Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A ‘Forcible Appeal to Humanity’: Sympathising with the Insane in the Romantic Age

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
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))

  • 177 Accesses

Abstract

The first decade of the nineteenth century was a watershed in the history of psychiatry in Britain. After a century of abortive calls for government intervention into the management of the insane, a sea change in popular opinion sparked a series of inquiries, leading to the passage of two bills to regulate the confinement and treatment of the mad. Imbued with an unflagging optimism, an ever-growing number of politicians, physicians, and philanthropists rushed to investigate the plight of the insane, and few doubted that such zealous efforts could fail to ameliorate their condition. Indeed, the pressing question for this self-assured band of reformers was why ‘for so many past ages, the situation of the Maniac should have engaged so little the attention of enlightened politicians, or of wise and disinterested men’. When, for instance, a committee of such ‘wise and disinterested men’ appealed for contributions to the royal chartered Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum in 1807, they considered it a ‘remarkable fact’ that the city had failed to establish a ‘suitable public provision for the reception and relief of the Insane’. This neglect was, in their view, a vulgar oversight, the recognition of which should compel the humane to intervene on the sufferers’ behalf: ‘If the case of the insane has been left the last which humanity has had courage to investigate, and benevolence has formed plans to relieve, let us hasten the more eagerly to fill up the culpable blank in the system of our charities.’

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The Act for the Safe Custody of Insane Persons Charged with Offences. (39 & 40 Geo III, c.94); The Act for the better Care and Maintenance of Lunatics, being Paupers or Criminals in England. (48 Geo III, c. 96).

  2. 2.

    Thomas Hancock, ‘On Lunatic Asylums’, Belfast Monthly 18, no. 4 (31 January 1810), 2.

  3. 3.

    On the improving ethos of Scottish medicine in this period see Megan Coyer, ‘Medicine and Improvement in the Scots Magazine; and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany (1804–17)’, in Cultures of Improvement in Scottish Romanticism, 1707–1840, eds Alex Benchimol and Gerard Lee McKeever, (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 191–212.

  4. 4.

    Andrew Duncan, Snr, ‘Address to the Public, respecting the Establishment of a LUNATIC ASYLUM at EDINBURGH.’, The Scots Magazine, and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany 69 (Nov., 1807), 817.

  5. 5.

    On the ‘silencing’ of madness in the eighteenth century see, for example, Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Khalfa (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

  6. 6.

    See, for example, Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint: the Case of the Hanwell Asylum’, Medical History 39, no. 1 (1995), 1–17; Michael Brown, ‘Rethinking Early Nineteenth-Century Asylum Reform’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006), 425–52; Michael Barfoot, ‘The 1815 Act to Regulate Madhouses in Scotland: A Reinterpretation’, Medical History 53 (2009), 57–76; Rebecca Wynter, ‘“Horrible Dens of Deception”: Thomas Bakewell, Thomas Mulock and Anti-Asylum Sentiments, c. 1815–1860’, in Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, eds Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge, 11–27 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015).

  7. 7.

    Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 92.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 93, 107–10. See also Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 416–7.

  9. 9.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 91–3.

  10. 10.

    Duncan, ‘Address to the Public’, 817.

  11. 11.

    On contemporary criticisms of excessive sensibility see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 70, 360; R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1974), 56–64; Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 36–7; Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 131–7; 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), 574; Barbara Taylor, ‘Misogyny and Feminism: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft’, Constellations 6, no. 4 (1999), 502–3.

  12. 12.

    Gerald Newman has argued that the emergence of bourgeois nationalism in the early nineteenth century was heralded by a wide-ranging middle-class critique of the ‘tendencies of impurity, dishonesty, artificiality, worldliness, and moral irresponsibility’ that had supposedly infested the higher circles of polite society, and subsequent ‘imposition of a counter-system’ of manners and morals that better reflected bourgeois norms (The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, 235).

  13. 13.

    Todd, Sensibility, 131. See also Thomas Dixon, ‘Enthusiasm Delineated: Weeping as a Religious Activity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Litt Prag. 22, no. 43 (2013), 81.

  14. 14.

    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), 217.

  15. 15.

    William Roberts, The Looker-On, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (London, 1795), 211.

  16. 16.

    Ibid.

  17. 17.

    These criticisms were evident from at least the 1770s. See, for example, Robert Miles’s remarks on primitivism and the Gothic in the writings of the Scottish moralist John Gregory, 1774 (‘The Gothic Aesthetic: The Gothic as Discourse’, The Eighteenth Century 32, no. 1 (1991), 48–51).

