I.iv.Sympathy as Moral Sentiment, Interiority, and...
It is in this cluster of problems that we situate theories of sentiments in their relations to a history of media.This includes mediation or immediacy in communication, inward and external manifestations of feeling, theatricality of sympathy in structuring a self and a world.What can sympathy, if seen from “the convergence of capitalism and print technology”(Anderson 1991:46)[56], tell us about the “distribution of the sensible”(to use Jacques Rancière’s phrase) and representation of self in this receding episteme of “tabulation of things”(to use Foucault’s concept)?How does the capability of sympathy configure into modern human body and intellect?What is the relation between emotional economy and an emergent aesthetics of exchangeability in what Foucault names as “the construction of an empirico-transcendental doublet”of human beings[57]?What theatrical stances—presence or absence—do different forms of humans take at a critical point in the history of global, systematized communication?These epistemological questions are what this writing tries to engage in a historical investigation upon a rising textual media culture.
In the eighteenth century, the writings of the empiricists bring feeling “closer to epistemological matters:empiricism allows emotion to be a way of knowing”(Pinch 18-19).Adela Pinch argues that “almost all eighteenth-century thinking about feeling … concerns the relationship between its epistemological and ontological status, and its social character”(18-19).It differs from the early modern thought of all emotional experience under the heading of “the passions,”and “nor only as innate, natural forces tied closely to the body but also as the essence of volition”(18).A reaction towards the Cartesian category of emotion as volition is found in John Locke, who writes in the last decade of the seventeenth century that “desiring and willing are two distinct Acts of the mind; and consequently that the Will, which is but the power of Volition, is much more distinct from Desire”(italicized sic)(250).Adela Pinch identifies a fundamental shift of feelings and emotions, which is separable from the negative pictures of “the passions as fundamentally destructive and in need of restraint”(18) by the seventeenth-century political theorists.Following Pinch’s historical argument, this current writing situates this shift in the historical period when “circulation becomes one of the fundamental categories of analysis”(Foucault 1970:179).David Hume calls “sympathy”“a communication of sentiments[58]”(italicized sic), and it suggests more volatile movement of feelings between persons than sensibility.The prevalence of a sympathy trope in the eighteenth century indicates the increasing mobility of feelings among subjects, objects, places, which occurs within a system of signs and a table of identities and differences.It builds affective affinities between circulating commercial markets, credit, public opinions as acting at great distances in the modern system of exchanges.David Hume the moral philosopher captures this social nature of people’s ability to feel other people’s feelings in this way:
The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible.As in strings equally wound up, themotion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature.(Hume 1978:575-576)
In chapter 7, the first volume of his sentimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy(1759—1767), Laurence Sterne describes a village midwife, who, as
she had all along trusted little to her own efforts, and a great deal to those of dame nature, —had acquired, in her way, no small degree of reputation in the world; —by which word world, need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be understood to mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter, or thereabouts, of which the cottage where the good old woman lived, is supposed to be the center.(Sterne 10)
The additional proclamation of a provincial English parameter of four miles indicates a world much beyond the local midwife’s reputation, whose existence Sterne’s readership is obliged to imagine and anticipate.The world is so obviously global that Sterne’s message of irony could be easily missed.His French translator hastened in 1776 to add a footnote:
But do not be fooled:it was not the whole world.She was not known, for example, among the Hottentot and Dutch women of the Cape of Good Hope, who are said to give birth like Mother Nature.The world to her was but a small circle.(qtd.in Festa 1)
Indeed, the eighteenth century is one of striking growth in Britain’s world-wide interests.British historian P.J.Marshall writes:
Both the area and the number of people under British rule increased greatly.Far more ships took out many more British goods to colonial markets and brought back much greater quantities of mostly tropical products.(Marshall 2001:1)
Of special significance is the Seven Years’ War, which formally lasted from 1756 to 1763.The term “British Empire”as a commonly accepted meaning of a collection of territories and peoples ruled by Britain is clearly established in the second half of the century.Sir George McCartney, later as Lord McCartney, an ambassador to China in 1793, wrote in 1773 of “this vast empire on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained”(qtd.in Marshall 2001:8).Conduits of circulation, not only as an “empire of goods”(qtd.in Marshall 2001:12) such as tea, silk, sugar, textile, furniture, porcelain, earthenware, but also as that of people, Scots, Irish, blacks, Indians, are formed and woven into a global economy.The British alone transported more than 3.4 million slaves from Africa to the Americas between 1662 and 1807[59].By 1815, the British Empire embraced one-fifth of the earth’s inhabitants[60].Scale of contact with the world beyond “the four English miles diameter”was greatly increased in all aspects of eighteenth-century life.Abundant fluxes of data from places far away were flowing into and through the metropolis center, often collected as the “imperial archive,”to use a phrase from Thomas Richards[61].Their afterlives are either what would come to be called “science[62]”or “culture[63]”in the modern period.Accordingly, sense of common identity, either a “Britishness”or more precisely an “Englishness”becomes a significant discursive site of contestation for different groups of people and things.Communications in commerce, matters, regions, peoples, and thoughts percolates through an economy of empire, which embodies the materialistic and the affective in the accumulation and dissemination of capital.Mechanics of sympathy as happening inter-subjectively or even between objects and subjects helps mediate and regulate the protean empire economy of changes, conflicts, struggles and disparities between the “small circle described upon the circle of the great world.”In 1806 the physician Thomas Trotter, in his A View of the Nervous Temperament, defines the nervous system to be centered on the “GREAT SYMPATHETIC NERVE ...whose office directs the most important operation in the animal economy and binds together in one great circle of feeling, actions and notions both distant and opposite[64].”The body, as Jonathan Crary convincingly argues, becomes part of the modern system along with society and the economy[65], which requires government and management.Its moral consciousness and physiological productivity begins to function in the mechanism of the state, empire, and modern industrialization[66].
