A ‘Plea of Humanity’? Emotions and the Makings of Lunacy Reform in Britain, c.1770-1820

Abstract

This thesis utilises theoretical frameworks for the historical study of emotions to challenge conventional narratives of mental health reform in early modern Britain. In particular, it contests prevailing explanations for the emergence of lunacy reform at the turn of the nineteenth century which, following the path-breaking work of Andrew Scull and others, have typically attributed changing attitudes towards insanity to the proliferation of new ideas about the innate sensitivity of the insane, and concomitant shifts in popular sensibilities. This thesis, by contrast, locates the emergence of lunacy activism in a shift in ‘emotional regimes’ in the closing decades of the eighteenth century which, it is argued, modelled the norms of the period’s distinctive manifestations of ‘humanitarian’ fervour. Eighteenth-century attitudes towards madness reflected the ambiguous attitudes towards other-directed feeling expressed in the writings of contemporaneous moral philosophers like Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Though Enlightenment dogma naturalised displays of sentimental affect towards distress, in the hands of these writers the definition of ‘sympathy’ itself was simultaneously moulded to adhere to the individualist doctrines of the consumer revolution. This encouraged the contemplation of pleasing or submissive subjects, while sanctioning the disavowal of subjects that challenged the polite spectator’s ease. It is suggested that the performances naturalised by this contemplative model of sympathy provided an obstacle to political engagement on the issue of the treatment of the mad, and that the erosion of these ideals and norms in the late eighteenth century was the precondition for a concerted lunacy advocacy movement. As industrialisation undermined the legitimacy of sentimental emotion, ambitious members of the ascendant middle-classes sought to distinguish themselves from ‘fashionable’ society by projecting an emotional style that emphasised courage, fortitude and aggression – traits which came to exemplify the emotional habitus of the first wave of social reformers. Encouraged by the new norms, these individuals showed increasing interest in the treatment of insanity: actively seeking the spectacle of madness as a means of proving their courage and self-command, while imposing themselves on political debates surrounding the lunacy question, believing that aggression and bravado reflected a sincere or ‘disinterested’ public spirit. Such findings have broad implications for the study of Western humanitarianism. A consideration of the influence of emotional regimes on political action can offer a corrective to traditional accounts of the development of humanitarian sensibilities, which typically locate the genesis of modern social activism in the eighteenth century ‘culture of sensibility’. Whatever the influence of sentimental doctrine on ‘natural rights’ discourses, it is clear that advocates’ responses to suffering were the product of specific social and material conditions, rather than any nascent extension of humane regard. Moreover, such an approach undermines any assumption that political agitation is simply a ‘triggered response’, activated by some deeply held ‘principles’, instead offering support for Monique Scheer’s assertion that the attitudes and thought patterns of intentionality, characteristic of the ‘liberal self’, can be conceived of as practices, mapped onto the habitus by the prevailing emotional regime.