Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse
- 2 Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy
- 3 Hawthorne's ‘Cold Fancy’ and the Revision of Sympathetic Exchange
- 4 Altruism's Conquest of Modern Generalisation in George Eliot
- 5 William Dean Howells's ‘Altrurian’ Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse
- 2 Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy
- 3 Hawthorne's ‘Cold Fancy’ and the Revision of Sympathetic Exchange
- 4 Altruism's Conquest of Modern Generalisation in George Eliot
- 5 William Dean Howells's ‘Altrurian’ Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Although man, as he now exists, has few special instincts, having lost any which his early progenitors may have possessed, this is no reason why he should not have retained from an extremely remote period some degree of instinctive love and sympathy for his fellows.
Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)The expression ‘Laissez-faire et laissez-passer’ … has been seized upon as the one piece of morality clearly enjoined by economists, and has conveyed altogether mistaken notions to those who have made it the pretext of so much righteous indignation.
William Greg, ‘Political Economy’ (1865)Nineteenth-century philanthropic discourse takes shape among the contexts of political, social, and religious reform, economic thought, and the arts. My purpose in this chapter is to provide a historical and interpretive context for certain key terms within that discourse. The lexical history of three of these terms – sympathy, philanthropy, and altruism – ties them as part of a narrative of cultural transformation with specific implications for the dominant aesthetic regimes of the period. While ‘sympathy’ acquired its modern connotations in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, the concept underwent a substantial revision in the mid-1800s, acquiring the status of an aesthetic ideology for multiple expressive modes. ‘Philanthropy’, which entered the English language in the 1600s, did not become a term of widespread use with the British and American public until the nineteenth century with the emergence of new forms of economic stratification and a new kind of institutional giving.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philanthropy in British and American FictionDickens Hawthorne Eliot and Howells, pp. 31 - 74Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007