At the end of the eighteenth century the British movement for the abolition of the slave
trade emerged, arguing for reform based on notions of humanity and the fellow-feeling
of mutual sympathy. With slavery still one of the biggest and most profitable crimes in
the world today, how public sentiment was mobilised to create the first humanitarian
movement to attempt to put an end to the slave trade remains a pertinent question. The
chief aim of this thesis is to investigate the development of abolitionist emotional
norms, evidenced in their mobilising materials, through an exploration of “emotional
practices”, Monique Scheer’s concept for historical change in emotions. This approach,
when combined with Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities” and
the rescripting of emotional norms, opens up the possibility of engaging with
abolitionist texts in a new way, giving access to the methodology behind their
politically engaged appeals to emotions like compassion and benevolence. Through
analysis of the sentimental arguments employed across a range of texts, written both
before and during the abolition campaigns, I uncover the centrality of the idea of
emotional cultivation and improvement to the political agenda of abolitionist writers. In
doing so I argue that there is a congruence between eighteenth-century theories of
potentially transformative moral sentiments and the assumptions about the plasticity of
human nature and emotions that informs emotions as a kind of practice. However, I do
so while acknowledging that there are fundamental eschatological and teleological
differences between the two. The politics of sympathy expressed by abolitionist
academics, newspaper correspondents, preachers and divines, writers of fiction, and
poets had an educative, progressivist, moral purpose which post-Romantic theories of emotions have revised or discarded. Through their conviction that steady cultivation of
the moral sentiments led to active and virtuous reform of society, abolitionists give their
own account of the historical and emotional changes that saw communities within
Britain come together to fight for abolition. Their conviction in the efficacy of their
politics of sympathy may have wavered once their attempts at sentimental moral
persuasion failed in the combative context of parliamentary debate. However, the
question for my thesis is not whether emotional practice can answer why abolitionism
developed or why it did or did not succeed. Rather, the question I ask is whether an
emotions-as-practice approach can give an effective account of the methods by which
communities manage emotions and how they understand the emotional shifts which
contribute, alongside other socio- and cultural historic factors, to social change.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 201
