Victorian Sentimentality: the Dialectic of Sentiment and Truth of Feeling

  • Michael Bell
Chapter

Abstract

If the eighteenth century is remembered as the age of sentiment and sensibility, the Victorian period is usually considered the peak, or trough, of sentimentality. Victorian sentimentality is a byword for indulgent and lachrymose excess, and the reaction against it, as encapsulated in Oscar Wilde’s remark that it would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, was crucial to many writers of the modernist generation. It may be that literary criticism is not the best mode for considering the significance of this cultural phenomenon. A popular culture of tears may serve an intuitively therapeutic purpose requiring simple triggers rather than artistically complex occasions. Nonetheless, literary texts, and contemporary ways of understanding them, are an especially significant part of the Victorian culture of feeling and in recent years Victorian sentiment has been seen with greater sympathy, and internal discrimination, while the modernist response now seems an overreaction. But this critical turn in favour of sentiment still largely misses the process of transformation. Victorian sentimentalism grappled, creatively and self-critically, with the inherited problems of ethical sentiment and its great achievements are just as sentimentalist in their deeper derivation as the moments of excess. The implicit criterion of true feeling which developed within the tradition of sentiment cannot be fully disentangled from sentimentality in the pejorative sense. In the realm of feeling, the true and the false define each other in a process of constant discrimination; true and false feeling have a dialectical relation.

Keywords

Eighteenth Century Moral Sentiment Modernist Generation True Feeling Social Principle 
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Michael Bell 2000

Authors and Affiliations

  • Michael Bell
    • 1
  1. 1.University of WarwickCoventryUK

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