Clark Lawlor

Consumption and literature: the making of the romantic disease

This book answers an important and unanswered question: How consumption – a horrible disease - came to be the glamorous and artistic romantic malady. It argues that literary works (cultural media) are not secondary in our perceptions of disease, but are among the primary determinants of physical experience. In order to explain the apparent disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, it examines literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, and covers a wide range of authors and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie; Clarissa, Little Eva). Lawlor shows that consumption’s symptoms made it a suitable disease for the Christian Good Death and a disease of love. These two discourses of consumption and the rise of sensibility and nerve medicine arrived at the moment of Romantic consumption and developed into the more Evangelical version of consumption in the Victorian era. The book was supported by AHRC research leave (matched-funding). Lawlor’s PhD student’s thesis, ‘Gender and Disease in eighteenth-century literature’ (Grant) relates to this research. Lawlor’s new project on fashionable diseases emerged from the questions posed by the book.

Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

This book arises out of a major research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on depression in the eighteenth century. It discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and in terms of individual attempts to describe and live with suffering. Different chapters, each by an authority in the field, look at depression, or, in the terms of the time, melancholy, spleen and hypochondria, as it is reflected in medical writing, philosophical writing, poetry, in the novel and in autobiographical writing, this last based on material which is currently unpublished. The book concludes by comparing eighteenth-century medical practice with contemporary structures for treating the depressed, and by asking what present-day society can learn about depression and its treatment from the experience of this previous era.

‘The Gloom of Anxiety’: Fear in the Long Eighteenth Century

Fear in the long eighteenth century was inflected by the specific historical concerns of the time, but it did not stand apart from pre-existing discourses. In this essay, we will address briefly some of the more general issues with the historical legacy of fear before moving to the particular and sometimes peculiar manifestations of fear in this transitional period. We argue that literary, medical, philosophical and religious discourses, among others, played a crucial role in ‘producing’ fear in the alleged Age of Reason. Fear, we will show, was regarded as a complex emotion, and as a phenomenon not solely pathological or negative in its manifestations and uses.

Laurence Sterne, Fame and Fashionable Disease

This article argues that the ‘fashionable’ diseases of consumption and melancholy were both linked by eighteenth-century medical theory about nervous diseases and sensibility, and that these diseases ‘worked’ for the novelist Laurence Sterne to promote his fiction and fame as a man of sensibility and sentiment. Through his own life and those of his literary and artistic characters Sterne exploited the long literary and medical tradition of melancholy and consumption as diseases of genius, but also used the newer rationales of the mid-eighteenth century to link the two conditions in a contemporary way.

‘Halfe Dead: and rotten at the Coare: my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption, from Early Modern to Enlightenment

It is well known that consumption is a fashionable disease: Susan Sontag contrasted it with cancer, and called it a disease of the self, a disease that expressed something about the personality of the sufferer. Historians and literary critics have written at length about consumption’s social and cultural cachet in various domains: religion, spirituality, the good death, secular love melancholy, female beauty, male genius, and the various connections between them. Consumption has been the subject of much literary production, and much of it stresses consumption’s potential benefits to the sufferer. However, not all strands of consumptive imagery are positive, and not all lend themselves to the apparently dominant artistic representations of the condition.

Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919: Wasted Looks, by Julia Skelly

Julia Skelly has written an excellent guide to the representation of addiction in British Art (broadly defined) over the very long nineteenth century. This is despite the fact that addiction did not surface as a concept until the early nineteenth century, as Roy Porter argued in relation to Thomas Trotter’s An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness and its Effects on the Human Body (1804, rpr and ed by Porter, Routledge, 1988), a text surprisingly absent from this book. How does Skelly avoid the charge of anachronism, of a kind of retrospective diagnosis so reviled by medical historians? For her, the answer lies in adopting a ‘continuist’ approach derived from the imperative to account for ‘certain recurrent explanatory metalogics that accord to the history of lesbianism over a vast temporal expanse a sense of consistency and, at times, an uncanny familiarity’ (p. 2) – these are the words of Valerie Traub, who is outlining a way of viewing history that departs from the usual methodology of highlighting historical specificity, difference, ‘problems of anachronism, changing terminologies and typologies, and resistance to teleology’ (p. 2). Such an approach allows Skelly to invest this book with a sense of urgency. Via this form of historical analysis (continuism), she argues, she can demonstrate the way in which the assumption that the addict can be identified and interpreted (and judged) through visual signs and symptoms has continued to the present day, and that this assumption has had material and deleterious effects on real people. Sitting alongside continuism in Skelly’s methodology is her own coinage of ‘addiction theory’, which is ‘a deconstructive mode of reading images and texts in order to unveil the ideologies that have contributed to their production and that have informed their reception. These images and texts, in turn, have been constitutive of discourses related to addiction and addicted individuals’ (p. 3). Addiction theory is influenced by both feminist and queer theory, but not reducible to either because of the different status of (non-addicted) women and homosexuals of both genders. The categories might overlap (as we see throughout the book), but the addict is at odds with the hegemonic culture of different historical situations in a certain way, with a special kind of ‘abnormality’. Addiction theory is therefore easy for the reader to pick up (and use), as it is a modification of tried and tested (if not uncontested) existing methodologies. Why these dates? 1751 marked the production of William Hogarth’s influential image Gin Lane, while 1919 saw Alfred Priest’s now lessknown Cocaine, both of which were overdetermined signifiers of addiction to specific substances in very different contexts, but that still peddled a stigmatizing line on the addict with which we live today. Between these dates, argues Skelly, we have a period ‘characterised by anxieties about gender, class, sexuality, race, consumer culture, space,