Indeed, as if symptomatic of a need of systematization, the eighteenth century, especially during its middle years, witnesses radical ruptures of constellations between sympathy, sentiment and society.On one hand, we have David Hume saying:
I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn(sic) solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strong uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandon’d and disconsolate.Fain wou’d I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself tomix with such deformity.(Hume 1978:264)
Thus David Hume is featured as an evil fanatic and as the lord of a gloomy, gothic castle by James Beattie[67].Besides this, here we see a “Frankenstein-like monster[68]”-philosopher phobic of a self consumed by contemplation and writing, who yearns for a sense of politeness and normality in mingling with “society”and “human commerce.”There may exist a prominent self of the division between an atomistic self and a larger scale of the public, the latter of which is materialized in “society”or “exchange between men of the products of nature or art.”It is what “human commerce”meant in the eighteenth century[69].On the other hand, feelings are not lodged within the private, inner lives of individual persons.Adela Pinch argues in her critical investigation upon this period’s epistemologies of emotions:
[T]hey [emotions] rather circulate among persons as somewhat autonomous substances.They frequently seem as impersonal, and contagious, as viruses, visiting the breasts of men and women the way diseases visit the body.(Pinch 1)
In other words, emotions, feelings, and sentiments have a rather exterior and more interchangeable existence in the eighteenth century, and it is internalized as inward psychological activities.A contribution to the Lady’s Magazine in 1775 reflects this object-like, or thingness, property of sentiment and sensibility:
Sensibility—thou source of human woes—thou aggrandiser of evils! —Had I not been possessed of thee—how calmly might my days have passed! —Yet would I not part with thee for worlds.We will abide together—both pleased and pained with each other.Thou shalt ever have a place in my heart—be the sovereign of myaffections, and the friend of my virtue[70].
Habitation of sensibility suggests either moral superiority or weakness, and is quite selective, excluding what the physician Thomas Trotter names in 1806 as “the untutored and illiterate inhabitants of a forest”(575).For Trotter, two groups of people are notoriously susceptible for such “fine impressions,”which, if received by “organ of sensation,”“never fail to induce delicacy of feeling, that disposes alike to more acute pain, as to more exquisite pleasure”(Trotter 575).Women are more prone to sensibility because of their physical constitution, which is an argument reiterated by commentators both medical and literary.John Brewer thus generalizes this historical argument:
Nature has endued the female to constitution with greater delicacy and sensibility than the male, as destined for a different occupation in life ...the female constitution, therefore, [is] furnished by nature with peculiar delicacy and feeling, soft in its muscular fibre, and easily acted upon by stimuli.(575) [71]
Another figure frequently identified as the victim of an excessive sensibility or sentiment is the author or literary man[72].One Mrs.Donnellan comments to Samuel Richardson:
The misfortune is, those who are fit to write delicately, must think so; those who can form a distress must be able to feel it; and as the mind and body are so united as to influence one another, the delicacy is communicated, and one too often finds softness and tenderness of mind in a body equally remarkable forthose qualities[73].