  18. 18.

    Keymer, ‘Sentimental Fiction’, 574.

  19. 19.

    Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 360; Eric Parisot, ‘Suicide Notes and Popular Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century British Press’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 3 (2014), 277–91; Richard Bell, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2012), Ch. 2.

  20. 20.

    R.D., ‘On Sensibility’, Lady’s Magazine 31, no. 10 (1800), 556.

  21. 21.

    Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Harper Collins, 2010), 7 [emphasis added].

  22. 22.

    Hugh Blair, Sermons, 2nd edition, vol. 3 (London, 1790), 41.

  23. 23.

    Monthly Magazine 2 (October 1796), 709.

  24. 24.

    Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 2 (Boston, 1803), 328.

  25. 25.

    On Darwin’s conceptualisation of evolutionary progress see Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 440–5.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 444.

  27. 27.

    Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 20.

  28. 28.

    Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 120.

  29. 29.

    Clara Reeve, The School for Widows, vol. 1 (London, 1791), vii.

  30. 30.

    Darwin, Zoonomia, 329.

  31. 31.

    For an excellent discussion of this theme, see William Barnhart, ‘Evangelicalism, Masculinity, and the Making of Imperial Missionaries in Late Georgian Britain, 1795–1820’, The Historian 67, no. 4 (2005), 712–32.

  32. 32.

    Alison Twells, ‘The Heathen at Home and Overseas: The Middle Class and the Civilising Mission, Sheffield 1790–1843’ (PhD thesis: University of York, 1997), particularly Ch. 1; Heather R. Beatty, Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 169–70; Clark, Sentimental Modernism, 21.

  33. 33.

    For a broader discussion of the middle-class criticisms of the manners and morals of the British aristocracy see Newman, English Nationalism, spec. 227–44.

  34. 34.

    Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 80–1.

  35. 35.

    R. Fell, Memoirs of the Public Life of the Late Right Honourable Charles James Fox, vol. 2 (London, 1808), 162 [emphasis added].

  36. 36.

    Keymer, ‘Sentimental Fiction’, 593.

  37. 37.

    On the manifold meanings attached to the shedding of tears in nineteenth-century England see Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), spec. 125–82; idem, ‘The Tears of Mr. Justice Willes’, Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 1 (2012), 1–23.

  38. 38.

    As Mary Lenard has shown, sentimentalism was increasingly relegated to the ‘feminine’ sphere of private charity, and by the mid-Victorian era was widely conceived in oppositional terms to the dominant ethos of political economy (Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 1999)). On parallel developments in Napoleonic France see William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 203–5, 236–7.

  39. 39.

    Reeve, School for Widows, ix.

  40. 40.

    Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 54.

  41. 41.

    Andrew Hemingway, ‘The “Sociology” of Taste in the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Oxford Art Journal 12, no. 2 (1989), 27–9; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 220–2; Bell, Sentimentalism, 74–86.

  42. 42.

    The Evangelical Magazine 18 (1810), 95.

  43. 43.

    The Lady’s Magazine 21 (July, 1790), 341–2.

  44. 44.

    Quoted in Keymer, ‘Sentimental Fiction’, 572.

  45. 45.

    Vic Gatrell, for one, notes that this particular ‘language of sensibility’ which likened the ‘rational’ and ‘sympathetic’ faculties was ubiquitous amongst turn-of-the-century social reformers. (The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 333.

  46. 46.

    Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 11th edition, vol. 1 (London, 1809), 69.

  47. 47.

    Blair, Sermons, 41–2. See also Monthly Magazine 2, 709.

  48. 48.

    Hannah More, The Works of Hannah More, vol. 2 (London, 1834), 269.

  49. 49.

    More, Works, vol. 3, 247–8.

  50. 50.

    R.D., ‘On Sensibility’, 556.

  51. 51.

    Rowland Weston, ‘Politics, Passion and the “Puritan Temper”: Godwin’s Critique of Enlightened Modernity’, Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 3 (2002), 457–8. On the wider influence of associationism on Romantic aesthetics see Fiona Price, Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), Ch. 4; Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 102.

  52. 52.

    On the importance of corporeal pain and materiality to moral education in nineteenth-century aesthetics see Elizabeth McClure, ‘The Ethics of Materiality: Sensation, Pain, and Sympathy in Victorian Literature’ (PhD Thesis: University of Maryland, 2007), 18.

  53. 53.

    More, Works, vol. 3, 248.

  54. 54.

