This chapter argues that As You Like It draws from early modern and classical educational theory to stage the acquisition of virtues such as courage, justice, and sympathy, which are, in turn, central to the romance’s resolution. The play explores a classroom exercise known as ethopoeia (or “character-making”), which frequently asked students to inhabit, write from, and perform from the subject position of other genders. Inhabiting other genders can prime students’ capacities to sympathize across categories of difference, enlarging prosocial other-orientation by cultivating the sense of justice necessary to understand how hardship affects people differently and the courage to give voice to the feelings of others. The analysis closes by considering the value of ethopoeia in contemporary liberal education.

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin sought to erase the hard border between humans and other animals. Attempts to define a human exception within nature persist, however, among evolutionary anthropologists as well as in popular histories of the human species. Darwin proposes a cultural rather than biological perfection of “humanity” through an evolution of the moral sense or conscience, which takes the form of a deliberative expansion of the sympathetic imagination to embrace other nations and races and, eventually, all sentient life. At the same time, Darwin predicts a future widening of the extinction gap between a more highly evolved human type and “lower” races and species. Extermination, seemingly at odds with a universal sympathy, provides its historical condition. The crux informs subsequent accounts of a revolutionary rather than evolutionary stage of human emergence, in which the enhancement of Homo sapiens’ social intelligence entails the extermination of other human populations.

This chapter uses a close reading of The Lancet medical journal, and its radical, charismatic editor Thomas Wakley, to delineate the ‘high-water mark’ of Romantic sensibility as an emotional regime. It explores the ways in which Wakley and The Lancet leveraged the emotional politics of contemporary melodrama to critique the alleged nepotism and corruption of the London surgical elites. More especially, it analyses their campaign to expose instances of surgical incompetence at the city’s leading teaching hospitals, demonstrating the ways in which this strategy weaponised the emotions of anger, pity, and sympathy, and considering its implications for the cultural norms of an inchoate profession and for the ultimate stability of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.

This chapter considers the emotional interiorities and intersubjectivities of Romantic surgery. It challenges the well-established stereotype of the pre-anaesthetic surgeon as dispassionate butcher by demonstrating the ways in which surgical identities and subjectivities were shaped by a culture of emotional expression and reflection. The emotional ‘authenticity’ of pre-anaesthetic surgery was rooted in the embodied experience of operative practice, and the huge challenges that came from dealing with death, disease, and disfigurement on a daily basis. But as well as encouraging emotional introspection, the experience of pre-anaesthetic surgery also demanded that the surgeon manage his patients’ emotions. After all, in this period, fear, despondency, and other states of mind were regarded as an immediate cause of death. For this reason, surgeons needed to monitor their patients’ moods and imagine themselves into their position in order to regulate their own conduct and promote optimal operative outcomes. These relations between surgeons and patients were structured by a range of factors, notably gender. For that reason, this chapter concludes with a consideration of Romantic surgical intersubjectivity in practice, utilising Astley Cooper’s casebooks to explore the ‘emotion work’ of womanhood in the elaboration and understanding of breast cancer.

Chapter 2 reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the Victorian industrial novel. Deeply invested in social determination, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, nevertheless, offer sympathy as the way out of the class struggles it deplores. At the same time, sympathy is precisely one of those impurities inciting desire that Stephen explicitly disavows at the end of Portrait of the Artist. Sympathy, though, remains fundamental to Ulysses, intertwined with its reflections on an autonomy that is equal parts aesthetic and political. Sympathy is seen here to be a form of social coercion limiting Stephen’s artistic autonomy even as its absence is part of what prevents the Irish from uniting against their common enemies and achieving political autonomy. Contrasting Bloom with Stephen, I read the Blooms as a model of community that refuses to see autonomy and sympathy as opposed values, a form of family that counters the patriarchal family of the national imaginary.

This chapter provides one of the first accounts of Cavendish’s theory of the passions in her later works of natural philosophy, mainly the Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663) and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). We argue that reading Cavendish’s philosophy in light of a Stoic-inspired model of causation highlights what is most original and distinctive about her theory of the passions. We analyze Cavendish’s ideas against the backdrop of her theories of occasional and principal causes, and highlight significant differences between Cavendish’s philosophy and the then-popular Cartesian account of the passions. We also examine how her philosophical ideas are put into practice in her dramatic work, “The Unnatural Tragedy” (1662). We maintain that the dramatic genre enables Cavendish to demonstrate how sociable passions might be communicated through sympathy, and unsociable passions discouraged through antipathy. In light of both the theoretical and practical aspects of her philosophy, we conclude that Cavendish stands as a significant innovator among theorists of the passions in the mid-seventeenth century.

Géricault’s preliminary sketch of a hanging was the most original of all his works in London, though it has been little discussed. Its depiction of the Cato Street executions still passes unrecognised. This chapter proves that these were indeed its subject. More widely, for the first time in art history it shows a hanging without making the execution stand for something other than itself – sharing kinship in this with Goya’s Third of May 1808 (though that work was unknown to Géricault). Géricault’s unflinching pity may anticipate our own.

