Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 ‘Democracy’ in Somerset and beyond
- 2 Politics, sensibility and the quest for adequacy of language
- 3 The heart of Lyrical Ballads
- 4 The Prelude: a poem in process
- 5 Words or images? Blake's representation of history
- 6 Blake, Coleridge and ‘The Riddle of the World’
- 7 Challenges from the non-verbal and return to the Word
- 8 The Nature of Hazlitt's taste
- 9 Jane Austen's progress
- 10 Languages of memory and passion: Tennyson, Gaskell and the Brontës
- 11 George Eliot and the future of language
- Index
9 - Jane Austen's progress
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 ‘Democracy’ in Somerset and beyond
- 2 Politics, sensibility and the quest for adequacy of language
- 3 The heart of Lyrical Ballads
- 4 The Prelude: a poem in process
- 5 Words or images? Blake's representation of history
- 6 Blake, Coleridge and ‘The Riddle of the World’
- 7 Challenges from the non-verbal and return to the Word
- 8 The Nature of Hazlitt's taste
- 9 Jane Austen's progress
- 10 Languages of memory and passion: Tennyson, Gaskell and the Brontës
- 11 George Eliot and the future of language
- Index
Summary
At the end of the eighteenth century, the fashion for cultivation of sensibility that had emerged could be thought of as a middle way, mediating between the competing rationalisms of writers such as Burke and Paine. Even at the time, however, the movement was viewed with uneasiness and even suspicion. Johnson, for example, deprecated the cult when it seemed to pass into glorification of feeling:
boswell. ‘I have often blamed myself, Sir, for not feeling for others as sensibly as many say they do.’
johnson. ‘Sir, don't be duped by them any more. You will find these very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling.’
Some years later a striking example of the interplay between reason and sensibility was offered by the relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. In her early days Wollstonecraft was a strong advocate of rationality. When she wrote her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, the need that they should be taught to use their minds was uppermost. Yet Godwin regarded her as the very embodiment of sensibility, so that in his Memoir he invited contrast with his own cast of mind – about which he was explicit:
Mary and myself perhaps each carried farther than to its common extent the characteristic of the sexes to which we belonged. I have been stimulated, as long as I can remember, by the love of intellectual distinction; but, as long as I can remember, I have been discouraged, when casting the sum of my intellectual value, by finding that I did not possess, in the degree of some other persons, an intuitive sense of the pleasures of the imagination.[…]
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- Romanticism, Revolution and LanguageThe Fate of the Word from Samuel Johnson to George Eliot, pp. 156 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009