    Lucinda Cole, ‘(Anti)Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More’. ELH 58, no. 1 (1991), 119 [emphasis added].

  55. 55.

    McClure, ‘Ethics of Materiality’, 18.

  56. 56.

    More, Coelebs, 225 [emphasis added].

  57. 57.

    On Austen’s depiction of regulated compassion in this scene see Theresa Kenney, ‘Benevolence and Sympathy in Emma’, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 38 (2016), 66–80.

  58. 58.

    Jane Austen, Jane Austen Collection (Amersham: Transatlantic Press, 2012), 826.

  59. 59.

    Robert Housman, The principles and extent of Christian benevolence considered in a sermon, preached before the governors of the Leicester Infirmary, at their Anniversary meeting, September, 16, 1794 (Leicester, 1794), 16.

  60. 60.

    Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (London, 1806), 154–5.

  61. 61.

    Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilizaton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

  62. 62.

    Rob Boddice, ‘Medical and Scientific Understandings’, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Age of Romanticism, Revolution and Empire, ed. Susan J. Matt (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 19.

  63. 63.

    Bell, Essays., 155 [emphasis added]. See also idem, Letters of Sir Charles Bell (London, 1870), 52. On Bell’s ideas about humanity’s expression of sentiment see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Ch. 5.

  64. 64.

    As Michael Bell notes, from the early Romantic period poetry, not literature, ‘became the crucial arena for devising aesthetic paradigms.’ (Sentimentalism, 79).

  65. 65.

    On the Romantic poets’ ambiguous sentimental inheritance see James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980); Todd, Sensibility, 143; Jerome McGann, Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

  66. 66.

    G. Kim Blank, ‘The “Degrading Thirst After Outrageous Stimulation”: Wordsworth as Cultural Critic’, The Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 3 (2006), 365–82. See also Jan Mieszowski, ‘Fear of a safe place’, in Fear: Across the Disciplines, eds Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier, 106–9 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).

  67. 67.

    Averill, Wordsworth, 183.

  68. 68.

    Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 38–45; Gary Harrison, ‘Spec(tac)ular Reversals: The Politics of the Sublime and Wordsworth’s Transfiguration of the Rustic Poor’, Criticism 34, no. 4 (1992), 563–90.

  69. 69.

    Harrison, ‘Spec(tac)ular Reversals’, 564–6.

  70. 70.

    See, for example, Irina Strout, ‘ “She Who Dwells Alone…”: Mad Mothers, Old Spinsters, and Hysterical Women in William Wordsworth’s Poetry of 1798’, in Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood, ed. Catalina Florina Florescu (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 162.

  71. 71.

    British Magazine and Review; or, Universal Miscellany (August, 1783), 132.

  72. 72.

    Jerome McGann, ‘The Anachronism of George Crabbe’, ELH 48, no. 3 (1981), 562–3.

  73. 73.

    For readings of ideology in Crabbe’s works see Frank Whitehead, George Crabbe: A Reappraisal (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 188–206; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 87–95.

  74. 74.

    Elizabeth Brewster, ‘George Crabbe and William Wordsworth’, University of Toronto Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1973), 142–4.

  75. 75.

    Whitehead, Crabbe, 140–5 (qtd. 140). Perhaps the most unsettling such tale came in ‘Letter XXII’ of The Borough (1810), which related the troubling story of the fisherman Peter Grimes, a petty tyrant guilty of wantonly persecuting and eventually murdering successive apprentices, and whose subsequent expulsion from his local community precipitated a decline into madness. Between detailing his crimes, and directing the reader to take in the horrid spectacle of Grimes’s mad body (‘How glare his angry eyes’!), Crabbe’s sensational intent was clear.

  76. 76.

    George Crabbe, Poems (London, 1808), 219.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 220.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., 220.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 232–3.

  80. 80.

    Travis Feldman, ‘Controversial Crabbe: A “Namby-Pamby Mandeville” ’, Studies in Romanticism 51, no. 2 (2012), 207.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., 223–8.

  82. 82.

    William Hazlitt, ‘Living Authors. No. V. Crabbe’, The London Magazine 3 (January to June, 1821), 486. See also idem, Lectures on the English Poets, 1818, quoted in Arthur Pollard ed., Crabbe: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 214.

  83. 83.

    Feldman, ‘Controversial Crabbe’, 217.

  84. 84.

    John Mahoney, The Logic of Passion: The Literary Criticism of William Hazlitt (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), 8.

  85. 85.

    Hazlitt, ‘Crabbe’, 489.

