By Fred Kaplan
An soaking up research of the evolution of sentiment in Victorian existence and literatureWhat is sentimentality, and the place did it come from? For acclaimed student and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds have been planted by means of the British ethical philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians won from them a concept of human nature, a trust within the innateness of benevolent ethical instincts; sentiment, in flip, emerged as a suite of shared ethical emotions against either clinical realism and the extra ego-driven energies of Romanticism. Sacred Tears investigates the profound ways that seminal writers Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle have been motivated through the philosophies of David Hume and Adam Smith, and by way of novelists of an analogous interval. Exploring sentiment in its unique context—one usually forgotten or overlooked—Kaplan's research is a stimulating fusion of highbrow background and literary feedback, and holds no small significance for questions of paintings and morality as they exist at the present time.
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Extra info for Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature
Example text
5 Keenly aware of the charges levelled against their works, authors of fashionable novels defend them with spirit. ‘Novels,—especially such as affect to treat fashionable life,—are born to such an inheritance of shame’, writes Mrs Gore, who interrupts the plot of Pin Money to complain of the critics, ‘[I]t is so much the custom of dull or silly people of all ages and sexes to reprobate them with a sentence of contempt as the most frivolous, flighty, useless, and condemnable productions of the press … that it becomes necessary from time to time to throw a heavy lump of marl on the surface’, something dull and tedious, ‘in order to deceive the dunces into a belief that some mysterious process of improvement is carrying on for their advantage’ (ii, 53–4).
61 Moreover, Mr Lloyd himself is the author of that ‘book in his window’, A Treatise on Hats, with twenty-four engravings and ‘now in its fourth edition’, so we have two advertisements in one. Lloyd’s customers, explains Real Life in London, ‘have only to refer to the engravings in Mr. Lloyd’s work, where every possible variety [of hat] is clearly defined, and to order such as may suit the rank in life they either possess or wish to assume’ [emphasis added] (i, 18). In short, in the daily papers and in Mr Lloyd’s book ‘dedicated to the head’, ‘all the senses are tantalized with profusion, and the eye is dazzled with temptation, for no other reason’, says the author, ‘than because it is the constant business of a fashionable life—not to live in, but out of self’ (i, 104).
Similarly, the reader looks for clues in Lady Birmingham’s scene and finds them on the lady’s richly furnished desk. It is from this power base that the parvenue Lady Birmingham commands the reluctant, grumbling deference of London exclusives, bidding them to attend the grand opening of her richly furnished new Regent Street house – which they most certainly do. The reader’s subjectivity, captured by this carefully managed display, is not misled. Lady Birmingham’s self-confident social power comes exactly ‘as advertised’.