David Hume singles out this anxiety and Robert James labels it as “HYPERCHONDRIACUS MORBUS”in his Medicinal Dictionary(1743—1745) for those “Literati … who indulge themselves too much in Study, continual Meditations, and Lucrubrations[74].”Thus, self and sensibility, body and sentiment are woven together, the excessive exemplary cases of which are about to be examined as an English disease.This composition of a selfhood partially through things and mediations with things accords well with Hume’s idea of a Lockean concept of selfhood as a fictional construct.It is an atomized idea of the self through the skepticism expressed in Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature(abbr.as Treatise):we lack an impression of a “simple and continu’d self[75].”The Humean skepticism and fright upon the disconsolation and abandonment of a self itself is indicative of an affective rupture of “soul”—what David Wellbery argues the most important concept in the eighteenth century.It projects itself as not contingent upon orthodoxy Christianity as it was in John Locke and other seventeenth-century philosophers[76].
If the first half of the eighteenth century was “still close to that of scholastic philosophy”(Yeo 241), the second half saw more of “words such as ‘Physicks’(and its apparent double, ‘Physick’), ‘Physiology,’ ‘Pneumaticks,’ ‘Pneumatology,’ ‘Phytology,’ ‘Somatology,’ and ‘Aerology’”(242) addressed not only to scholars but also to the reading public.In the historical period when information came of age, and various technologies of knowledge were developed[77], the soul was more associated with “physiology”and “logic.”The study of the mind is transferred from the realm of pneumatology(that is, the traditional doctrine of “incorporeal”substances, concerning God, angels, and so on) to “psychology[78].”David Hartley(1705—1757) significantly writes of a “psychology, or theory of the human mind,”locating that endeavor as part of “natural philosophy.”According to Chambers’ Cyclopaedia(1728)—a work hugely influential, since it served as a template for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie[79], such “psychology,”“a Discourse concerning the Soul,”constitutes a sub-department not of “theology”but rather of “anthropology,”the study of man[80].Indeed, it is one of the beginnings of “the creation of a new body of thinking:the psychologization that is, of identity”(Porter 2005:371).The formation of modern interiority, as advocated through empiricist natural philosophical writings, is manufactured for a rising consumer society in the eighteenth-century Britain[81].This “account of subjectivity”helps to “explain desire, propensities, and aversions as being universal to humans as a group”(Poovey 147), which are cultivated by moral philosophers and remain essential to liberal governmentality.Thus, sentiment and sensibility, as sources of either virtue or distress, should be situated at the constellation of social forces such as politeness, good taste, sociality, commerce, and feminization[82] that configure a modern shape of selfhood.In this way, a political economy of feeling and its inwardness and outwardness parameter occupy a very significant position regarding the conceptualization of identity and sociality in Western modernity, which witnesses the significance of emotion as part of the rising anthropology of man, the “human sciences,”to use Foucault’s phrase[83].
【注释】
[1]For a useful brief discussion on the distinction between “emotion,”“feeling,”“passion,”and “pathos,”see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory, pp.4-5.
[2]This is a stance similar to that of Rei Terada:“I try to steer a middle course between imposing a single vocabulary on all discussions of texts and giving up on terminological distinctions altogether”(Terada 4).
[3]Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, Introduction to Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, p.12.
[4]Indeed, this is very Kantian.See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 3.
[5]This phrase is taken from Jean-Christophe Agnew’s Worlds Apart:The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550—1750, p.59.
[6]A conceptual dichotomy used more in its historical sense by Benjamin Nelson in his The Idea of Usury:From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood.
[7]Adela Pinch historicizes this inward turn of emotions in the century, which is inspiring for this current writing.See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion.
[8]Also see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.1.
[9]John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, i, 1, and “Epistle to the Reader.”For this epistemological turn in the history of modern philosophy as a discipline, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, chapter 3.
[10]This reminds of what Fredric Jameson argues for a “waning of affect”in our time.See Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism, p.10.Especially on pages 15 through 16, when Jameson expresses willingness not “to say that the cultural products of the Postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—which it may be better and more accurate, following J.-F.Lyotard, to call ‘intensities’—are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria.”
[11]See OED online, under the entry of “sympathy.”
[12]Similar to what David E.Wellbery discusses the concept of “soul”in relation to “representations”in the German aesthetic theory by Christian Wolff(1679—1754).See David E.Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”pp.9-42.
[13]Also see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p.148.
[14]For the argument that the medieval notion of “the individual”is distinct from the modern notion of the “individual subject,”see Timothy J.Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, chapter 2; see, generally, chapter 1, on the passage from pre-modern “patterning”to a modern discourse of “analytico-referentiality.”
[15]For how writing effects a radically dramatized self in our modern society, see Raymond Williams, Writing in Society, pp.1-10.
[16]See Walter J.Ong, Orality and Literacy:The Technologizing of the Word, p.74.