  86. 86.

    Ibid., 486.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 489 [emphasis added]. See also, the critical reflections on Crabbe’s The Borough printed in the Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal 61 (April, 1810), 404.

  88. 88.

    See, for example, Eclectic Review 8 (December 1812), 1240–53.

  89. 89.

    Feldman, ‘Controversial Crabbe’, 224; McGann, ‘Anachronism’, 566.

  90. 90.

    Francis Jeffrey, The Edinburgh Review 16, no. 31 (1810), 36, 31.

  91. 91.

    Annual Review, 6 (Jan, 1808), 514.

  92. 92.

    Todd, Sensibility, 143.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., 143.

  94. 94.

    Quoted in Li Ou, Keats and Negative Capability (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 1.

  95. 95.

    Ou, Keats, 2. It should be noted that not all Romantic poets lived up to Keats’ high expectations for negative capability.

  96. 96.

    Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 487. See also, John Jervis, Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 33.

  97. 97.

    Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 3.

  98. 98.

    Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 122.

  99. 99.

    In speaking of Wordsworth’s interest in abjection, Averill notes: ‘What attracted Wordsworth to such materials was what appealed to his times, the powerful emotional energies that the bizarre and terrible make available to poetry and fiction.’ (Wordsworth, 183)

  100. 100.

    Thus, in explaining the appeal of Crabbe’s poetry, Thomas Talfourd described readers that sought ‘pleasure not only in the sources of peace and tranquillity, but in the stormy vehemence of passion’ (quoted in Pollard, Critical Heritage, 208). See also Bruhm, Gothic Bodies, 4.

  101. 101.

    See, for example, Wordsworth’s dismissal of Charles Lamb’s criticism of Lyrical Ballads, as conveying a limited ‘range of Sensibility’ (Quoted in Averill, Wordsworth, 185).

  102. 102.

    Martha Woodmansee, ‘The Interests in Disinterestedness: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Emergence of the Theory of Aesthetic Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Modern Language Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1984), 26.

  103. 103.

    As Gillen D’Arcy Wood makes clear, the artistic pretensions of Romantic artists caused them to rebel against mimetic representation, and thus many iterations of blunt realism (The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001)).

  104. 104.

    Andrew Schulz, ‘The Expressive Body in Goya’s Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent’, The Art Bulletin 80, no. 4 (1998), 678. See also Peter Klein, ‘Insanity and the Sublime: Aesthetics and Theories of Mental Illness in Goya’s Yard with Lunatics and Related Works’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1998), 198–252.

  105. 105.

    Gwyn Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 82.

  106. 106.

    Schulz, ‘Expressive Body’, 682.

  107. 107.

    Ibid., 682.

  108. 108.

    Suzanne E. May, ‘ “Sublime and Infernal Reveries”: George Romney and the Creation of an Eighteenth-Century History Painter’ (PhD thesis: Liverpool John Moores University, 2007), 112

  109. 109.

    Pollard, Critical Heritage, 209.

  110. 110.

    Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, 31.

  111. 111.

    Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 12 (1808), 131. See also Wordsworth’s comments on this couplet in Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 40–1.

  112. 112.

    Edwin S. Rickman, Madness, or The Maniac’s Hall; A Poem, in Seven Cantos (London, 1841), 23.

  113. 113.

    Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 42.

  114. 114.

    Ibid., 25.

  115. 115.

    Quoted in McDonagh, Idiocy, 42.

  116. 116.

    Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 41–50.

  117. 117.

    William Wordsworth to John Wilson, 7 June, 1802, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. 1: The Early Years: 1787–1805, 2nd edition, eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Chester Shaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1967, 356.

  118. 118.

    Pollard, Critical Heritage, 209.

  119. 119.

    On the studied detachment typical of ‘professional culture’, see Rita Felski, ‘Suspicious Minds’, Poetics Today 32, no. 2 (2011), 220.

  120. 120.

    Dugald Stewart, Philosophical Essays (Edinburgh, 1810), 476.

  121. 121.

    Ibid., 470.

  122. 122.

    Stewart , tellingly, locates the sphere of vulgar taste in ‘such a capital as London or Paris’: the dens of opinion and emulation, where the mind is dulled from ‘all connection with Reason and the Moral Principles, and alive only to such impressions as fashion recognizes and sanctions’ (Ibid., 469–70).

  123. 123.

    Wordsworth to Wilson, in Selincourt and Shaver eds., Letters, 357. See also Thomas Moore’s reflections on Lord Byron’s schooling in ‘the roughness and privations of life’ (Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of his Life (London, 1873), 120).

