This chapter focusses on the rise of humanitarian literature relating to the southern hemisphere settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the 1830s, when humanitarian concerns about the treatment of Indigenous peoples coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery and the proliferation of coerced and indentured labour. It examines how travel writing and poetry of witness encouraged humanitarian intervention on colonial frontiers, often by ventriloquising the voices of Indigenous peoples in the aftermath of violent massacres. It considers the wider networks and print media in which humanitarian literatures originated, such as open letters, religious tracts, treaties, and petitions. The chapter argues for the importance of a sentimentalised aesthetics of eyewitness immediatism drawn from abolitionist literature in shaping (and distorting) attitudes towards Indigenous peoples. It considers what the framework of humanitarianism can tell us about the literary culture of the 1830s and about the period’s cultural politics of emotion, as metropolitan social commentators sought to redirect sympathetic norms away from distant suffering and towards white poverty at home.

Taking as its case study a cluster of schools, libraries, and learned societies in Southeast Asia, this chapter considers the operation of nineteenth-century colonial cultural institutions on multiple scalar and conceptual levels. First, as local, regional, and transnational networks of people, enabling both bonding networks with local and regional institutions and bridging networks with metropolitan institutions. Second, as geographical nodes and/or centres of regional knowledge collection, production, and accumulation that extend and disseminate knowledge gathered in the colonies to metropoles and regional centres via cultural goods such as journals, publication exchanges, and printed works. And third, as perceived beacons attracting European and non-European knowledge producers and consumers within a global system of useful knowledge societies for the diffusion of moral and intellectual improvement. Focusing on the transmission of what Andrew Sartori has called a global ‘culture concept’, the chapter argues that these institutions were critical both to British expansionism in Southeast Asia and to the creation of Chinese and Malay counterpublics that opposed British cultural hegemony.

This chapter turns more explicitly to those questions of rhetoric and style that have infused the previous three chapters, considering both the relationship between style and the formation of historical protocols, and how style informs the reception of written history in periodical reviews. By examining the reception history of T. B. Macaulay's History of England (1848–59) and Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution: A History, it seeks first, to unpack the methodological conventions and disciplinary judgments that later critics and self-identified ‘scientific’ historians such as J. R. Seeley transmitted about their more ‘popular’, ‘literary’, and ‘novelistic’ predecessors; and second, to rehabilitate prose style as part of a technical discourse that reflects and mediates the domain of historical knowledge production. As discussed in the introduction to this book, I understand style very broadly as a ‘mode of thinking through’ or, perhaps more accurately, as a mode of ‘historical thinking’ rather than simply as an ornamental or mechanical device. In other words, I consider ‘style in its widest sense’ or, as the biographer, critic, and editor of the Fortnightly Review, John Morley, put it in a reference to Thomas De Quincey's theory of ‘organology’: ‘style … in its relation to ideas and feelings, its commerce with thought, and its reaction on what one may call the temper or conscience of the intellect’.

Contained within a long essay on the relationship between style and national character published in instalments in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine between 1840 and 1841, De Quincey's characterisation of style as an arbiter of the ‘temper or conscience of the intellect’ provides a way of understanding Macaulay's ‘vividness’, Carlyle's ‘irregularity’, and other personal idiosyncrasies as an index to larger questions about how stylistic practices reflect and participate in debates concerning national distinctiveness, historical specialisation, and the formation of disciplinary protocols. As Andrew Elfenbein has pointed out, it was the very status of Macaulay and Carlyle as celebrated stylists that concealed the encroaching ‘threat of specialized prose’ throughout much of the nineteenth century.

In a wry reproach to the cloistered philosopher towards the end of his four-volume History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–8), William Godwin argues that feeling is a more central concern for the historian than it is for the abstract thinker or political theorist. The comparative ease with which the philosopher can ‘invent imaginary schemes of policy, and … shew how mankind, if they were without passions and without prejudices, might be best united in the form of a political community’ is inimical to the aims and methods of the historian, who must instead acknowledge that ‘men in all ages are the creatures of passions, perpetually prompting them to defy the rein, and break loose from the dictates of sobriety and speculation’. Such passions, Godwin concludes, not only render historical actors ‘very unlike the pieces on a chess-board’, but also demand that the historian go beyond any general laws of human nature to account for each individual's psychological and social distinctiveness, taking into ‘his estimate the materials of which they are made’ and dynamically ‘adapting his proceedings to their internal modifications’.

