The Limits of Sentimentalism: Financial Misconduct, Sensibility and Parliamentary Scandal in the Case of Powell and Bembridge

Abstract

In the late eighteenth century, the language of sentiment was deployed to justify a wealth of individual behaviours, laudable or otherwise. From illicit desire in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie to murder in Herbert Croft's Love and Madness, sensibility was, among other things, a tool of exoneration. Using Edmund Burke's appropriation of sentimentalism in the Powell-Bembridge scandal of 1783, this article examines what happens when this well-worn mechanism fails, when sensibility reaches its limits. Burke's inability to explain away the crimes of these two men with his usual tactics exposes sensibility's ultimate resistance to certain nefarious narratives.