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.