A Revolution of Feeling by Rachel Hewitt, Granta, £25
Authors are not always to be blamed for their subtitles – they may be foisted on them by publishers to make a book more eye-catching. So here we have “The Decade That Forged the Modern Mind”. “Which one was that?” you may reasonably ask, even before wondering whether there is indeed such a thing as “the modern mind”. No matter. Hewitt fixes on the 1790s – certainly, on account of the French Revolution, a momentous decade. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”, thought Wordsworth, before concluding that it turned into a decidedly less blissful, indeed rather dirty, afternoon.
Hewitt sets out her stall in the first chapter, ambitiously entitled “A History of Emotions”, in which she asserts that “emotional cultures could change”, and that “new repertoires of emotion could be generated and paradigm shifts could occur in medical theories about the origin and operation of the passions in the body. Precisely such a revolution of feeling took place in the last decade of the 18th century.” I like that “precisely”. It reminds me of one of my schoolmasters who used to say that any sentence beginning with the word “surely” should be distrusted.
There is a good deal about how we write and speak about emotions, some of which is interesting, some platitudinous and old hat. Happily, however, Hewitt is concerned not only with this sort of stuff, but also with individuals, in particular with a number of intellectuals – Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, Thomas Beddoes and Richard Lovell Edgeworth – who were first excited by the Revolution in France and hoped that it would lead to political reform and greater liberty in England, only to suffer disappointment as the British government of William Pitt embarked on a course of repression. Hewitt’s sympathies are with these idealists, and especially with Wollstonecraft and her insistence on the sadly neglected rights of women.
She gives an admirable and enjoyable account of their opinions, experiences and stories, and treats their disappointments and disillusionment with generally intelligent sympathy. They were all striving for what they deemed to be a better world, as idealists have throughout history.
There is no doubt which side she is on. Pitt’s government was undeniably severe and repressive, its use of agents provocateurs distasteful as such employment almost always is. She quotes Tom Paine, the author of The Rights of Man, saying that in Britain it is from “plots against the Revolution that all the mischiefs have arisen”.
What she doesn’t seem to realise is the extent to which the government’s severe policy and methods may have been justified. The example of the Revolution in France was genuinely frightening – it had destroyed established order, persecuted the Church and outlawed religion. The proclamation of the Rights of Man had led straight to the Terror. Governments have a duty to maintain order, and, though it is probable that Pitt, who had himself been in favour of parliamentary reform before 1789, may have exaggerated the danger of revolution, they were only too aware of the course taken by the Revolution in France.
Moreover, high-minded as the British radical reformists undoubtedly were, they were also often silly and even unintentionally comic. Wollstonecraft, for instance, fell in love with the painter Henry Fuseli, and presented herself at his house where she informed his wife that “she wished to become an inmate in his family”.
Likewise, Hewitt writes at length on Coleridge and Southey’s plan to establish an ideal community, called a Pantisocracy, without remarking on its absurdity. Idealists can of course be very foolish: witness Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s attempt to rear his son Dick according to the precepts laid down by Rousseau in Emile; and Hewitt has the good sense to remind us that, whatever merit Rousseau’s theories of education may have had, he deposited his own children in a foundling hospital.
The strengths of this book are evident. It is continuously interesting and the picture of the radical reformers is intelligent and always sympathetic. Yet it suffers from the weakness characteristic of any work of history that attempts to form general conclusions from the lives of a handful of not necessarily typical individuals.
Accepting that the events of the 1790s brought disappointment to her characters, Hewitt would have us believe that the optimism of the 1790s was replaced by a pessimism founded in Malthus’s theories about the relationship between population and production, and the indulgence of emotion by Victorian repression of feeling.
But this is to draw general conclusions from a few examples. One might as reasonably say that the 19th century was a time of optimism, economic expansion and belief in progress. Moreover, emotional restraint may not be a repression of feeling, but rather a disinclination to express it. Stiff upper lip, you know.
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