Carolyn Burdett

Is Empathy the End of Sentimentality

By the end of the century, and under pressure from new scientific theories of minds and emotions, the languages in which the Victorians understood the relationship between inner feeling and moral action came under great pressure. At the same time, the established association between aesthetic and moral value was being challenged by aestheticisms espousal of ‘art for arts sake’. This essay examines one very distinctive response to these issues: Vernon Lees development of the concept of ‘empathy’. Lee offers empathy as a scientifically verifiable process which explains why beauty matters to us. She also seeks to use it to mediate a new position capable of acknowledging the power of aestheticisms critique of Victorian moralism, while re-establishing moral action as central to aesthetic experience.

Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner's Undine and From Man to Man

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwins later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tullivers characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxleys 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiners Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings.

A Sweeter Word

In 1889 the philosopher Herbert Spencer, in an effort to prove how little influenced he had been by the work of Auguste Comte, paid a researcher one guinea to go to the British Library and trawl through Spencer’s articles from the 1840s checking whether or not he had used the word ‘sociology’ (p. 204). Today, with digitalized resources and electronic searching to hand, timepressed scholars need no longer resort to cash payment to track a word which interests them. Thomas Dixon’s most recent work shows just what important and insightful history can result. The Invention of Altruism tells a series of richly populated stories charting the semantic naturalization that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century following George Henry Lewes’s 1852 translation of Comte’s term altruisme. Notwithstanding the discomfort caused by the ‘barbarous’ mixing of a Latin root, alter, with the Greek suffix, -ism (perhaps by Comte, or by his teacher, François Andrieux), the coinage championed by Lewes and others found acceptance in Britain. The latest complaint Dixon can find about altruism as a new and ‘silly word’ is in a newspaper article being perused by the Reverend Lashmar in George Gissing’s 1901 novel, Our Friend the Charlatan. Paired with egoism, altruism had become an established way to denote other-regarding, as opposed to self-regarding, impulses. In the process, Comte’s original coinage was contested, eventually unmoored from its positivist origins, and associated with divergent intellectual and political positions, accruing to itself in the process a substantial freight of new meanings and helping to redefine and shape Victorian moral debate. For Dixon’s book, as its subtitle indicates, is about the ‘processes of moral meaning-making’ (p. 23). It is also importantly a history which explores moral feeling. In part, that accounts for why Dixon seeks his evidence in such a variety of places, in popular fiction, for instance, as much as the work of influential philosophers. In addition, readers of Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions: the Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge University Press, 2003) will recognize some similarities. The earlier book also focuses on a keyword to examine how a diverse range of terms denoting forms of feeling – passions, affections, sentiments – were corralled by the end of the nineteenth century into a single over-arching