The idea that the study of emotions might be an important aspect of historical scholarship has a long pedigree. Proponents of its value can be found in some unusual places such as Lewis Namier who, in his essay ‘Human Nature in Politics’ and in his biography of the eighteenth-century English statesman Charles Townshend, emphasised the importance of politicians’ emotional condition to understanding their conduct. However, it is only since the late 1990s that the history of emotions has emerged as a sub-discipline within historical scholarship. Since then it has grown in popularity and now occupies an important position within cultural history, something attested to by the growing number of centres focused on supporting research into the history of emotions.
The book under review originates in one of the many centres for research into the history of emotions, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. The volume consists of 13 chapters written by a mixture of historians, philosophers, literary critics and psychologists. It aims to place contemporary developments in psychology in dialogue with historical scholarship in order to revisit the history of print culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
How might this and other work being produced on the history of emotions inform historians interested in the organisation of past societies? Eighteenth-century political economy certainly placed emotions at the heart of economic thought and history. After all, Adam Smith produced the Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as The Wealth of Nations, and the emotion of sympathy was central to his understanding of how the economy functioned. Keynes highlighted the importance of emotions to economics in his discussion of the ‘animal spirits’ that drive most decisions made by individuals. Such insights, and extensive further research, have inspired the growth of behavioural economics, work which takes the economic effects of emotions very seriously indeed. In terms of demographic behaviour, there are similarities between Barbara Rosenwein's influential concept of ‘emotional communities’ (groups with shared norms of emotional expression and value) and Simon Szreter's notion of ‘communication communities’, which he uses to explore the relationship between social class and fertility. The history of emotions, therefore, shares a common intellectual heritage with much economic and social history, and, when considering the structure and culture of past collectives, it addresses similar topics, albeit often starting from a different position.
Heather Kerr, David Lemmings and Robert Phiddian's stated intention in the opening chapter to this edited collection is to explain why ‘sympathetic and violent passions’ (p. 4) in the eighteenth century were channelled into print rather than exploding into conflict as in the civil wars of the seventeenth century. That is a grand aim, and one that proves extremely difficult to live up to. The growth of print undoubtedly played a role in the shifts in political and public culture in eighteenth-century Britain, but it was hardly the only factor. While the eighteenth century did not witness a civil conflict within the British Isles of the kind seen in the seventeenth century, there were significant rebellions in 1715 and 1745 and the American Revolution was in many respects a bloody civil war. However, if the volume does not entirely convince at the level of its overarching argument, the individual chapters do provide a number of interesting and useful discussions of aspects of the history of emotions.
W. Garrod Parrott, a psychologist, provides a very informative discussion of contemporary developments in the study of emotions and relates them to recent historical scholarship. Of particular interest is his discussion of studies that have shown how individuals can experience ‘group-level emotions … that were statistically different from the emotions reported as an individual’ (pp. 38–9). Such research can potentially assist in discussion of the definition and actions of historical social groups. His chapter also suggests a sensible approach to the issue of whether emotions are constant across cultures and time, or socially constructed. He proposes a solution to this problem based on a concept he calls ‘ur-emotions’ (p. 30), which are underlying abstract structures upon which culturally specific emotions are formed. Such an approach based on bounded possibilities shares much common ground with socio-economic historical method.
Other chapters consider the emotional norms in particular social groupings, such as Jean McBain's stimulating discussion of letters from readers of Defoe's Review, which usefully relates the emotional community evidenced in those letters to wider shifts in the mores surrounding love and marriage. These chapters offer valuable comments on the methodological difficulties associated with studying emotions in the past. For example, the long-standing problem of how to relate cultural representation to individuals’ lived experiences raises its head in Eric Parisot's interesting chapter on the representation of suicide in the press.
Several contributions focus on particular emotions in order to approach the work of individual authors. Thus, Robert Phiddian signifies the importance of violent anger in the satire of Jonathan Swift and Glen Pettigrove discusses the place of emotions in Frances Hutcheson's moral philosophy. It is not clear how these studies of individual authors can reveal much about the emotional communities of eighteenth-century Britain without a close engagement with the structure of the print trade and the socio-economic and cultural structures that authors and readers inhabited. The lack of such engagement means that these chapters read as commentaries on particular authors. The connection to wider emotional communities remains vague and too often based on assertions about how audiences ‘would’ have reacted. These problems are noted in Conal Condren's afterword but without any sustained discussion of how they might be solved.
This collection reveals many of the possibilities of the history of emotions, but also the significant difficulties researchers face. A closer engagement between historians of social structure and of emotions has the potential to assist both groups.