[17]See Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture;”Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, pp.46-124; Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, pp.15-53, 163-170; David E.Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”pp.9-17.The rise of representation could also be seen as part of the epistemological shift from the seventeenth century, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, chapter 3.
[18]For how the British novel is part of modern mass media, and the rise of the British realism is a gendering process, see William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684—1750.
[19]Also see William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684—1750, p.224, note 21.
[20]Weber’s interest is more than the technology of reading and writing, also including television, radio and film.His theoretical focus is rather the ways in which modes of inscription are media—the linkage between media “infiltrating”the lines of demarcation by which they are traditionally defined and thereby exposing them as “inscribed in, and as, a network”(Weber 2004:3).This “mediatic articulation”means that the concatenations of “mediatic articulation”cross the border that is supposed to separate the modern mass media from what has come before, “upsetting”and “dislocating,”as Weber says, the commonly held notion of their “radical distinctiveness”(2).Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras:Form, Technics, Media.
[21]This argument has inspired my media investigation upon William Wordsworth’s “poetic mediality”in this current writing.
[22]Indeed, the mid-eighteenth century has been well defined as the period in which this media shift happened.See, for instance, Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, p.4.For a recent more sociological history of reading, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.
[23]As Adela Pinch writes:“Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers seek after the origins and locations of feelings; as they try to pin feelings down, I shall argue, they often discover that one’s feelings may not really be one’s own”(Pinch 3).We will return to this point later.Robert Southey, a harsh critic of the practice of physiognomy, surveyed the galley slaves “with a physiognomic eye to see if they differed from the rest of the people,”once he visited Lisbon.See “Marginal Practices”by Patricia Fara in The Cambridge History of Science:Eighteenth-Century Science, p.495.
[24]Regarding how “literature”was an “engine”of social change, and categorized as “aesthetic”in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Paul Keen, “Preface,”in Revolutions in Romantic Literature:An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780—1832, p.xvi.For “aesthetic”as a political “distribution of the sensible,”see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, pp.12-19.
[25]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion.
[26]James R.Averill, “Inner Feelings, Works of the Flesh, the Beast Within, Diseases of the Mind, Driving Force, and Putting On a Show:Six Metaphors of Emotion and Their Theoretical Extensions,”in Metaphors in the History of Psychology, p.107.
[27]See Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class.
[28]S.Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,”cited by Christopher Fox in his Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, p.1.
[29]Introduction was undertaken in the 1770s as part of a plan for huge work.Mary P.Mack says that “Bentham wrote thousands of practice pages between 1769 and 1781.Some of them were incorporated in The Principles of Morals, printed in 1780, which was itself only a small fragment of his monumental plan to analyze the entire structure of law”(Mack 130).
[30]See John B.Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, p.269, note 53.(https://www.daowen.com)
[31]For a similar “cleansing”strategy that occurs in another media—French painting, that is—in the age of Diderot, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; for how this happens in a media history of the British novel, see William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684—1750.As a matter of fact, the classes of people with “too much sentimentality”or “ardent or morbid sensibility”seems to be an undefined antagonist, for which Fried designates “theatrical”—what Jon P.Klancher defines as “the stances of both radical rhetoric and mass-cultural display,”and “it is worth pointing out that theorists of this kind of reader/spectator nearly always fabricate a hybrid antagonist, composedly equally of radical discourse and mass culture”(191).For Klancher, this kind of theorists includes Samuel T.Coleridge, see chapter 5 in The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790—1832 for his discussion.This tactic is indeed—as Jon P.Klancher points out—throughout media culture, whether literature or otherwise, see Jon P.Klancher, p.191, note 46.For a Chinese case regarding the historical development of a musical medium Qin, see Ronald Egan, “The Controversy over Music and ‘Sadness’ and Changing Conceptions of the Qin in Middle Period China.”I thank Professor Ling Hon Lam for this reading.
[32]See Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility.”
[33]See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp.1-16.
[34]See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion.p.6.
[35]See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, in particular chapter 6, “Science and Knowledge,”with its elucidation of several thresholds of emergence of a “discursive formation”:the thresholds of positivity, epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization(186-187).For Foucault, these are events whose dispersion is anything but evolutive, which is where his critical archaeological spirit lies.
[36]Also see Raymond Williams, Keywords, p.281.
[37]The Monthly Magazine, 1796, 2(October):706, quoted in James Chandler, “Sentiment and Sensibility,”p.22.
[38]Also see Samuel H.Monk, The Sublime, pp.45, 49.
[39]See Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,”p.144.
[40]See G.S.Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres,”in which he defines John Locke’s publication of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding(1690) as the first to deal with this “science of man”, influential to at least three subsequent generations of moral scientists:Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, La Mettrie, the philosophes, and dozens of others.Rousseau’s methodology of doing an intellectual history regarding this key problematic is followed in this current writing, however.
