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A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade That Forged the Modern Mind
Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and the physician Thomas Beddoes dreamt of founding new political worlds. But when the French Revolution descended into bloody terror, feverish optimism turned to bleak disappointment, resulting in a more conservative emotional landscape, and a profound cultural revolution of feeling.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
560 pages, Paperback
First published October 5, 2017
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September 23, 2022
The most famous comment on British feelings about the French Revolution came from Wordsworth – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’ What's sometimes forgotten is that a few lines later, he was talking dismissively about how he and his fellow radicals had ‘fed their childhood upon dreams’, while his mate Coleridge referred to a ‘gradually exhausted balloon of youthful enthusiasm’.
That was the 1790s for you – a shift ‘from optimism to pessimism’, when everyone's hopes for social and sexual renewal met a sticky end in the Terror and, closer to home, in Pitt's crackdown on non-conformity. This very ambitious book from Rachel Hewitt tells the story of the disillusionment of those years, while also attempting to show that they brought about a major change in how we think about our emotions.
As a historian, Hewitt is pretty engaging. She traces the decade through three main figures – Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Coleridge, and the physician Thomas Beddoes – plus a huge cast of supporting characters, whose journey through the politics, science, art and sex of the time illustrates roughly the same decline and fall of hope.
Some of the best stories here are the incidental ones. I was fascinated to learn more about Thomas Day, the radical novelist and educational reformer, who, under the influence of Rousseau's ideas about how to bring up children, simply went round to the Foundling Hospital, picked out two girls of eleven and twelve, and took them home, intending to marry the one who responded best to his regime. (His regime, inevitably, involved them learning to devote themselves submissively to their future husband.) Even in 1769, people looked askance on a bachelor swanning around with two prepubescent girls, so he moved to Avignon where, presumably, he felt attitudes would be laxer; it didn't really work, though, and when they got back to England he apprenticed one of the girls off to a milliner and never contacted her again. The other lasted a couple more years until he abandoned her, too, sending her to live with an ‘ailing woman’ in the country.
Day's motives in this unsavoury episode were, perhaps, slightly more high-minded than we might immediately assume, but there was certainly an important sexual element in all this. Sex was one of the things that the French Revolution was assumed to be reinventing. This is most obvious through the sharp, doomed perspicacity of Mary Wollstonecraft's writing, which identified most of the salient inequities in gendered society generations before anyone would have the inclination to do anything about them. (Incidentally, this is now the fourth or fifth book in which I've read a narrative account of Wollstonecraft's horrific death following childbirth, and I'm not sure I can put myself through it again.)
Hewitt's wider argument, about the impact of all this on our own attitudes towards the emotions, is a bit trickier to prove. She brings in any number of modern references, from mindfulness blogs, to supposedly ‘untranslatable’ words, to the trendy sex therapies of Emily Nagoski. Some of these seem more pertinent than others, and they're often treated in a rather shallow way, but it's still quite fun seeing them drafted into Georgian debates like this.
The most lasting inheritance, she argues, is the ‘hydraulic’ theory of emotions, which saw the passions as resolutely political, and predicted that suppressing them would lead to outbreaks of violence and disorder. The concept survives in figures of speech which see people as ‘pent-up’ or finally ‘snapping’. (Hewitt suggests that this is mostly applied to men, for vaguely patriarchal reasons, but I have my doubts – surely it's women who are the ones usually stigmatised as overemotional?) Anyway, Beddoes was finding in his lab that his hydraulic theories of gases were mostly rubbish, and hydraulic emotions soon turned out to be chimerical, too. Far from producing disorder, political repression was dismayingly effective. Pitt's ‘Gagging Acts, and the increasingly conservative, authoritarian political tide…were arguably resulting in a more, not less, docile population in Britain,’ she argues.
Nevertheless, there is definitely something in the idea that emotions have become a matter for individuals, now, rather than for societies. One effect of a more modern, psychotherapeutic sensibility has been to ‘convert the social critique contained in individuals' distressing emotions into criticisms of the individuals themselves’: instead of fixing the real social issues that make you anxious, why don't you just have some chamomile tea and do half an hour in downward dog? This ‘depoliticization of emotion’, Hewitt suspects, disproportionately affects women, who are thereby discouraged from ‘challenging the way in which emotions and emotional negotiations are infected with highly gendered inequalities of power’. Not a pretty sentence, but you see the point.
This is all extremely interesting, though you might feel that we are starting to drift a long way from the 1790s. Still, the overall argument that there was – in one lovely phrase – ‘a ghost in the Enlightenment machine’ is convincingly made, and this tension between rationality and emotion is something that's very much still with us. Hewitt's book takes on a bit too much, perhaps, and isn't quite ‘very heaven’ – but it does contain some moments of bliss.
