The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the 19th century. Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, especially through the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term.

Today there is a thriving 'emotions industry' to which philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists are contributing. Yet until two centuries ago 'the emotions' did not exist. In this path-breaking study Thomas Dixon shows how, during the nineteenth century, the emotions came into being as a distinct psychological category, replacing existing categories such as appetites, passions, sentiments and affections. By examining medieval and eighteenth-century theological psychologies and placing Charles Darwin and William James within a broader and more complex nineteenth-century setting, Thomas Dixon argues that this domination by one single descriptive category is not healthy. Overinclusivity of 'the emotions' hampers attempts to argue with any subtlety about the enormous range of mental states and stances of which humans are capable. This book is an important contribution to the debate about emotion and rationality which has preoccupied western thinkers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has implications for contemporary debates.

Charles Dickens famously satirised the rationalism and mechanism of utilitarian educational ideas through the figure of Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times. Even in the nineteenth century there were very few people, in reality, who would have agreed that the education of children should be a matter of purely intellectual, rather than emotional, instruction. The surge of interest in emotional intelligence and emotional literacy since the 1990s has given this topic new currency but, on all sides of the debate, it is mistakenly assumed that the idea of educating the emotions is something new. The present article retrieves one part of the forgotten history of emotional education by examining nineteenth-century British discussions about the proper places of passion, feeling and emotion in the classroom, in the context of debates about utilitarianism, religion and the role of the state. The views of educationalists and philosophers, including Samuel Wilderspin and John Stuart Mill, are considered and compared with more recent policy debates about 'Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning'. The article concludes by asking: Who are the Gradgrinds today?

This essay uses the history of emotions to make two arguments – one destructive and one constructive. It uses examples from intellectual and cultural history to undermine the idea that the modern English term ‘anger’ refers either to a clearly defined mental state or to a coherent emotional concept. At the same time, it also questions the diagnosis of the present as an ‘age of anger’. Constructively, the essay uses the intellectual and cultural ancestries of modern ‘anger’ as a case-study in a distinctive approach to the history of emotions. With reference to works by linguists and anthropologists, to ancient philosophical and literary texts, and to some of the most influential visual representations of the irate body and the furious face, from Hieronymus Bosch to Charles Darwin, the essay explains and defends a pluralist and interdisciplinary approach, arguing that ‘anger’ is a modern English word without a stable transhistorical referent, and proposes the method of genealogical anatomy as a way to avoid the twin dangers of anachronism and essentialism in the history of emotions.

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