Transcript Slide 1 - Individual.utoronto.ca

“Oh! my children, my children,” he cried, “have I found you thus? My
poor Jack, art thou gone? I thought thou shouldst have carried thy
father’s grey hairs to the grave! and these little ones” - his tears
choked his utterance, and he fell again on the necks of the children.
“My dear old man,” said Harley, “Providence has sent you to relieve
them; it will bless me if I can be the means of assisting you.”
“Yes, indeed, sir,” answered the boy; “father, when he was a-dying,
bade God bless us, and prayed that if grandfather lived he might send
him to support us.”
“Where did they lay my boy?” said Edwards.
“In the Old Churchyard,” replied the woman, “hard by his mother.”
“I will show it you,” answered the boy, “for I have wept over it many
a time when first I came amongst strange folks.”
He took the old man’s hand, Harley laid hold of his sister’s, and they
walked in silence to the churchyard.
There was an old stone, with the corner broken off, and some letters,
half-covered with moss, to denote the names of the dead: there was a
cyphered R. E. plainer than the rest; it was the tomb they sought.
“Here it is, grandfather,” said the boy.
Edwards gazed upon it without uttering a word: the girl, who had
only sighed before, now wept outright; her brother sobbed, but he
stifled his sobbing.
“I have told sister,” said he, “that she should not take it so to heart;
she can knit already, and I shall soon be able to dig, we shall not
starve, sister, indeed we shall not, nor shall grandfather neither.”
The girl cried afresh; Harley kissed off her tears as they flowed, and
wept between every kiss.
(Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, 1771)
John Earlom (after George Romney), Sensibility. A Portrait of Emma Hart (1789)
John Earlom (after George
Romney), Sensibility. A
Portrait of Emma Hart
(1789)
Defining sensibility
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755):
1. Quickness of sensation.
2. Quickness of perception.
Defining sensibility
Encyclopaedia Britannica (3rd edn, 1797):
a nice and delicate perception of pleasure or pain, beauty or
deformity.
Defining sensibility
Encyclopaedia Britannica (3rd edn, 1797):
a nice and delicate perception of pleasure or pain, beauty or
deformity. It is very nearly allied to taste; and, as far as it is
natural, seems to depend upon the organization of the
nervous system.
Defining sensibility
Encyclopaedia Britannica (3rd edn, 1797):
a nice and delicate perception of pleasure or pain, beauty or
deformity. It is very nearly allied to taste; and, as far as it is
natural, seems to depend upon the organization of the
nervous system. It is capable, however, of cultivation, and is
experienced in a much higher degree in civilized than in
savage nations, and among persons liberally educated than
among boors and illiterate mechanics.
Philosophy and sensibility
3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics (1711)
No sooner are actions viewed, no sooner the human
affections and passions discerned (and they are most of them
as soon discerned as felt) than straight an inward eye
distinguishes and sees the fair and shapely, the amiable and
admirable, apart from the deformed, the foul, the odious, or
the despicable. How is it possible, therefore, not to own that
as these distinctions have their foundation in nature, the
discernment itself is natural and from nature alone?
Philosophy and sensibility
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
That there may be some correspondence of sentiments
between the spectator and the person principally concerned,
the spectator must, first of all, endeavour, as much as he can,
to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home
to himself every little circumstance of distress which can
possibly occur to the sufferer. He must adopt the whole case
of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to
render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of
situation upon which his sympathy is founded.
The Cult of Sensibility
Time
Mid-eighteenth century, esp. 1740s to 1760s.
Archetypal victims/heroes:
The chaste suffering women
The benevolent, emotionally-sensitive. Man.
Stock Vocabulary
Benevolence, virtue, esteem, delicacy, transport, kind, honest, tender,
fond, melting, swelling, overflowing.
The Cult of Sensibility
Novel
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768)
Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)
Poetry
Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1743-5)
Thomas Gray, ‘An Elegy Written on a Country Churchyard’ (1783)
Drama
Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722)
Edward Moore, The Gamester (1753)
The Attack on Sensibility
Detail of James Gillray, New Morality
(1798), showing the figure of Sensibility.
The Attack on Sensibility
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
[…] all your pretty flights arise from your pampered sensibility; and
that, vain of this fancied preeminence of organs, you foster every
emotion till the fumes, mounting to your brain, dispel the sober
suggestions of reason. It is not in this view surprising, that when you
should argue you become impassioned, and that reflection inflames
your imagination, instead of enlightening your understanding.
Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, Sir, reason together; and,
believe me, I should not have meddled with these troubled waters, in
order to point out your inconsistencies, if your wit had not burnished
up some rusty, baneful opinions, and swelled the shallow current of
ridicule till it resembled the flow of reason, and presumed to be the
test of truth.
The Attack on Sensibility
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)
As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own
imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very
well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are
manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce,
through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect.