Review of Rachel Hewitt's book 'A revolution of feeling: the decade that forged the modern mind'Publisher PD

Roe, Nicholas Hugh

Review of Rachel Hewitt's book 'A revolution of feeling: the decade that forged the modern mind

University of St. Andrews - Pure

The birth of romance

St Andrews Research Repository

d e c e m b e r  2 0 1 7  /  j a n u a r y  2 0 1 8  |  Literary Review 33nicholas roeThe Birth of RomanceA Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern MindBy Rachel Hewitt(Granta Books 550pp £25)h i s t o r yRachel Hewitt’s fi rst book, Map of a Nation, showed how the institution that created our Ordnance Survey Lan-dranger maps also shaped the United King-dom. Her new book is similarly ambitious, setting out to chart how the revolution-ary 1790s transformed the Western world by inventing some aspects of the modern mind. According to Hewitt, the decade of the French Revolution saw a revolution of feeling, and of feeling about feeling, as 18th-century conceptions of the passions faded and disappointed hopes gradually revealed a modern emotional landscape.Anyone who has read Blake or Words-worth knows that a generation of Brit-ish radicals and intellectuals blazed with enthusiasm for the French Revolution. ‘Hey for the … Millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude be unto the soul of Thomas Paine!’ declared the journalist Thomas Holcroft. Hewitt fi nds some-thing more human in the decade’s sub-sequent passage from beatitude to terror, peace to war, anticipation to regret, opti-mism to disappointment, happiness to melancholy. In Britain, prosecutions for sedition and treason, intensifi ed by the notorious ‘Gagging Acts’, saw hundreds – perhaps thousands – of men and women suffer detention, exile, fi nancial ruin, har-assment, psychological damage, physical harm, impaired health and, in the case of the Unitarian scholar Gilbert Wakefi eld, death from the effects of imprisonment. ‘Out of the broken, bleeding hopes of the 1790s’, Hewitt tells us, came a new ‘attitude to emotion’ that was more self-centred and inward, with a palette of feelings extend-ing from ecstasy to despondency. The new attitude was ‘Romantic’, with all of that word’s connotations of individualism and alienation, spontaneity and obsession, lib-erty and enthralment.Whereas 18th-century emotions had fostered communities of ‘sympathetic exchange’, the new approach was cen-tred on personal experience, memory and imagination, all at a remove from material history. So Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, composed at the end of the decade, quietly detaches itself from contexts to contem-plate a ‘serene and blessed mood’ above and beyond the world of sensations and events. Hewitt traces this cultural revo-lution through a group biography of fi ve ‘initial optimists’: the poet Samuel Tay-lor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the experimental physician Thomas Beddoes, and the pioneering photographer Thomas Wedgwood. Interweaving these lives with the events of the decade, the book is packed with vivid biographical detail and tells its story of the passionate 1790s with fl air and human insight. Anyone seeking a single-volume account of this momentous and many-faceted decade should read it.Hewitt structures her book chrono-logically and thematically. Its four sec-tions begin with ‘Hope’ then arc through ‘Discouragement’ and ‘Disappointment’ to ‘Despair’ – broadly speaking, the trajectory of Wordsworth’s story of his revolutionary self in The Prelude. Although Hewitt aims for a revisionist account, some of the ter-rain covered is well trodden: the debate about Burke’s Reﬂ ections, Rousseau’s writ-ing on education and Hartley’s on emotion, Coleridge’s Pantisocracy, the 1794 treason trials, Wedgwood’s theories of education, the Irish rising of 1798 and so on. From this familiar territory, Hewitt makes more original forays into medical science and psychology, exploring the hydraulic theory of passions, according to which feelings and desires are actuated by fl uid pressure. Dating from the Middle Ages, the hydrau-lic theory has proved surprisingly durable and survives, Hewitt contends, in some 21st-century claims about the ‘operation of emotion’. Beddoes’s medical theories and gas therapies, available at his ‘Pneumatic Institution’, revealed the revolutionary potential of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas: inhaling it, Beddoes believed, would do more for the poor than Paine’s Rights of Man. By spontaneously creating a sense of light-headed, giggly euphoria, nitrous oxide showed that, contrary to earlier con-ceptions of socially responsible passion, emotions ‘might have no moral purpose at all’. The hook of this ‘legal high’ was already apparent in 1797. If the book’s sections signal milestones in Hewitt’s argument, her core narrative is perhaps best represented in her close and sensitive tracking of Wollstonecraft’s ‘complex and nuanced approach to emo-tional regulation’. Elsewhere, engaging local detail can at times obscure the route: in mapping history, Hewitt is frequently obliged to tour all kinds of contextual Portraits of Southey and Coleridge by Robert Hancock, 1796DEC17 TF.indd   33 21/11/2017   20:30Literary Review |  d e c e m b e r  2 0 1 7  /  j a n u a r y  2 0 1 834h i s t o r yhinterlands. The account of Pantisocracy (a form of utopian social organisation where all rule equally), for example, tells us about emigration schemes, the Bounty mutiny, Joseph Priestley’s Pennsylvania, Coleridge’s and Southey’s undergraduate careers and their courtship of the ‘disreputable’ Fricker girls. All of this has interest, if not novelty, and anyone looking for a thorough inves-tigation of Pantisocracy will find Hewitt’s account helpful. But what of the emotional history of this idealistic community? We hear of the Pantisocrats’ ‘change of heart’, their ‘declining hopes’ and ‘disappointment’s darkening outline’, yet so far as I can see curiously little is made of the emotional the-ory that for Coleridge had underpinned the scheme. ‘The ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the Soul,’ he announced to Southey: I love my Friend – such as he is, all man-kind are or might be! The deduction is evident – Philanthropy (and indeed every other Virtue) is a thing of Concretion – Some home-born Feeling is the center of the Ball, that, rolling on thro’ Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection. Pantisocracy was to be an affective ‘center’, from which an emotional ‘roll-ing’ would collect and assimilate other ‘attachments’ into a fabric of love. Such, at least, seems to have been the idea. Mar-riage to the Fricker sisters was conspicu-ously absent from this view of feeling and friendship, which in some ways recalled earlier ideas of communal and ‘sympa-thetic exchange’ that were also jettisoned when the scheme failed. In 1796 Coleridge could be found in luxurious solitude, con-templating ‘idle flitting phantasies’ that traversed his ‘indolent and passive brain’; by 1802, mired in hopeless passion for Sarah Hutchinson, he had arrived at a much darker recognition: ‘My genial Spirits fail/… I may not hope from out-ward Forms to win/The Passion & the Life whose Fountains are within!’ As Percy Shelley pointed out, Paine’s ‘age of revolu-tions in which everything may be looked for’ was also an ‘age of despair’.By focusing on the 1790s, Hewitt brings into focus more protracted factors in the history of emotions, all of which centred on the self – the new industrial capitalism, evangelicalism, ideas of democ-racy, the cult of sensibility, even reading habits and the rise of the novel. ‘I am stud-ying such a book!’ Southey exclaimed to a friend. ‘I am inclined to think man is capa-ble of perfection!’ The book he had been reading was Political Justice, Godwin’s two-volume treatise on rational perfectibility in which the ‘evil of marriage’ is described as a ‘system of fraud’ – a selfish restriction of sexual fertility. Four years after the publi-cation of this manual for sexual liberation, Godwin and Wollstonecraft married. Both of them had pioneered revolutions of feel-ing, although Godwin’s sexually candid biography of Wollstonecraft had a con-trary effect: as Hewitt shows, the book helped foster a reaction that would see the Victorians reinstate sexual stereotypes the 1790s had seemed, for a little while, to have left behind. It would be more than a century before Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf took up the cause and created their own revolutionary maps of modern feeling.To order this book from the Literary Review Bookshop, see page 85.This Christmas, treat someone to a year of Apollo for just £45 and we’ll also send YOU a Cézanne book, worth £35:   www.apollo-magazine.com/M106E '    +44 (0)330 333 0180 quoting M106EOffer available to new UK and overseas customers subscribing by continuous payment ($75 for US subscribers; €70 for subscribers in Europe). For one-off payments please expect an extra charge of £5/$5/€5)One of the world’s oldest and most respected art magazines, Apollo covers everything from antiquities to contemporary workPLUS RECEIVE A FREE BOOKDEC17 TF.indd   34 21/11/2017   20:30

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The birth of romance

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