[41]For a speculation upon the difference between “inwardness”and “interiority,”see Stephen Toulmin’s fine essay, “The Inwardness of Mental Life.”
[42]See essays collected in Vision and Visuality, especially Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,”pp.3-23.
[43]See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man; Walter J.Ong, The Presence of the Word:Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History; Elizabeth L.Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe.
[44]See Donald M.Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, p.26.
[45]See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, chapter 2.Of course, visuality could never be the exclusive epistemological mode.For instance, the tradition of hermeneutics is resolutely tied to aural experience.See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes:The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, pp.105-108.
[46]See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, ii, 5.
[47]See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp.41-42.
[48]John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, xi, 17.
[49]See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p.39.
[50]Also see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, p.81.
[51]Of course, this is a Foucauldian formula, see specifically the last two chapters “Man and His Doubles”and “The Human Sciences”in his The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
[52]“Paradigm”here is taken as meaning what is advocated through Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s archaeological writings.See Agamben(2009), “What Is a Paradigm?.”
[53]Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, p.81.Quoted in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p.41.
[54]Quoted in David E.Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon,”p.36.
[55]Quoted in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p.40.
[56]Of course, this is Benedict Anderson’s central argument regarding the emergence of nationalism in its modern form.
[57]See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, chapter 9, “Man and His Doublets.”
[58]David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p.324.
[59]See P.J.Marshall, “Introduction,”in The Oxford History of the British Empire, p.22.
[60]See Linda Colley, Britons, p.323.
[61]See his book Imperial Archive:Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire(Verso, 1996).
[62]For a brief history upon the historical relation between “science”and “natural history,”see Deborah E.Harkness, “A Note about ‘Science’,”in her The Jewel House:Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution, pp.xv-xviii.W.G.Ward is given credit for coining a particular collective usage for science that remains valiant through modern time, when he wrote in 1867:“We shall … use the word ‘science’ in the sense which Englishmen so commonly give to it; as expressing physical and experimental science, to the exclusion of theological and metaphysical.”Also see OED item b.
[63]For a brief historical survey of the heavily loaded term “culture,”see Raymond Williams’ definition of the concept in his Keywords, pp.87-93.Also see Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture.
[64]Thomas Trotter, “A View of the Nervous Temperament:Being a Practical Enquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention and Treatment of Those Diseases, 2nd ed.(Newcastle, 1807),”in Radical Food:The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking 1790—1820, vol.3, p.641.Quoted in James Chandler, “Sentiment and Sensibility,”p.24.
[65]See Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,”pp.29-50.
[66]Also see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception:Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
[67]In James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and allegory(unpublished in his lifetime) “The Castle of Scepticism,”see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.40, note 25.
[68]This phrase is from Adela Pinch, see Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p.31.
[69]See OED online, under the entry of “commerce.”
[70]Lady’s Magazine, 1775, 3(May):251-255.Quoted in James Chandler, “Sentiment and Sensibility,”p.28.
[71]John Brewer, “Sentiment and Sensibility,”p.26.
[72]See John Brewer, “Sentiment and Sensibility,”pp.26-27.
[73]The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, vol.4, p.30.Quoted in John Brewer, “Sentiment and Sensibility,”p.27.
[74]Quoted in John Brewer, “Sentiment and Sensibility,”p.27.
[75]Obviously one can do a biographical reading of Hume’s philosophical statement here.For how he changed his name from Home to Hume, and its relevance to his literary construction of a selfhood, see the chapter on David Hume in this writing.
[76]See Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Passion, p.370.
[77]See Daniel R.Headrick, When Information Came of Age.
[78]See Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Passion, p.371.
[79]See Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Passion, p.371.
[80]See Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Passion, p.371.
[81]See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, pp.147-148.For the eighteenthcentury Britain as a consumer society, see The Birth of a Consumer Society:The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England(Eds.by John H.Plumb, Neil McKendrick and John Brewer); The Consumption of Culture, 1600—1800:Image, Object, Text(Eds.by Ann Bermingham and John Brewer).
[82]For the relation between feminization, literature and commerce in Eighteenth-Century England, see E.J.Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England:Literature, Commerce and Luxury.
[83]The emergence of which, as Foucault writes in a Romantic vein in the last pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on Language, suggests the immediate emergent disappearance of human species from the seashore of the world.In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that the nineteenth-century “episteme”initially organized the world according to biological models:“… man, his psyche, his group, his society, the language he speaks—all these exist in the Romantic period as living beings”(Foucault 1970:253-263).