This book does not aim to give a broad account of sensibility and sentiment in the eighteenth century: it is focused instead on sympathy. It deals with the actual affective and imaginative experience of feeling what it is like to be someone or something other than one's self. Except for some sketches of background events, such as the political struggles in England during the seventeenth century and the Revolution in France at the end of the eighteenth, there is little attempt to relate sympathy directly to historical events or to cultural and social developments; although there is much that could be said of this connection, particularly in the sphere of imperial expansion and colonial settlement. I begin with the tentative claim that sympathy thrives in situations of comparative powerlessness in which the function and tendency of social roles is no longer directly apparent to those who fill them, either because power is the prerogative of an absolute authority or because it is distributed in ways that cannot be fully understood. It is amidst the bankruptcy of a clearly stated regime of moral virtue, such as feudal obligation or Christian charity, that the passionate spontaneity of sympathy finds its opportunities for expression. And when taken, these opportunities show the relationships between participants fulfilling very different social, political and historical purposes from what these had formerly been conceived to be, either by themselves or by society at large. Sometimes, in the most dramatically interesting scenes of sympathy, they are revealed to be fulfilling no purpose at all.

So it is first of all with the activity of sympathy that I am concerned, and then with the ways that people thought about it and tried to explain, justify, exploit or direct it. Almost all my examples are from literary or philosophical sources, very few from accounts of actual exchanges between people.