  124. 124.

    Wordsworth to Wilson, in Selincourt and Shaver eds., Letters, 354 [emphasis added]. Similar criticisms were aired by Crabbe in his poem ‘The Widow’s Tale’, which relates the story of a genteel woman whose refinements distance her from the rustic community she moves into. As Thomas Williams notes, Crabbe’s ‘visceral’ depictions of the woman’s overbearing disgust towards humble life were used to deride such sensitivities (‘George Crabbe and John Clare: Refinement and Reading’, Romanticism 20, no. 2 (2014), 177–8.

  125. 125.

    Bell, Essays, vii–viii.

  126. 126.

    Ibid., 156.

  127. 127.

    Ibid., 157 [emphasis added]. Bell was undoubtedly influenced here by Stewart, who he studied under at the University of Edinburgh. He also came under the influence of Francis Jeffrey and his Whig circle (L. Stephen Jacyna, ‘Bell, Sir Charles (1774–1842)’, in ODNB).

  128. 128.

    Caroline Lamb, The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb, ed. Paul Douglass (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 117–8.

  129. 129.

    Anon, ‘Sketches of the Later English Poets. No. 1.—Crabbe’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (April 1834), 162.

  130. 130.

    George Gilfillan, A Second Gallery of Literary Portraits (Edinburgh and London, 1850), 65–6.

  131. 131.

    Ibid., 61, 70.

  132. 132.

    Ibid., 70.

  133. 133.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 83–114; Andrews et al., History of Bethlem, 418–9; Porter, Madmen, 153–64.

  134. 134.

    On the influence of these doctrines on contemporaneous political thought see Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, 328–42.

  135. 135.

    On the ideological origins of the disciplinary penitentiary see Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Gatrell, Hanging Tree; John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987); David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 100–6.

  136. 136.

    Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 485.

  137. 137.

    Ibid., 483.

  138. 138.

    Amanda Bowie Moniz, ‘ “Labours in the Cause of Humanity in Every Part of the Globe”: Transatlantic Philanthropic Collaboration and the Cosmopolitan Ideal, 1760–1815’ (PhD Thesis: University of Michigan, 2008), 125. On the cultural influence of Howard’s philanthropy see Gabriel Cervantes and Dahlia Porter, ‘Extreme Empiricism: John Howard, Poetry, and the Thermometrics of Reform’, The Eighteenth Century 57, no. 1 (2016), 95–119.

  139. 139.

    Sarah Goldsmith, ‘Dogs, Servants, and Masculinities: Writing about Danger on the Grand Tour’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 1 (2017), 3–21; idem, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (London: University of London Press, 2020), Ch. 5.

  140. 140.

    The Weekly Magazine, or, Edinburgh Amusement 38 (Oct., 1777), 117–8. On the ‘fantasy’ of ‘heroic philanthropy’ in the eighteenth century see John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–1780 (London: Routledge, 2005), 243–9.

  141. 141.

    On Howard’s contribution to the debate over penal reform see Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Ch. 4; Ignatieff, Just Measure of Pain.

  142. 142.

    Anon, ‘Some Account of the Late John Howard, F.R.S.’, The General Magazine and Impartial Review (April, 1790), 147. See also The Weekly Magazine (Oct., 1777),118.

  143. 143.

    Samuel Jackson Pratt, The Triumph of Benevolence; A Poem… (London, 1786), 11.

  144. 144.

    Philip Thicknesse, A Year’s Journey through the Pais Bas; or, Austrian Netherlands, 2nd edition (London, 1786), 211–2.

  145. 145.

    Ibid., 212.

  146. 146.

    Moniz, ‘Labours in the Cause of Humanity’, 129, 131. For a discussion of the contemporaneous debates over manliness, religious feeling and militarism see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 104–11.

  147. 147.

    John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (Warrington, 1777), 66–8.

  148. 148.

    John Howard, ‘Memorandums and Remarks’, 1788–89, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Eng. misc. c. 332, e. 401, f.3r.

  149. 149.

    Samuel Palmer, The True Patriot. A Sermon, on the Much Lamented Death of John Howard, L.L.D. F.R.S. (London, 1790), 39.

  150. 150.

    Indeed, in a passage that foreshadowed Hannah More’s later writings on the topic, Palmer directly counselled his audience to cease ‘fashionable visits’, and, rather, inspect ‘the houses of the poor, and other scenes of woe’, to have ‘their compassion excited to a degree beyond what they ever felt’ (Ibid., 38).