Some 100,000 people were said to have watched Thistlewood, Brunt, Ings, Tidd, and Davidson die. Soldiers controlled them. It’s an open question which of the spectators were the more ‘barbaric’ – the plebeian crowd, the aristocrats attending the condemned with the sheriffs, or the gentlefolk who rented windows overlooking the scaffold. It was the plebeian crowd, not the polite, that shouted in protest as the five were hanged and decapitated. The men’s behaviour was closely watched and reported. The era’s alleged capacity for a refined sensibility was not widely evident among the polite people. Only radical London seethed with anger and resentment, until the Queen Caroline affair provided it with a new target.

The Introduction examines the process of “sympathetic collaboration” – drawing from manuscript marginalia, notes, journal/diary entries, and correspondence – and the influences of that process on poetry, drama, and fiction. Guided by the current trend of literary studies around sympathy, emotion, and affect, it demonstrates the long reach that eighteenth-century moral philosophy has on later literature and artistic thought by investigating the writing and creative processes to understand the ways in which communal relationships are inscribed within the literary product. Collaboration is necessarily rooted in the ideals of Victorian liberalism: It is derived from a representation of sympathetic identification and emphasizes human sociability. In a broader sense, this book provides a fresh understanding of literary collaboration necessarily informed by the mechanics of the writing process and illustrated in the formal elements of literature, as well as textual or marginal traces within the manuscripts. Nineteenth-century artistic creation is, I propose, rooted in sympathetic identification. This philosophical approach to life (seen in the lived attempts at community for each of my case studies) has larger implications for literary history: I suggest that these sympathetic communities are mutually implicated in formal experimentation and innovation.

In a narrative of self, what is the place of people, of others, of community? Quite plainly, this question poses the paradox of the lyric poet. Interlinking the social implications of poetry with theoretical models of eighteenth-century sympathy, primarily Adam Smiths sympathetic concord, lays the foundation for the latter half of the chapter: understanding “sympathetic collaboration” and its connections to Victorian liberalism, which I define as a communal fraternity of sympathetic experience that uses art as a means of expression and experimentation.

This chapter explores the ironic and contentious potential of sympathy, in particular the manner in which slight differences in earnest commitments can create polemic relationships just as charged as those that stem from deeper ideological rifts. I focus on Swift and his interactions with hack writer John Dunton. The two writers, I argue, do not disagree about what they dislike, but rather have slightly different, though equally genuine, commitments to the same religious and political institutions. Scholars have seen Swift and Dunton as writers who are representative of the ironic and earnest styles, respectively. While Dunton’s work often lacks the same level of irony or self-awareness as Swift’s, it was still often subversive or duplicitous in a way that was amenable to Swift and that first attracted Swift to his writing. Drawing on Adam Smith, I suggest that this relationship reveals how interests and affects are inseparable from communal relationships and social groupings that are inherently factional and fractious. In Smith's account, any affective state is a combination of a judgment and a social identification: it is always positional and partial.

The heart of nursing is intrinsically linked to what you do as a nurse and why you do it, but it is also about how you do it – the ways in which you represent and enact the core values and intent of the profession.

While some of your views and beliefs are likely to be shared with other students and experienced nurses, your reasons for wanting to be a nurse, and what you consider to be at the heart of nursing, will vary depending on your personal perspectives and experiences. This chapter begins by considering some of the common perspectives on nursing, noting how your own perspective is likely to change as you progress through your studies and into practice. We look at why people choose nursing, the different views and influences they are likely to encounter and the diverse range of roles and settings in which they may work. We then discuss how this informs what it means to be a nurse and your emerging sense of professional identity. The chapter concludes by exploring caring, compassion and kindness – concepts that lie at the heart of nursing, even though they are likely to be understood, applied and experienced differently in the context of each nurse’s own practice.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

Nineteenth-century literary realism develops alongside but is not identical to clinical medical realism. Recent scholarly work has focused, for good reason, on how literary and medical realisms overlapped during this period. However, it is useful also to consider some differences: dissimilarities in language (literary writers privileged spoken vernacular, while physicians developed a written rhetoric with a complex, specialized professional vocabulary), demography (literary realism largely chronicled the middle classes and respectable working people, while hospital-trained physicians wrote about poor urban patients), methodologies (medical men explored quantifiable data; literary realists continued to employ lengthy description), definitions of truth (medical reportage works to present a truthful portrayal of real events; literary rendering strives for a credible portrayal of fictional ones), and relation to the balance of detachment and sympathy (clinical physicians believed that detachment underwrites medical progress, although they did not always deny their sensibilities, often turning to literary realism or romance to manage such moments rhetorically). This chapter argues that medical and literary writers, attempting to negotiate, overcome, or uphold these key differences, defined what it meant for Victorians to tell the truth, well aware that all realism is a representation, and representation is only an approximation of the real.

This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.

In the early modern period, the feeling and practice of compassion were recalibrated in a pressure cooker of social, religious and political changes. The rich philosophical heritage of classical ideas about the role of pity in virtuous citizenship and prudent statesmanship and the embodied practices of late-medieval affective meditation on compassion with the suffering of Christ jostled against new contexts of civil war, colonisation and capitalism. Notions of neighbourliness, charity and compassion became elastic as communities changed shape. Much of today’s critical impatience with compassion is predicated on its failure to follow through on its rhetoric, its incapacity to practice as it preaches. Yet early modern compassion was not merely an erudite textual tradition: it was also a set of practices that took on differing importance in different social and religious groups. These practices were impacted by and in turn shaped textual representations of compassion. The chapters in this volume analyse a broad range of sources to access the interplay between texts and practice in the early modern period.