That was the 1790s for you – a shift ‘from optimism to pessimism’, when everyone's hopes for social and sexual renewal met a sticky end in the Terror and, closer to home, in Pitt's crackdown on non-conformity. This very ambitious book from Rachel Hewitt tells the story of the disillusionment of those years, while also attempting to show that they brought about a major change in how we think about our emotions.
As a historian, Hewitt is pretty engaging. She traces the decade through three main figures – Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Coleridge, and the physician Thomas Beddoes – plus a huge cast of supporting characters, whose journey through the politics, science, art and sex of the time illustrates roughly the same decline and fall of hope.
Some of the best stories here are the incidental ones. I was fascinated to learn more about Thomas Day, the radical novelist and educational reformer, who, under the influence of Rousseau's ideas about how to bring up children, simply went round to the Foundling Hospital, picked out two girls of eleven and twelve, and took them home, intending to marry the one who responded best to his regime. (His regime, inevitably, involved them learning to devote themselves submissively to their future husband.) Even in 1769, people looked askance on a bachelor swanning around with two prepubescent girls, so he moved to Avignon where, presumably, he felt attitudes would be laxer; it didn't really work, though, and when they got back to England he apprenticed one of the girls off to a milliner and never contacted her again. The other lasted a couple more years until he abandoned her, too, sending her to live with an ‘ailing woman’ in the country.
Day's motives in this unsavoury episode were, perhaps, slightly more high-minded than we might immediately assume, but there was certainly an important sexual element in all this. Sex was one of the things that the French Revolution was assumed to be reinventing. This is most obvious through the sharp, doomed perspicacity of Mary Wollstonecraft's writing, which identified most of the salient inequities in gendered society generations before anyone would have the inclination to do anything about them. (Incidentally, this is now the fourth or fifth book in which I've read a narrative account of Wollstonecraft's horrific death following childbirth, and I'm not sure I can put myself through it again.)
Hewitt's wider argument, about the impact of all this on our own attitudes towards the emotions, is a bit trickier to prove. She brings in any number of modern references, from mindfulness blogs, to supposedly ‘untranslatable’ words, to the trendy sex therapies of Emily Nagoski. Some of these seem more pertinent than others, and they're often treated in a rather shallow way, but it's still quite fun seeing them drafted into Georgian debates like this.
The most lasting inheritance, she argues, is the ‘hydraulic’ theory of emotions, which saw the passions as resolutely political, and predicted that suppressing them would lead to outbreaks of violence and disorder. The concept survives in figures of speech which see people as ‘pent-up’ or finally ‘snapping’. (Hewitt suggests that this is mostly applied to men, for vaguely patriarchal reasons, but I have my doubts – surely it's women who are the ones usually stigmatised as overemotional?) Anyway, Beddoes was finding in his lab that his hydraulic theories of gases were mostly rubbish, and hydraulic emotions soon turned out to be chimerical, too. Far from producing disorder, political repression was dismayingly effective. Pitt's ‘Gagging Acts, and the increasingly conservative, authoritarian political tide…were arguably resulting in a more, not less, docile population in Britain,’ she argues.
Nevertheless, there is definitely something in the idea that emotions have become a matter for individuals, now, rather than for societies. One effect of a more modern, psychotherapeutic sensibility has been to ‘convert the social critique contained in individuals' distressing emotions into criticisms of the individuals themselves’: instead of fixing the real social issues that make you anxious, why don't you just have some chamomile tea and do half an hour in downward dog? This ‘depoliticization of emotion’, Hewitt suspects, disproportionately affects women, who are thereby discouraged from ‘challenging the way in which emotions and emotional negotiations are infected with highly gendered inequalities of power’. Not a pretty sentence, but you see the point.
This is all extremely interesting, though you might feel that we are starting to drift a long way from the 1790s. Still, the overall argument that there was – in one lovely phrase – ‘a ghost in the Enlightenment machine’ is convincingly made, and this tension between rationality and emotion is something that's very much still with us. Hewitt's book takes on a bit too much, perhaps, and isn't quite ‘very heaven’ – but it does contain some moments of bliss.
June 27, 2023
More of an anthology of fascinating biographies/themes than a single, integrated story. A bit too long and some chapters that don't really feel very related to the main argument that the 1790s saw a shift in our conception of the mind/emotions. Overall though, really enjoyed this as a new way of looking at the end of the eighteenth century.
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