Part of his ongoing—indeed lifelong—revision of the rationalist principles outlined in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin's somewhat belated insistence that feelings matter and that they ought to be recorded in written history raises some of the key questions addressed by this book. How could history remediate abstract philosophic ideas and general laws, and subject them to concrete experiential and evidentiary proof? When and how did historians come to understand human behaviour, and its cognitive and sensory underpinnings, as central to capturing the truth of the historical past? How, if at all, did they account for the changing norms, practices, and representations of feeling they discovered in their various studies? How did they access or recover the agency and subjectivity of historical actors and interpret the expression of feelings in historical documents and artefacts? And how did they actualise or represent historical shifts in emotional life in rhetorical and textual forms, from the inner life of individuals to the emotional economies of crowds, collectives, and institutions?

The first half of the nineteenth century undoubtedly saw the rise of the man of letters and the emergence of the popular historian, who attempted to situate his or her work in a literary marketplace newly dominated by the novel. Yet the idea that ‘generalists’ and ‘popularisers’ rejected learned discourse, and that specialised study stagnated over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has rightly been met with increasing scepticism. Historians of academic disciplines have demonstrated the extent to which popularisation and specialisation could be complementary rather than antagonistic in certain fields, from physics and biology to philosophy and poetry. Early nineteenth-century history-writing is usually seen as impervious, if not actively resistant, to specialisation. However, practitioners in the period could take a different view. The sense that technicity, jargon, and opacity were already pervasive in written history led T. B. Macaulay to contend repeatedly in review essays in the 1820s and 1830s that the historian needed to reclaim those aspects of the past that the novelist had appropriated following history's turn to its ‘present narrow limits’. If Macaulay urges his fellow historians to ‘assert the rights of history over every part of her natural domain’ and to return to those vernacular sources that historians had wrongly declared ‘beneath their dignity’, it is precisely because he found the histories of the period so technical and so dry.

Even as he rejects history's narrowing field, Macaulay presciently recognises that several forces were converging in Britain to encourage historical specialisation and the bureaucratisation of historical study, including the expansion of science and the elevation of scientific research models, the university reform movement and the institutionalisation of disciplines, and changes to cultural criticism and conceptions of intellectual elites. The period from the 1820s to the 1850s witnessed agitation for changes to proprietary and copyright laws, as well as attempts to organise the ‘disorganic Literary Class’ into guilds and other professional bodies. History, too, had its own protocol-generating organisations in the form of cooperative printing societies such as the Roxburghe Club and the Bannatyne Club. These societies and book clubs originated in the 1810s and 1820s in Scotland but soon sprang up across the British Isles to organise antiquarians and bibliophiles into working associations, and to fill the gap in printing and preserving historical documents not yet undertaken by the long-awaited Public Record Office (1838).

If the French Revolution was widely understood as an unfixed event belonging to the recent past and open to multiple reconfigurations, the English Revolution and Civil Wars occupied a more fully determined place in the historiography of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When Godwin began writing his History of the Commonwealth in January 1822, interpretations of the seventeenth-century English Republic were still dominated by Hume's eight-volume History of England, which was famously dismissive of religious enthusiasm and sceptical of the role of parliamentary liberty in the history of the English constitution. Hume's counter-republican argument had already been ably rebutted by a series of radical and Whig rejoinders, from Catharine Macaulay's History of England to George Brodie's History of the British Empire (1822), but the history of the English Revolution remained an important means of party self-definition, not least because, as the Whig constitutional historian Henry Hallam pointed out, the seventeenth century was ‘the period from which the factions of modern times trace their divergence’.

Godwin himself had long rejected party histories of the English Commonwealth, arguing in ‘Of History and Romance’ that the ongoing differences between Whig and Tory historians paralleled earlier discrepancies between the eyewitness accounts of the republican Whitelocke and the royalist Clarendon. His subsequent distinction between the ‘superficial’ and the ‘profound’ historian condemns the former for choosing the historical perspective on the English Civil Wars that best suits his or her own prejudices, while crediting the latter with a sceptical awareness of the discontinuous and multiple possibilities of the past. Correctly identifying that party prejudice had increasingly coalesced around assessments of Oliver Cromwell's life and character, Godwin saw his History of the Commonwealth as an evidence-based intervention into the ‘accumulated slander and misconception’ that characterised the existing historiography on Cromwell and the seventeenth-century republicans more generally. Moving away from Whig constitutionalism and adopting a broadly republican approach, Godwin's Cromwell is the complex and daring progenitor of ‘a great and perilous [social] experiment’ rather than a power-hungry usurper of English constitutional liberty or a one-dimensional hero of parliamentary democracy.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke famously calls the Revolution ‘the most astonishing’ event ‘that has hitherto happened in the world’, culminating in his equally famous (non-)depiction of it as a ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’ in which ‘the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind’. As Mary Wollstonecraft registers in her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), Burke's mixed, fragmented, and fluctuating rhetorical strategy replicates his view of the Revolution as an ‘insolent and bloody theatre’ of ‘continually shift-ing’ scenes of ephemeral sensation, offering a series of impressionistic and ‘glowing picture[s] of some interesting moment’ that are either ‘exaggerated’ or dissociated from a longer, stadial history of human development. To put this point differently, Wollstonecraft ties both the text's passional language and its non-coherence at the level of narrative signification with its own loss of authority, so that Burke's rapid and disjointed succession of afflicting scenes—in particular the melodramatic tableaux of the National Assembly and the attempted violation of Marie Antoinette during the October Days—are as ahistorical as any painting (or stage set) that captures only a single, discontinuous moment in time.

Wollstonecraft's overriding sense that Burke's Reflections works via emotional effect rather than rational contiguity is the starting point for this chapter's examination of the role of feeling in the emergent historiography of the French Revolution in 1790s Britain. While Reflections can be understood within a variety of historical traditions from sentimentalism to stadial theory, I situate Burke's text within his understanding of changing regimes of feeling, outlining the ways in which he embeds his analysis of political rights within the practical context of contending human passions, and ties revolutionary action to unsocial feelings. Burke's insight that political obedience rests ‘on something more than relational calculation’ was, of course, enormously important to the period's affective ‘interweaving of private sentimental and public politics’. However, his understanding of feeling in Reflections is ultimately a regulatory or disciplinary one, producing passive political subjects rather than any kind of agential political force. In representing the Revolution (and the feelings, beliefs, and judgments that underpin it) as a ‘non-event’ or aberrant ‘lapsus naturae’, Burke's emotional economy of primary French ‘sensations’ and secondary or acculturated English ‘sentiments’ relegates the actors of the revolutionary present to a non-existent temporality and subjugates their lived experience to a predetermined and illusory past.

Narratives about national character can be traced back to the Middle Ages but it was not until the early nineteenth century that the ‘national paradigm’ began to gain dominance in written history over constitutionalism, feudalism, and religious controversy. Historians such as Hume and Robertson, and after them Burke and Wollstonecraft, had already displayed a keen interest in national characteristics and characterologies, tying their understanding of national character either to classical contrariety models, or to enlightenment developmental frameworks that understood national characteristics as corresponding to more or less ‘civilised’ stages of human development. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, stadial investigations into the synchronic relationship between manners and nations had been extended to wider culturalist interests that legitimated the ‘unique character of nations’ and their ‘alleged superiority over other nations’. As the ‘political instrumentalization of a national self-image’, romantic-era nationalism provided the framework for the distillation of ethnic communities defined by the ‘myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories, elements of shared culture, an association with a specific homeland, and a measure of solidarity’. The ethnicisation of class differences that had gradually stolen into earlier historical accounts was therefore increasingly overlaid by what Joep Leerssen has called ‘romantic ethnogenesis’, whereby debates about ethnic origins and myths provided the ‘stamp of authenticity’ for distinctively national histories.

