Sense and Sensibility

The Fading of the Ancien Régime Mentality

“…According to Janet Todd, the sentimental literature was characterized by a style in which '[t]he association of nouns and adjectives is predictable', and adjectives 'gain intensity through prefixes'. 32 The rhetoric applied by Grot, Pletnev and Edelfelt followed this sentimentalist tradition. It was such men that young upper-class women tried to please.…”

“…For highsociety life in Helsinki, see von Frenckell, Offentliga nöjen och privata, I and II, passim. 15 Davidoff,The Best Circles,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][49][50][51][52][53] Copyright of Scandinavian Journal of History is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.…”

'Storms of Sorrow': The Poetry of Helen Maria Williams

“…In her book Sensibility, Janet Todd explains that the Dissenters' libertarian concerns were reinforced by the sentimental interest in the deprived. The most famous Dissenting divines rarely wrote sentimental literature, but they were certainly its consumers, and they encouraged many to produce it/ 1 Williams was a protege of the well-known Dissenter Andrew Kippis, who, as she recounts in her memorial verses to him, taught her 'in the house of prayer' 2 when she was a child, and then helped her to discover her literary vocation when he assisted her with her first publication, Edwin and Eltruda (1782). This was one of the poems she revised for the collection which secured her reputation as a bright young poet of the 1780s, her two volume Poems of 1786, 3 which also included several sonnets, odes, long political poems, and religious verse.…”

“…Todd explains that people sometimes saw sensibility 'as equalizing since it occurred in all ranks; at other times they considered it a property more or less exclusively of the higher and more genteel orders.' 32 Williams, an ardent Republican, does not emphasize class distinctions. When she mentions 'some vulgar mind' who does not understand sensibility, she uses the word 'vulgar' to mean 'ignorant/ and she generously suggests that such a person may be 'unconscious' of the effects of his or her actions (1:25).…”

A Wall of Ideas: The "Taboo on Tenderness" in Theory and Culture

“…For conservatives, "sensibility was felt to be demoralizing, anti-Christian and childishly French"; and for radicals, "pathos and effusions were no remedy for poverty and injustice." 24 In this characterization of sentiment as debilitating, the baby of tenderness tended to be thrown out with the bathwater of fashionable sentimentality. The love between mother and child could even be seen as a prototype of particularistic and overindulgent relations-as Mary Wollstonecraft has it, "women who .…”