Picturing Benevolence against the Commercial Cry, 1750–98: Or, Sarah Fielding and the Secret Causes of Romanticism

Abstract

For most of the eighteenth century, the tenderest emotions were frequently accompanied by the clinking of purses. By the century’s end, the connection between money and feeling had become more distant, more highly mediated and mystified. Benevolence no longer appeared in the pages of fiction figured so graphically in coins and banknotes, legacies or annuities, charitable endowments or gifts of money and parcels of land, freely given in a spirit of fellow feeling and sympathy. That fictional representations of benevolence and acts of charity came to hold a less fashionable place than they had once enjoyed testifies to a major ideological and aesthetic shift during this period. As capitalism developed during the long mercantilist moment that preceded the birth of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, political economic theorists replaced earlier religious views of charitable benevolence with a new religion of the market. Adam Smith’s ‘moral sentiments’ were those that best served to constitute the self or subject most appropriate for the capitalist marketplace and commercial society, and were most easily reconcilable with producing the ‘wealth of nations’.¹ These commercial tenets of social life displaced earlier debates about self-interest, the motivating force so crucial for Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Bernard Mandeville, in contention with the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson’s defence of the defining human attribute as benevolence, which manifested itself in a tendency towards universal sympathy with fellow creatures. A significant casualty of the war of political economic policy on the benevolent redistribution of wealth was charity towards the indigent poor in the direct form of almsgiving. Beginning in the 1770s and gathering force in the 1790s, political economy in theory and practice rendered risible or impracticable what had formerly seemed the noblest of human desires, or the most communal and politically progressive of Christian dictates.

The last of the Flock is more gloomy than the rest. We are not told how the wretched hero of this piece became so poor. He had, indeed, ten children: but so have many cottagers; and ere the tenth child is born, the eldest begin to work, and help, at least, to maintain themselves. No oppression is pointed out; nor are any means suggested for his relief. If the author be a wealthy man, he ought not to have suffered this poor peasant to part with the last of the flock.

Dr Charles Burney, The Monthly Review (1799)

He [ … ] assured him, if his Fortune could any way conduce to his Happiness, whatever share of it was necessary for him, should be intirely at his Service.

Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744)

[I]n our little Family of Love, each Day was employed in Endeavours to promote its common Welfare.

Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple: Volume the Last (1753)