The long and complicated history of romantic ethnogenesis informed nineteenth-century written history in multiple and often competing ways. Adding a more overtly racialised layer to constructions of national identity, narratives of origin, inheritance, lineage, and descent were used to consolidate various popular and state nationalist agendas, from war propaganda to population and demographic discourse, gradually transforming older ethnies and patriotisms into modern ethnic nationalisms. These narratives of (often) ‘invented traditions’ could also, however, be repurposed by those who sought to promote oppositional or counter-state narratives of national disinheritance, or to develop and sustain regional communities that could not always be comfortably assimilated into state Protestantism and other dominant, metropolitan perspectives of a nation's past. In their attention to alternative identarian models of collective attachment, non-metropolitan historical endeavours—from provincial to colonial histories—raised unresolved questions about the relationship between centres and peripheries in ways that could both reinforce and disrupt the ‘official culture of the ruling elites’.

Against the conception of romantic-era historicism as primarily sentimental or feeling, this book has identified an alternative type of counter-sentimental historicism: one that foregrounds an ethical and representational ambivalence towards sentimentalism without necessarily disavowing it altogether. Both working historians and poststructuralist philosophers of history have tended to pit romantic-era historians against their more scientific successors. This book has argued instead that the written history of the period—usually represented as anomalous, alternative, or transitional in historiographical accounts—is critical to understanding how the history of modern history-writing developed. Despite persistent fears (then and now) that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain had not produced a ‘grand history’ in the continental style, the period is unique in providing a diverse set of historiographical alternatives to empirical and positivist history based on investments in certain types of feeling, sympathetic, or sentimental history, while simultaneously proving integral to the rise of empirical history through its incorporation of antiquarianism, its emphasis on documentary and material research, and its inauguration of inductive and hermeneutic methodologies.

Adapting both to the ascent of the novel and to a rapidly industrialising print-media and publishing landscape, romantic-era historians negotiated and synthesised prior modes of antiquarian, philosophical, and sentimental history in the context of newly historicised understandings of character and subjectivity. Acknowledging that ‘reactive behaviour’ shapes the motives and actions of historical individuals is a conceptual intervention in written history that had its first extended airing in the historical moment we now call ‘romantic’, one in which ‘situational narratives’ increasingly privileged dynamic internal processes and their unanticipated or unintended consequences over philosophical metanarratives of progress and decline. At the same time, the recognition that feelings could and should be studied historically resulted in a certain distance from sentimental modes of representation and from the subjective experience of the historical witness and/or interpreter. Situating romantic-era written history within the history (or pre-history) of the history of emotions has therefore ironically meant focusing not so much on sentimental historicism or ‘feeling history’, but rather on the objectification and even suppression of feeling in nineteenth-century historical writing . More specifically, I have argued that the period's written history played an important role in the movement towards reifying feeling into a historically contingent object of study with its own history and process of development; or, in other words, in making feeling amenable to objectification.

The developmental frameworks evident in poems from Sleep and Poetry to The Fall of Hyperion are most often read in relation to theories of influence and maturation. Keats certainly stages his own development as a ‘very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers’ (LJK, I, 214), but both his self-representations and ‘life of allegory’ readings of his work have obscured the extent to which the sociological drive of his poetry is an inheritance from the Enlightenment. His awareness of the ways in which changes in social and economic conditions are reflected in literary practices, as well as his understanding of the interdependence of manners, morals, laws, customs and opinion, suggest that he was writing against the background of his acknowledged reading of Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Buffon, Robertson, Gibbon, Hutcheson and Mavor, and in all probability, his additional reading of Montesquieu, Goldsmith, Blair, Hume, Hartley, Warton and Smith. Keats draws primarily on six Enlightenment conceptual frameworks: the first is the so-called ‘contrariety’ model that permeates the historiography of the French, English and Scottish Enlightenments; the second is the descriptive developmental model that attempts to explain the shift in European culture from feudal to civil and commercial societies; the third is the so-called ‘philosophic’ model of history which supplements classical and exemplary history with a more empirical study of probable causes and effects, and widens the scope of history from a narrow concern with high politics to a broader view of society; the fourth is the diachronic, comparative and uneven ‘stages of society’ paradigm of the Scottish Enlightenment; the fifth is the Enlightenment moral debate concerning theories of self-interest and benevolence; and the sixth is the associative and sceptical framework of the British empiricists.