Philosophies of Sympathy

Abstract

Scholars have often emphasised the involvement of the discourses of sensibility and sentimental philanthropy with the realm of the political. As Markman Ellis argues, the sentimental novel was a means of moulding the emotions of the reader, as well as addressing urgent political issues of the time, such as social injustice and slavery. The sentimental novel’s articulation of such concerns was an attempt to reformulate social attitudes to inequality through the cultivation of humanitarianism and sensibility.¹ According to R.F. Brissenden, the French Revolution put into practice the humanitarian ideals grounded in the belief that man’s capacity to act morally is related to his physical and psychological responsiveness to the impulses around him, that is, his sensibility. A belief existed that if individuals could freely exercise their natural sensibilities, they would act in a philanthropic spirit. Such ideas, as Brissenden writes, could serve as the basis for the launch of the Revolution, a general plea for human rights, the movements for the elimination of torture, and the abolition of slavery.² However, such a belief in the ideology of sentimental philanthropy was shaken by the end of the century. This attitude is well illustrated by the attacks of the Anti-Jacobin, a Tory satirical review of the 1790s. George Canning, one of its authors, writes critically of the Goddess of Sensibility:

Mark her fair Votaries — Prodigal of Grief,

With cureless pangs, and woes that mock relief,

Droop in soft sorrow o’er a faded flow’r;

O’er a dead Jack-Ass pour the pearly show’r; —

But hear unmov’d of Loire’s ensanguin’d flood,

Chok’d up with slain; — of Lyons drench’d in blood;

Of crimes that blot the Age, the World with shame,

Foul crimes, but sicklied o’er with Freedom’s name […]³