1 - Sentiment and sensibility

Summary

For much of the second half of the eighteenth century the language of feeling, with its key terms of sentiment, sympathy and sensibility, was central to the discussion of man and society, manners, ethics and aesthetics. In its concern with interiority – with feeling, the human psyche and the creative imagination – its emphasis on the ethical and psychological power of literature, its concern with everyday life, and the debate it provoked about the effects – chiefly malign – of the publishing industry, critics and the literary system, the literature of sentiments and sensibility rehearsed many of the issues and deployed some of the language we tend to associate with ‘Romanticism’. At the same time sensibility has its own history, anchored, as we shall see, in the material conditions of the production, dissemination and consumption of literature in the period between the mid-eighteenth century and the French Revolution. To apprehend both this history and its possible relations to what subsequently was called Romanticism, we need to characterize sensibility less as a body of ideas or as a discourse deployed across a series of texts than as the site of a major dispute about how to understand, express and affect man’s capacity for moral deliberation and action. This debate about man’s moral consciousness and its relations to literary technology – both in the sense of a poetics of sentiment and of mechanisms of literary production – was sensibility’s inheritance to Romanticism.