  151. 151.

    Ibid., 11, 13.

  152. 152.

    Ibid., 16–7.

  153. 153.

    Ibid., 12.

  154. 154.

    John Aikin, A View of the Character and Public Services of the Late John Howard, Esq. (London, 1792), 215 [emphasis added].

  155. 155.

    James Baldwin Brown, Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of John Howard, the Philanthropist (London, 1823), 424.

  156. 156.

    It is telling that the published postscript of Palmer’s funeral sermon invoked Howard’s reputation to justify the repeal of the Test Acts—the laws that barred many Catholics and Nonconformists from public office. On the ideological underpinnings of the reformist cabal see Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 30–1. For middle-class political activism more broadly see Hilton, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, 151.

  157. 157.

    Moniz, ‘Labours in the Cause of Humanity’, 131. Lunacy reformers were viewed, quite literally, as embodying Howard’s mission: when praising the uncompromising activism of Edward Wakefield, the wife of the alleged lunatic James Tilly Matthews extolled, ‘my heart assures me, while Wakefield lives, Howard can never die’ (E.S. Matthews to Edward Wakefield, 29 January 1816, Wakefield MS).

  158. 158.

    See, for example, Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 83–96; Andrews et al., History of Bethlem, Ch. 23.

  159. 159.

    Brown, ‘Rethinking’, 443.

  160. 160.

    Ibid., 451–2.

  161. 161.

    Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 85–7, 115–74.

  162. 162.

    Quoted in Brown, ‘Rethinking’, 443.

  163. 163.

    Copy of A Memorial of York Monthly meeting held the 14th of 5th Month, 1823, concerning William Tuke, RET 1/10/2/11, f.5. See also Daniel Hack Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles (London, 1883), 113.

  164. 164.

    Goldsmith, ‘Dogs’, 9–10.

  165. 165.

    Joseph Gurney, Notes on a Visit made to some of the Prisons in Scotland and the North of England, in Company with Elizabeth Fry; with some General Observations on the Subject of Prison Discipline, (London, 1819), 108–9.

  166. 166.

    Just as the repeal of the sentimental emotional regime initiated the imposition of stricter gender roles in public life, so the unpleasantness of lunacy reform become identified as a predominantly masculine calling. One early advocate for a lunatic asylum in Edinburgh considered the sight of the unreformed madhouse to be too overpowering for ‘the fair sex’, instead, patronisingly, calling for interested women to simply deploy ‘the tears of sensibility, the persuasions of beauty, and the eloquence of both’ in order to ‘rouze in the breasts of those who have the means, the desire and inclination of affording relief.’ See Humanity, ‘Bedlam’, Caledonian Mercury, 21 April 1800.

  167. 167.

    John Carr, The Stranger in Ireland: or, a Tour in the Southern and Western Parts of that Country, in the Year 1805 (Philadelphia, 1806), 202.

  168. 168.

    James Neild, State of the Prisons in England, Scotland, and Wales (London, 1812), liii-liv.

  169. 169.

    Ibid., liii.

  170. 170.

    James Neild, ‘To Dr. Lettsom’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 74 (July, 1804), 609.

  171. 171.

    Ibid., 610.

  172. 172.

    S[amuel] T[uke], ‘On the State of the Insane Poor’, in Philanthropist 1 (1811), 358–9.

  173. 173.

    Ibid., 357.

  174. 174.

    Ibid., 358.

  175. 175.

    Charles Tylor, Samuel Tuke; His Life, Work, and Thoughts (London, 1900), 23.

  176. 176.

    Anon ‘The Late Samuel Tuke, Esq., of York’, The Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 11 (London, 1858), 174.

  177. 177.

    Tuke, ‘Insane Poor’, 359.

  178. 178.

    Roberts, Looker-On, 201–2 [emphasis added].

  179. 179.

    Parliamentary Debates, vol. 28 (London, 1814), columns 662–3.

  180. 180.

    Anon, ‘Observations upon the Mad-House Reports, with a Proposal of at least One Remedy’, The Times (17 May 1816).

  181. 181.

    Hancock, ‘On Lunatic Asylums’, 2.

  182. 182.

    Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 115.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Mark Neuendorf

Authors
  1. Mark Neuendorf
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mark Neuendorf .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Neuendorf, M. (2021). A ‘Forcible Appeal to Humanity’: Sympathising with the Insane in the Romantic Age. 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_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84355-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84356-4

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation