpoint, see The Monthly Review’s commentary on the ‘happily touched’ madness conveyed in a 1787 performance of Benoît-Joseph Marsollier’s comedy Nina; or, the Love Distracted Maid, performed at Covent Garden (The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal 37 (1787), 78).
172.
As the correspondent to the Morning Chronicle derided, ‘the greatest powers of acting cannot give interest to absurdity’ (23 March, 1803).
173.
Lewis, Correspondence, 236–40.
174.
Ibid., 240.
175.
Ibid., 239.
176.
Ibid., 237.
177.
Morning Chronicle (23 March 1803).
178.
Philip Kemble, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq. (Philadelphia, 1825), 451.
179.
Charles Ryskamp, ed., Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776 (Melbourne, London and Toronto: William Heinemann Ltd., 1963), 44.
180.
Porter, Madmen, 99.
181.
John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–1780 (London: Routledge, 2005), 234. On sentimentalism’s ‘profound conservatism’ see Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 216, 230.
182.
Ryskamp, Boswell, 251–252.
183.
Csengei, Sympathy, 49.
184.
Cecilia Lucy Brightwell ed., Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 2nd edition (Norwich, 1865), 16.
185.
Ibid., 16.
186.
Ibid., 16.
187.
Ibid., 16.

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Neuendorf, M. (2021). ‘A Sight for Pity to Peruse’: The Spectacle of Madness in the Culture of Sensibility. 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_2

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